That would be Allen Dulles, resident United States Intelligence Representative in Bern Switzerland during World War 2, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950’s, fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and a prime suspect as orchestrator of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
Yes Virginia, there ARE conspiracies. In case you didn’t notice you lived through one on January 6, 2021. In case you are not aware, you are living through a coup today.
Human beings are intelligent social animals. They plan, they plot, they huddle, they conspire.
The semantic sleight of hand that has turned the question , “I wonder who was/is behind that?” into a mark of lunacy is to be deplored.
From January 1943 on, Allen Dulles had a privileged seat at the table of the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This essay is an exploration of what lessons he might have learned from the failure of that series of plots and perhaps applied said lessons later on.
His seat at the table was through Hans Bernd Gisevius, nominally assistant consul at the German embassy in Bern, actually a member of the inner circle of German military intelligence officers plotting against Hitler. Gisevius managed to meet regularly with Dulles to keep him informed of the identity of the plotters and the progress of plans. In the unhappy sequel to the failure of the bomb attempt on Hitler in July 1944, Dulles was instrumental in helping Gisevius escape back to Switzerland. Over 200 conspirators were not so lucky. They died miserable deaths.
If I were Allen I would have learned the following lessons.
1. If at first you don’t succeed try again.
Use real assassins.
Don’t keep lists.
Military Intelligence provides incredibly good cover.
Wholesale regime change is not easy.
The first to point the finger are the real assassins.
Unfortunately, when Allen sat down as chief intelligence consultant to the Warren Commission he did not share with them the benefits of this experience. Instead he gave them a reading assignmemt to the effect that the typical assassination in America was performed by the lone nut. (See #6 about pointing the finger)
Let us go through those lessons he should have shared with the Commission, even if they would have been self-incriminating.
Keep trying. The core group of plotters in German military intelligence had assembled by 1938 as Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia and then Poland. There were a series of plans to arrest or kill him to avert the perceived disaster that would befall Germany, and especially the Reichswehr (military) by getting into all out war with the West. Then the same cycle was turned as the plan to attack the Soviet Union materialized. Then, as it became clear that military success was turning to certain failure in 1943 there were a series of attempts including a bomb that was actually placed on Hitler’s plane but proved to be a dud, leading up to the disaster of July 20, 1944 when the bomb did explode, but Hitler survived.
In the case of President Kennedy, a series of similar efforts can be perceived, although we are obviously talking about months, not years. In the fall of 1963 there were three attempts with very much the same pattern. Threat from a tall building, fall guy (two of whom had apparent Castro sympathies), and multiple shooters. The first was in Chicago, the second in Miami, and the third, of course, in Dallas.
Use real assassins. If it’s an assassination, have assassins do it. In the case of July 20, 1944, the actual bomb was handled and fumbled by an officer, Claus von Stauffenberg. Fumbled I say because he was only able to fuse one of the two charges in his briefcase. This made it all the more disastrous that Hitler was shielded by a heavy wooden table, the bag was shuffled over to a corner and the room was not as enclosed as the originally planned venue. The most spectacularly successful assassination of a Nazi leader was that of head (just below Himmler) of SS Reinhard Heydrich by a team of Czech soldiers trained by the British OSS. They ambushed him and trapped him in a triangulated crossfire. They escaped, he died of his wounds a few days later. The nearby villages of Lidice and Ležáky were wiped from existence in retribution.
In the case of President Kennedy, unfortunately we do not know who the real assassins were, but we do know that Lee Oswald was no assassin. The Warren Commission made much of Lee’s participation in a hunting club while in the Soviet Union (with a shotgun), but Marina in her testimony put those exploits in proper perspective with her remark to the effect that those outings were all about “catching a vodka”. The silliness of suggesting that, in Texas of all places, Lee stood out for having a rifle in his possession is barely worth commenting on. The latest set of candidates for actual shooter range from a Cuban exile marksman to a Dallas Policeman with significant marksman credentials to Jean Souetre, a French commando who was expelled from Dallas that same day. As for triangulation, the testimony of the Emergency Room doctors at Parkland hospital make it clear that the president suffered shots from the front as well as back. I will not go into the arguments about the shot to the head that killed the president other than to say, watch the Zapruder film yourself, the one that was not released to the public for ten years, and see what you think.
