Books: The Cold War’s First Family

DULLES by Leonard Mosley; Dial; 530 pages; $12.95

It would be too much to call the Dulles family the Kennedys of the Eisenhower years: the rectilinear and Protestant Dulles tribe did not throw each other into swimming pools. But the Dulles family had something of the same proprietary interest in the world and the power that runs it. From the State Department, John Foster Dulles presided over the cold war and the nation’s other dealings with the rest of the planet. His sister Eleanor was in charge of the State Department’s crucial Berlin desk. Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, controlled a shadow kingdom that raised private armies, deposed Presidents, bribed Kings and generally kept track of the world. The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg once called Allen the most dangerous man in the world and predicted that if he ever succeeded in getting into heaven, he would “be found mining the clouds, shooting up the stars and slaughtering the angels.” Allen was delighted.

The Dulleses are remembered somewhat grimly: the stern Foster in steel-rimmed glasses, cocking his chin against the Communist threat; Allen, urbane but swallowed by the anonymity of his institution; and Eleanor, out of sight altogether. Biographer Leonard Mosley shows them to be a brood who, for all their Republican orthodoxy, were capable of great spirit and flashes of color.

A grandfather, John Watson Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. An uncle, Robert M. Lansing, became Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State. The children, whose father was a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York, enjoyed a vaguely Kennedyesque upbringing that taught them sailing on Lake Ontario, the endurance of cold morning showers and furiously intense sibling competition. Foster, the eldest of the five children, was the foremost of the group, grave and sententious; he quoted William James at the age of ten. Allen, four years younger, was Byronically romantic and found a place for his temperament in intelligence work.

Mosley has, among other things, assembled a wonderful collection of anecdotes about Allen and the international dacoity that he practiced. In April of 1917, while serving as a duty officer at the American legation in Berne, Allen had a date with a girl and therefore refused to see someone named V.I. Lenin. By next day, Lenin was on his way back to Russia, where he immediately ordered peace negotiations with the Germans to begin. Lenin, who admired Woodrow Wilson, had wanted to establish an American contact.

Allen was a womanizer. When his wife first discovered this, she coolly went to Cartier and charged a large emerald to his account. It was her “compensation,” she told Allen, and every time he strayed he would pay a similar price. Mosley does not record how large Mrs. Dulles’ jewelry collection became, though Sister Eleanor guesses that “there were at least a hundred women in love with Allen at one time or another.”

During World War II, Allen returned to Berne for the OSS. Among others, he recruited Fritz Kolbe, an employee of the Nazi foreign office who delivered plans for the V-2 rocket missiles and minutes of the meetings of Hitler’s inner council. When Allen became head of the CIA in 1953, he applied the same stylish ingenuity and ruthlessness he had learned in the OSS. One of his greatest successes was the Berlin Tunnel in 1954. At a cost of $4 million, the CIA burrowed into East Berlin to tap all calls, from Communist Berlin, including those to Moscow.

The CIA had an annual budget of $97 million in 1950, for which only the most general accounting had to be given during Allen’s years in control. From the di rector’s own discretionary fund, he dispensed $30,000 a year to one member of the French Cabinet and once handed him $500,000 to distribute among fellow members of the Chamber. Allen lavished secret funds on Saudi Arabia, including money that may have gone for the virgins and small boys King Saud fancied. Said one former agent: “He was never against the unclean side of intelligence, so long as he could convince himself, as he usually could, that it was being done for a cause.”

Foster is the Dulles whom Mosley clearly likes the least. He quotes a wicked story about Foster’s first appearance before the House Committee on Appropriations to give the members a sort of tour d’horizon. State Department assistants had to ask if the Secretary could change the transcript substantially before it was released. In his appearance, said one State Department man, Foster ticked off countries with capsule evaluations: “France … all those mistresses and dirty postcards. Italians … an asset to their enemies in every war they’ve fought. The Middle East: full of Arabs, but also full of oil.” Churchill remarked, “Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him.” That may be too brisk a dismissal. Though he operated in a sometimes heavyhanded “brinksman’s” style, in his nearly eight years as Secretary of State, he became a tough and savvy diplomat who could match the Soviets in sheer implacability.

In a way, the most interesting of the Dulles family was Eleanor, an intelligent and independent woman forced to work all her life in her brothers’ shadows. In 1926 her doctoral thesis at Radcliffe was published under the title The French Franc. John Maynard Keynes declared it “the best book on monetary inflation that I know.” After World War II, Eleanor played a major part in helping Austria reorganize its economy.

Eleanor is now 82. Foster died of can cer in 1959, displaying to the last the great family stoicism that prompted one of his doctors to remark that he was the only man he had known who insisted on walking normally when suffering from gout.

Allen’s reputation never recovered from the Bay of Pigs, and he died in 1969. Some of the guests at his funeral noticed that the Presbyterian minister’s eulogy soared to heights he had never reached before, in a style he had never used before. There was an explanation: the sermon was written by the CIA.

“At CIA expense the shah was established in Rome with his wife, Soraya, and told to hold himself ready to return to his country. While in Rome, Soraya received a visit from an American gynecologist who had been summoned from the United States by Kim Roosevelt. She had been trying for some time to produce a son and heir for the shah, and had failed to do so… The gynecologist went into a complicated explanation of the fertility cycle, the waywardness of ovaries, and why it was difficult to make eggs drop at the right moment. She must just keep on trying and keep her husband ‘interested’ in her.

‘Doctor,’ said Soraya, ‘all I’m asking you to do is find something to break my eggs. I’ll see the shah goes on making the omelettes.'”