The Wise Man of Intelligence: Uncovering the Life of Allen Dulles

There are very few reliable histories of intelligence, and with good cause. The sources lie, are lost, are nonexistent, are withheld. Journalists (often) lack the patience, scholars (often) lack the clout to gain access, to stay the course, to outlast those who would with both good and malign intent seek to influence the writer's conclusions. The public craves romance, exploits of jamesbonderie; the academic too often settles for models, flow charts, and a warm sense of insiderism. The chosen prose style - breathless, confidential, promising more than most sources can honestly deliver - is at war with any serious attempt to assess the value of intelligence to the formulation of foreign policy, to victory or defeat in battle, even to the methodology of research or analysis. Of hundreds of books on intelligence there are, perhaps, a dozen that pass the historian's test: that is, they are significant, they are interesting, and they are, insofar as one can judge of so elusive a subject, true.

Peter Grose's biography of Allen Dulles is one of these books. It is the best book on American intelligence since Thomas Powers' engaging romp through the corridors at Langley, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979). Professionals in intelligence found some errors in Powers' book, and no doubt there are a few in Grose's account - though I believe I found only two, neither of any significance - but both books have the flavor, the smell, the texture of the truth. That both are biographies suggests that we may best penetrate the mysteries of an intelligence agency on the coattails of its highest officials, perhaps because compartmentalization, the need-to-know principle, and the sheer diversity of modern intelligence work prevents anyone except the most highly placed from having even a moderately coherent picture of the world of intelligence.

THE GREAT GAME

Through detail, nuance, and a persistent intelligence, Grose shows what the life of a professional in the Great Game was like. Between November 1916, when Allen Welsh Dulles, then 23 and a new third secretary to the American Embassy in Vienna, and November 1961, when Dulles stepped down as Director of Central Intelligence, we follow an urbane member of the American Establishment as he encounters the affairs of the world. A romantic at heart, Kipling's Kim on his bedside table on the night he went into the hospital to die, Dulles was, to use the words of one of his contemporaries, present at the creation - of the Cold War, of the CIA, of our world.

Grose writes very well, with a wry sense for the humorous situation (of which there were many in Dulles' life), a frank eye on "the gentleman spy" as philanderer, with sympathy for the wife much-philandered against, and with a consistent graciousness. He belies the reports that, as a result of the Bay of Pigs, there was personal animosity between Dulles and the young new president, John F. Kennedy. He provides a balanced assessment of the operations to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran, not failing to remark on how short-term successes were followed by long-term disasters. He is very good with the anecdotal aside, with the intriguing footnote that stands out textually precisely because it is a footnote. He appears almost always to be in command of the larger international contexts and, as befits a former executive editor of Foreign Affairs, can provide the reader with necessary background in a few broad yet clearly defined brush strokes. He seldom repeats himself. Despite the length of this biography, it seems almost spare, without the padding - precise addresses, the color of the walls in an interrogation room, the exact time when a contact is made - that is standard to most books about espionage.

To be sure, there are signs of haste in the final chapters; for example, at least twice Grose turns to a semi-digested catalog of events to force the pace. It is a wonder that there are not more such signs, for in his "Notes on Sources" Grose remarks that the Central Intelligence Agency did not release its record on Dulles' tenure at the agency ("in delayed response to my request of March 1989 under the Freedom of Information Act") until May 1994. The last restrictions on the Dulles papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton were lifted only four months earlier. There is a footnote reference to the Aldrich Ames case. To incorporate so much that is timely and fresh so quickly after new materials became available is a remarkable act of applied intelligence by a writer who, one presumes, was never in "the game" himself. Further, Grose shows every sign of having enjoyed the chase.