The Man with the Innocent Air

(See Cover)

What enables the wise sovereign and good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

--Sun Tzu, On the Art of War (500 B.C.)

A century hence, if the world has not reverted to savagery, students of history may learn that the year of Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration and Joseph Stalin's death was a significant milestone. In midsummer 1953, however, the shape of the new era was not yet apparent. In Washington and Moscow, men unaccustomed to the exercise of national power were still groping toward policies of their own. Each group felt strongly the force of the ancient maxim: "Know your enemy." Enemies of the U.S. have started and lost two great wars largely because they miscalculated American strength and direction. On its part, through failure to know its enemy, the U.S. had suffered at Pearl Harbor one of the most spectacular and costly surprises of history. Neither the U.S. nor its enemies was likely to forget the value of foreknowledge.

The basic nature and long-range goals of the enemy can usually be determined from public sources, e.g., Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, the writings of Stalin. This kind of information is easy to get, not always easy to understand. Along with it, a nation will seek to know the enemy's specific strength (capabilities) and his probable course of action in specific circumstances (intentions). These specifics hostile nations usually try to conceal from each other. They must be ferreted out by "intelligence." The best definition of intelligence in the military-political sense is: "information which is hard to get."

Top man of U.S. intelligence at this critical point in history is Allen Welsh Dulles, 60, whose older brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, must, along with the President and the defense chiefs, construct policy toward the enemy out of the information brought in by Allen's Central Intelligence Agency. Because the Communist tyranny is conducted behind the thickest cloak of secrecy and deceit the modern world has ever known, a high proportion of the information about this enemy is of the hard-to-get variety. Because modern weapons threaten whole nations, a U.S. chief of intelligence must bear the kind of responsibility that Winston Churchill in World War I ascribed to Admiral Jellicoe. commander of the British Grand Fleet: "The only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." In that sense, Allen Dulles has the most important mission in the long, sordid, heroic and colorful history of the intelligence services. This scholarly, hearty, pipe-smoking lawyer is in strange contrast to some of his famous predecessors in intelligence history.

Merchants & Poets. Rahab the Harlot, whose "house was upon the town wall." concealed the spies sent by Joshua into Jericho; in return, Rahab was protected by the Israelites when the walls came tumbling down. The screen of "merchants" who preceded the Mongol hordes across Asia in the 13th century were the occupational ancestors of the Nazi "businessmen" and "tourists" who infested Europe and Latin America in the 1930s. In China, it is said, military intelligence became such a respected art that rival commanders sometimes parleyed, each with his spies in attendance, and worked out how a pending battle would come out if it were fought. When this was decided, the theoretical winner paid tribute to the theoretical loser, and departed the field without bloodshed.

Europe's national states developed intelligence agencies of increasing complexity. England's first secret service was organized by Sir Francis Walsingham, who kept Elizabeth I informed of the growth of the Spanish Armada, and who infiltrated the Jesuit underground in England with several agents. Walsingham employed a number of minor poets, and perhaps Playwright Christopher Marlowe as well, started English intelligence off on a high literary note that it has never entirely lost. Britain's literarily gifted secret agents have included Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, and Novelist Somerset Maugham.

Petticoats & Plots. Cardinal Richelieu, with the aid of his Grey Eminence, Father Joseph, gave France its first effective espionage apparatus. By the early years of the Napoleonic wars, the French secret service under Joseph Fouche was Europe's best. (In 1809 Fouche's men intercepted a British intelligence report written in invisible ink on an agent's petticoat--a device that was considered highly original when it cropped up again during World War I.) Characteristically, however, it was Prussia that introduced Europe to mass espionage. Wilhelm Stieber, spymaster to Bismarck, boasted that he had some 40,000 agents in France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Stieber was almost surely exaggerating, but his vacuum-cleaner espionage technique did supply the Prussian army not only with military information but with accurate estimates of the finances of leading citizens in occupied French towns.

In the years before World War I, plot and counterplot reached a rolling boil in Eastern Europe. In Russia, the famous double spy, Eugene Azeff, paid agent of the czarist secret police, took command of the terrorist branch of the revolutionary underground, and in between the writing of his reports to the police, masterminded the assassination of the Czar's uncle as well as two attempts on the life of the Czar himself. To this day it is not clear which side Azeff was really working for; perhaps Azeff, a great technician of conspiracy, never knew. In Austria-Hungary, Colonel Alfred Redl, director of the empire's intelligence, betrayed his country to the Russians rather than face exposure as a homosexual. During the ten years that passed before he was discovered and driven to suicide, Redl turned over to Russian intelligence some of the Austro-Hungarian empire's most cherished secrets. Among them were detailed plans for campaigns against Serbia, a fact which somewhat handicapped the Austro-Hungarian army when war with Serbia, Russia's ally, finally came in 1914.

