Allen Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. As a result of the failed invasion of Cuba, Dulles was fired by President John F. Kennedy.

Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission that investigated Kennedy's assassination. A conspiracy theory suggesting that Dulles and the CIA were somehow involved in Kennedy's assassination and its potential cover up in the Warren Commission have been subject to popular debate among historians, political commentators and conspiracy theorists. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that the CIA was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.

Quotes

• Since the beginning of the present European conflict the American public have been advised to keep their emotions under control. ... To recommend coolness is not to recommend indifference. ... A cause to which we incline emotionally is not for that reason wrong any more than it is for that reason right. ... The country should be slow to anger and should judge the acts of foreign governments in the light of our own national interests. This does not mean that Americans count the preservation of liberty here and the survival of human liberties in other countries as of only trifling importance in a world largely given over to Machtpolitik. It would be a stupid foreign leader indeed who thought so.
  • Allen W. Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Can America Stay Neutral? (1939)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Allen Dulles on Wikipedia