Don’t keep lists. Perhaps because they were German or because a main conspirator, Hans von Dohnányi, brother in law to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a lawyer for Military Intelligence who wished to document Nazi crimes against humanity, a trove of very detailed documentation plus Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’ diaries were found and proved to be conclusive evidence condemning the plotters. In the years since 1963 there has been an inexcusable destruction of documents germane to any realistic investigation of possible conspiracies behind President Kennedy’s death.
Counterintelligence. Every time that Gisevius met with Dulles, all he needed to do was file a report that he was assessing American capabilities. I exaggerate, but there is no question that the Abwehr team of Gisevius, Admiral Canaris, and Hans Oster, could pretty much go anywhere and see anyone under cover of their intelligence work. Admiral Canaris, under arrest, successfully evaded conviction until almost the very end, simply by claiming that his actions were directed at uncovering the plots. Given the centrality of CounterIntelligence to all of this, one cannot fail to look closely at the activities of James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence until 1974. For example, why, in 1959 was Angleton sitting on the file of Lee Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union? Was Lee part of a false defection operation aimed at Soviet Intelligence? Did the Warren Commission explore this question? Of course not. Also I sent to underscore the MILITARY nature of the intelligence service behind the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. In the investigations into Kennedy’s death I find an amazing naïveté that seems to equate the intelligence service of this country with the CIA and FBI and almost completely ignores the existence and functions of its military intelligence services. For example if Lee was a false defector and the CIA wished to preserve deniability about such an operation, it would have been child’s play for the Office of Naval Intelligence to arrange his language training and any tradecraft training completely off the “books” of the CIA , and then let Angleton trace his progress by way of State Department memos documenting his encounters with the American consulate. All this long before John F Kennedy became president. It’s just to say that Lee Oswald was very possibly a creature of military intelligence.
Did Allen Dulles suggest the Commission look into that, especially given his deep dealings with German military intelligence? Of course not.
Keep it simple. The unfortunate plotters of July 20, 1944, had not just the task of eliminating Hitler, they had to replace the entire apparatus of Nazi governance. Quickly. So, the unraveling of the plot began when a squadron of home guards in Berlin, went to arrest Goebbels at his office. Whereupon all he had to say was “Pick up the phone.” Hitler was on the line whereupon the guards were instructed to go arrest the plotters. After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson, who had his own direct line to the Generals, was sworn in, and the coup was over. Simple. The analogue in Germany would have been had Himmler executed a coup. I speculate that one of the reasons he protected Admiral Canaris, was that he was using Canaris for exactly that purpose, but I do not know.
He who points the finger is the assassin. This is a very complex point. Suffice to say that the very first announcement by the July 20 plotters, on the mistaken belief that Hitler had been killed, pointed at a Nazi and SS plot behind the assassination. Fast forward to 1963 and consider the speed with which Lee was identified as the culprit. So many voices, including the current target of scrutiny , a group of Cuban exiles known as DRE, who within 24 hours had published a complete dossier of Lee’s supposed pro-Castro pro-Communist identity. Back up a step and consider the handiwork of William Harvey, upper level CIA operative in charge of assassination planning, whose notes on the way to do it included “ set up fall guy, fake legend, blame it on the Sovs”.
The biggest single lesson I believe that Dulles learned was that you don’t have to make the plot. You can just let it/help it happen. I see Allen Dulles as someone singularly adept at massaging events to encourage them to go the way he wanted.
Note: I will publish a follow up Substack documenting the historians whose work I have depended on to provide this summary. But above all worth mentioning immediately is David Talbot, “the Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.”
Then I will publish the Chapter of “the White Gloves Legend”, where Allen Dulles gives William Harvey his marching orders.
Stay tuned.
Allen Dulles. Credit: Wikipedia