Among devotees of espionage, World War I is memorable for its many women agents. Not the best, but the most glamorous female spy was Mata Hari (Eye of the Morning), who claimed to be a half-caste Javanese temple dancer, but who was in fact the daughter of a solid, middle-class Dutch family. Mata Hari, for ten years France's most famed courtesan, was recruited into German intelligence as Agent H.₂₁. She managed to send information out of wartime Paris through smitten neutral diplomats. In 1917, when a French military court confronted her with evidence that she had received large sums of money from German officials, Mata Hari had a ready explanation: "They were the price of my favors. Thirty thousand marks?* My lovers never offered me less." Unconvinced, the thrifty Frenchmen sent her to the firing squad, which she faced with unbandaged eyes.

The Headmaster. With Rahab, Walsingham, Richelieu, Fouche, Stieber and Mata Hari, Allen Welsh Dulles has little in common except his job. A tall, husky (6 ft., 190 Ibs.) man who wears rimless spectacles and conservative clothes. Allen Dulles is an unmistakable product of that nearly extinct patrician society which dominated New York and New England before World War I. With his booming laugh, bouncy enthusiasm, and love of competitive sports, Dulles is uncannily reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. He has the young-old look of a college student made up as Daddy Long Legs in the class play.

In the cheery, manly manner of a New England prep-school headmaster, Dulles operates an intelligence service with resources far beyond those of his historic predecessors. CIA's staff is huge--estimates run from 8,000 to 30,000--and it includes a greater proportion of "super-grade" civil servants ($12,000-$14,000 a year) than any other agency of the U.S. Government. It occupies at least 30 buildings in Washington alone; its headquarters is the wartime OSS building off E Street. CIA's budget, which goes to Congress concealed within the budget requests of other agencies, is never rnade public, but reasonable guesses run as high as $500 million a year.

Reward for Effort. For all his innocent appearance, Allen Dulles is uniquely qualified by background and experience to run the CIA. Like older brother John Foster Dulles, Allen was virtually predestined to take a hand in the management of U.S. foreign affairs. His father, a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, N.Y., was a nephew of John Welsh, envoy to Britain during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Maternal grandfather John Watson Foster had been Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison and uncle Robert Lansing was to become Secretary of State under Wilson. At the age of eight, Allen, already deep in the problems of international relations, turned out a 31-page history of the Boer War, roundly criticizing the British. Fond relatives arranged to have the booklet published, and despite wrong grammar and juvenile misspellings, it sold 4,000 copies and earned some $1,500, which was turned over to a Boer relief fund. (This youthful literary effort served Dulles well in 1920 when he asked Columbia Professor Henry Alfred Todd for permission to marry his daughter Clover. Professor Todd, a man with deep respect for erudition, rushed over to the Columbia library to see whether Dulles had published anything, found a card which read "DULLES, Allen W.--The Boer War; A History. Without further research, Professor Todd promptly gave his consent to the marriage.)

Man with a Beard. In 1916, with an M.A. from Princeton and a year's teaching experience at India's Allahabad Christian College, Dulles joined the Foreign Service. After a year in Vienna, Dulles was transferred to Switzerland when the U.S. entered World War I. In Switzerland he got his first taste of intelligence work. Assigned to the job of gathering political intelligence from southeast Europe, he organized an undercover group which made a determined but unsuccessful effort to lead the Austro-Hungarian empire out of the German camp.

In the course of his intelligence-gathering, Dulles spent a good deal of time meeting people, many of them highly unusual types. On the advice of other U.S. officials, however, he passed up as a waste of time a chance to meet a strange journalist with a beard and some off-center political ideas. The bearded scribbler, Dulles later discovered, was Nicolai Lenin, who was about to leave Switzerland for Russia and the revolution. Ever since, Dulles has insisted on seeing almost anyone who wants to talk with him. Says he: "You never know when or where lightning will strike."

Time Out for Beer. By the time he was 33, Dulles, then chief of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Division, had a family and the realization that he could not maintain the scale of living that would be required of him in any more exalted diplomatic job. In 1926, after getting a law degree from George Washington University in his scarce spare time, he went back to New York to join brother John Foster in the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. For the next 15 years he made money as a Wall Street lawyer.

Less than two months after Pearl Harbor, Dulles was back in Government service, this time with what was to become the Office of Strategic Services. A few months later he headed off for Switzerland by way of Spain and unoccupied Southern France. He very nearly failed to make it. Alarmed by the North African invasion, the Germans had decided to take over Vichy France. At the Swiss border, Dulles was held up by a French official who seemed more impressed by the watchful eye of the local Gestapo man than by Dulles' impassioned references to Lafayette and Pershing. Finally, when the Nazi ambled off to a tavern for his regular noontime beer, the Frenchman gave Dulles the nod, and he crossed into Switzerland, the last American to arrive there legally for nearly two years.

