The Hearty Professional

To Allen Welsh Dulles, who died at 75 of pneumonia in a Washington hospital last week, the gathering and interpretation of intelligence was vital to American survival in a threatening world. He modestly described his risky, arcane calling as a "craft" but pursued it with an unrelenting enthusiasm and expertise that helped make the Central Intelligence Agency -- for all its adverse publicity and serious misjudgments --the world's most efficient espionage organization. British Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong, former head of intelligence for the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, says of Dulles: "No more acute intellect has served in the profession before or since."

His courtly yet convivial manner evoked the style of an old-fashioned prep-school headmaster, but Dulles was above all the man who professionalized the intelligence service of the U.S. Before him, American espionage had been at best the work of skillful amateurs whom their countrymen sometimes disdained as unsporting. Dulles was fascinated by the romance and daring of his trade. In later years he hugely enjoyed Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, and was delighted when his laboratory--at his prompting--found that one of Bond's fictional weapons, a spring-loaded knife embedded in the heel of a shoe, actually worked.

He was absorbed by the personal element of intelligence gathering. He often told his juniors of the time that "an insignificant little man" sought out someone in authority at the U.S. consulate in Bern, where Dulles was a minor official toward the end of World War I.

"I was dressed for tennis," Dulles recalled, "and I had no time for him." The man, it turned out, was Lenin, and the interview that did not take place might have changed history.

Early Surrender. Dulles did change history when he returned to Bern in 1942 as OSS chief in Switzerland. A contact known pseudonymously as George Wood, in the German Foreign Office, sent him more than 2,000 documents from Berlin. Dulles kept in touch with the ring of German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. He learned of the V-l and V-2 secret-weapons development at the Peenemunde research center in time for Allied bombing raids to set the program back for crucial months.

Dulles' greatest achievement in World War II was the negotiation of an early surrender of German troops in Italy, which he arranged through a secret meeting with the SS commanding general in a Swiss villa. That act doubtless saved thousands of American lives. It also infuriated Stalin, who did not relish the prospect of a unilateral U.S. settlement with the Germans.

Dulles had a major role in writing the 1947 law that set up the CIA, and in 1950, its director, Walter Bedell Smith, asked him to come to Washington to talk over revisions in the agency's structure. "I went to Washington intending to stay six weeks," Dulles remembered. "I remained with the CIA for eleven years." He became a deputy director in 1951, CIA boss two years later.

Differing Brothers. During most of the Eisenhower years, Allen and John Foster, his elder brother and the Secretary of State, played a predominant role in national security affairs. Presbyterians both, the two were very different in temperament and style. Foster, who died in 1959, was a stiff, ascetic intellectual. Pipe-puffing Allen was a charming extrovert whose laugh would rock a room. To Foster, the more ideological of the two, Communism was a morally repugnant philosophy; to Allen, more practical, the Soviet Union was a powerful political and military enemy.

When it seemed that political advantage could be gained, Dulles sometimes risked operations that he supervised with cheerful confidence. In 1953, the CIA helped to depose Iran's leftist Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, making way for the return of pro-Western Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi from exile in Rome. The next year, when the regime of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman seemed increasingly proCommunist, the CIA stage-managed a civil war that ended in Arbenz's overthrow. CIA agents dug a tunnel from West to East Berlin that succeeded in intercepting Communist communications until it was discovered.

Dulles presided over two major disasters during his tenure as director. One was the Russian capture of U-2 Pilot Francis Powers, which enabled Nikita Khrushchev to gain a propaganda victory over the U.S. (since then, a system of spy satellites initiated under Dulles has much surpassed the U-2s). The other was the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, which led at least indirectly to Dulles' retirement seven months later. Dulles took it all calmly. CIA directors, he said, were "expendable." He wrote: "Obviously you cannot tell of operations that go along well. Those that go badly generally speak for themselves."

The CIA became involved with causes aimed directly at countering Communist propaganda, like Radio Free Europe. There were more intellectual ventures, among them an open $300,000 grant to the M.I.T. Center for International Studies. The agency also helped finance the National Student Association for just over 15 years, until militant N.S.A. leaders denounced the deal in 1967. Dulles said dryly: "We obtained what we wanted." Of the Communists, he said: "We stopped them in certain areas, and the student area was one of them."

At the austere CIA headquarters, a bas-relief plaque with Allen Dulles' likeness bears the inscription: "His Monument Is Around Us." It has been 40 years since Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the only U.S. code-breaking operation then in existence with the scornful remark, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Allen Dulles was a gentleman, but he also had a bent for reading other people's mail that was ingenious and invaluable.

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