The Conspirators. In Bern, which was teeming with spies, counterspies, exiles and dissidents from a dozen regimes, Dulles set up OSS headquarters for Europe. Often sick with the gout, Dulles worked late into the night, meeting agents under the cover of darkness. In time, his office became a center of the European Resistance, and one of the biggest and most effective intelligence-gathering units in the Allied world.

Through Hans Gisevius, an anti-Nazi German intelligence officer, Dulles learned the details of the German underground's plot to assassinate Hitler. Dulles was never able to persuade the Allied powers to support the conspirators, but when the plot failed, he did succeed in saving Gisevius, who fled Germany with forged Gestapo papers and a Gestapo identification ring--all supplied by OSS.

From another anti-Nazi German, known by the code name "Wood," Dulles got the text of 2,600 top-secret German Foreign Office documents. It was on information supplied by Wood that Dulles found the first evidence that someone in the British embassy in Turkey was selling vital Allied secrets to the Nazis. Following up Dulles' lead, the British eventually discovered that the culprit was Ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen's valet "Cicero," who, thanks to the movie Five Fingers, has become World War II's best-publicized spy.

The war over, Dulles went back to Manhattan and his law practice, but he was too deeply engrossed in intelligence work to stay on the sidelines long. In 1950, when General Walter Bedell Smith became director of Central Intelligence, Dulles agreed to serve as his chief of operations for six months, stayed on to become deputy director. Last January, when Smith was named Under Secretary of State. Dulles took command of CIA.

Other People's Mail. As an intelligence chief who grew up in his business. Allen Dulles is a new phenomenon in the U.S. So, too, is the organization which he heads. Although there was some brisk intelligence work in the Civil War, the U.S. throughout most of its history has underrated the importance of intelligence. U.S. Army and Navy intelligence services, handicapped by the reluctance of regular officers to make a career of such work, were barely adequate for tactical purposes. In the 1920s. the State Department supported the so-called "Black Chamber." which had begun as an Army counterespionage unit in World War I, and which later succeeded in cracking some foreign codes. By this means, the U.S. officials read secret instructions from Tokyo, giving maximum and minimum bargaining positions to Japanese delegates to the Washington Disarmament Conference. In consequence. Japan came out of the conference with less than it might have obtained. But in 1929, when he took office as Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry Stimson cut off Black Chamber funds on the ground that "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." (Ironically, Stimson, as F.D.R.'s Secretary of War, later presided over the development of a cryptanalytic service several hundred times larger than the Black Chamber.)

In World War II, the OSS, brain child of General "Wild Bill" Donovan, tried to win acceptance as the main agency of strategic intelligence. Jealousy on the part of military intelligence agencies, and the fact that OSS had to be organized hastily, kept it from fulfilling this important role. The main contribution of OSS was a number of specific intelligence operations, some of them brilliantly performed, rather than as a central strategic intelligence service. It did leave with the Government a hard core of first-rate intelligence men.

"Promotional Intelligence." Before World War II had ended, these men, together with like-minded officials of other agencies, had begun to agitate for a permanent strategic-intelligence service. One of their strongest arguments was the fact that the existing U.S. intelligence system encouraged "sales-promotion intelligence." Any information evaluated by the Office of Naval Intelligence, for example, was likely to agree with Navy strategic doctrine and be in support of the Navy view in arguments between the services. The Air Force had a similar record, and if Army and State Department evaluation was less biased, that could be ascribed to the not very creditable fact that the Army and the State Department had fewer ideas on grand strategy than the Navy and Air Force.

There was no agency that was responsible to the President himself and committed to the interpretation of intelligence from the point of view of the U.S. Government as a whole. The Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947, was designed to fill this function. Subordinate to the National Security Council and thus to the President, it was given responsibility for coordinating all U.S. intelligence activities, and for the preparation of national intelligence estimates representing the best combined judgment of all branches of U.S. intelligence, including CIA itself. This was supposed to give policymakers estimates free of the promotional bids of particular services or departments.

In its first three years of existence, however, CIA, hampered by service rivalry, did not make much of a success of its main job. Instead, the first director, Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, concentrated on another CIA function: the collection of those kinds of intelligence which are not the special province of any other agency. Bureaucratically, this was the line of least resistance, but it was not the main job CIA was set up to do.

Though CIA officials do not admit it publicly, the agency was from the start engaged in a wide range of "covert activities": espionage, aid to resistance movements and perhaps sabotage. Armed with all the traditional devices of espionage and a few 20th century improvements, such as plastic explosives and microfilm which can be sealed under the stamp on an envelope, CIA agents spread across the world. Covert activities have a vast glamour, and emphasis on them is effective public-relations policy.

Cloak, Dagger & Files. In the last two or three years, CIA has got closer to its main function as a central evaluation agency, a mission where the information is hard to get and harder to evaluate, but where espionage is only one of many techniques. The mass-organization of modern military, economic and political systems means that every government has to give thousands of officers, engineers, businessmen, artisans and minor politicians access to thousands of facts that the government might like to cover up.

As a consequence, the modern intelligence agency resembles nothing so much as a research foundation. The modern intelligence officer's primary tools include newspapers, technical publications, broadcast transcripts, interrogation of returning travelers (known in CIA parlance as "debriefing"), and, above all, voluminous files.

To assemble from these sources innumerable single facts, and arrange them in meaningful relationships, requires several types of minds. The information-packed expert on Lower Slobbovian economic history has his place in such a setup, and so has the lawyer or the archaeologist who is trained to draw conclusions from incomplete and obscure evidence. The CIA has dozens more of both types than it has of spies, agents or cloak & dagger men.

Simple Criterion. CIA was still concentrating on establishing itself as an independent intelligence collection and research agency when the invasion of South Korea caught the U.S. Government by surprise. Called up to Capitol Hill to explain why there had been no advance warning, Admiral Hillenkoetter convinced most Congressmen that CIA was not at fault. Nobody asked a critical question which nevertheless hung over CIA's head. The question: Had CIA ever pulled all the intelligence services together and produced a national intelligence estimate on the North Korean threat? The answer: no.

Four months later Harry Truman appointed "Beedle" Smith to succeed Hillenkoetter. Assisted by Dulles and New York Investment Banker William Jackson (TIME, July 20), Smith revamped CIA from top to bottom. Items:

P:A Joint Watch Committee, including members from the military services, the State Department, the FBI and the Atomic Energy Commission, was set up to keep an eye on day-to-day indications of Communist attack anywhere in the world.

P:An Office of National Estimates was established; in the first month of Smith's regime, it produced ten times as many combined intelligence estimates as CIA had turned out in three years.

P:For the first time, all U.S. intelligence agencies began to get regular guidance from a central source on what information they should look for and the urgency with which it was wanted.

Smith and his team also shook up CIA's staff, which included a considerable number of dubious security risks and dilettantes. In Smith's first month, 50 employees were fired. The criterion which Smith established was simple. Said he: "I don't care whether they were blabbing secrets or not. Just give me names of people at Georgetown cocktail parties."

The Mysterious Visitors. CIA staffers, who respected but feared Smith, are even more impressed by Allen Dulles, who runs the agency smoothly and with apparently inexhaustible energy. Dulles is in his office every morning by 8 o'clock, often works through till 11 at night. Though he is burdened with the reading of a staggering number of documents and the usual quota of time-consuming conferences (including a weekly meeting of the National Security Council), Dulles manages to see scores of visitors every day, ranging from foreign ambassadors to secret agents. To avoid embarrassing confrontations, Dulles' visitors are frequently dispersed among a number of nearby offices, with Dulles himself moving from room to room like a big-city dentist.

These summer weekends Dulles hurries up to his handsome shore place at Lloyd Neck, Long Island, where he spends as much time as possible with his wife, two married daughters and son Allen Macy, an ex-Marine lieutenant who is still recuperating from a near-fatal head wound suffered in the fighting around Korea's Bunker Hill last November.

Room for Improvement. Much of the increased respect with which CIA is now regarded in Washington is directly attributable to Smith and Allen Dulles. But Dulles himself is the first to admit that there is plenty of room for improvement. Relations with the military intelligence services, though better than ever before, are still less than good. (The Navy, which had advance warning of the Batista coup d'etat in Cuba last year, failed to pass the word on to CIA.) Because of insufficient filtering and analysis at lower levels, a vast and confusing flood of information is still passed up to top U.S. officials. Says Dulles: "We have got to get more selective, and that may mean fewer people."

Congress has let CIA alone. So far, the only serious interference has been Joe McCarthy's demand that a CIA employee appear before his committee--a demand which Dulles, with White House backing, flatly and successfully rejected (TIME, July 27).

So Dulles has a free hand to tackle an old, old job with new methods. He thinks that U.S. intelligence is now better than the British, but he has not yet caught up with the more serious competition. Because the U.S. is--and expects to remain --an open society, the job of Communist intelligence here, Dulles thinks, is easier than his own. Some day, however, he hopes that his collection of scholars, scientists, historians, lawyers and spies will be running a service second to none in its field--as effective, perhaps, as Joshua's.

*In 1917, about $5,000.

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