by David Talbot
When Joan and Fritz married in spring 1948, it was clearly a marriage of convenience—for Joan’s father and her new husband. Molden, who became secretary to Austrian foreign minister Karl Gruber after the war and later an influential journalist and diplomat, was a vital intelligence connection for Dulles. The marriage was also a wise move for Molden. For the young, ambitious Austrian, having Allen Dulles as a father-in-law was obviously a big feather in his cap. But the match proved much less successful for Joan.
Just like her mother many years before, Joan had great difficulty explaining why she had married her husband. Joan suffered the same severe pre-wedding doubts that Clover had before marrying Allen. Joan found Fritz a “very erratic character, always given to creating dramatic situations,” as she later wrote her mother. She worried about marrying “someone who wasn’t ever satisfied with the simple everyday aspects of life.” But, in the end, Joan gave in to the implacable intensity of her suitor and went through with the marriage, resigning herself to the fact that she would never have children or enjoy a stable family life with such a man.
Her marriage to Molden, who openly reveled in the company of other women, soon developed a striking resemblance to that of her parents. He often disappeared on mysterious rendezvous, leaving her to wonder when she would see him again.
“Fritz was a ladies’ man, that’s for sure,” Joan recalled years later. “He was so extroverted that you just never knew where he was. He’d say, ‘Let’s rent a sailing ship in the Greek islands,’ and I didn’t know how many of his girlfriends would be on board or for how long we’d be at sea. Do I see similarities with my father? Probably, probably.”
Joan divorced Molden in 1954, but, as if to not disappoint her father, she quickly replaced him with another high-ranking Austrian diplomat named Eugen Buresch. The son of a former Austrian chancellor, Buresch had succeeded Molden as director of the Austrian Information Service in New York. The following year, after being named Austria’s ambassador to Iran, Buresch took Joan off to Tehran, another highly sensitive diplomatic posting. Joan suddenly found herself amid the imperial splendor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s court, the emperor reinstalled on the Peacock Throne by her father, after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.
Joan gave birth to two children with Buresch, a boy and girl. Like Fritz Molden, Joan’s second choice for a husband seemed crafted primarily for her father’s professional benefit. Iran was not only an oil-rich nation, it was a strategically located CIA surveillance platform bordering the Soviet Union. To have a son-in-law acting as his eyes and ears inside the shah’s court was an espionage boon for Dulles, who by then was running the CIA.
But, again, the marriage turned out to be much less beneficial for Joan. In July 1959, Joan wrote her father a painful letter, made all the more poignant by its resolutely upbeat tone, informing him that she and Buresch had separated. Joan, who was living with her young children in Switzerland at the time, had recently visited her parents in Washington but found it easier to tell her father about the failure of her second marriage through the post. The separation had not been her idea, she assured her father—she “would have gone on trying endlessly for the sake of the children,’’ she wrote. But, in any case, she was “very glad to be alone again.”
Joan had good reason to welcome the breakup. Buresch, it turned out, had a violent streak. “Every six months, or every time I do something he doesn’t approve of,” she wrote her father, “he gets terrible fits of rage and tries to beat me up, etc. etc. Last summer, because I tried to come to Europe to see mother, he nearly kicked me out.” When she said, “kicked me out,” Joan added, she meant it “literally.” Apparently Buresch vented his fury with his feet as well as his fists.
Joan did not dwell on the abuse that “Gino,” as she called her husband, meted out. She was much more concerned that her father not worry about her, or worse, write her off as a hopeless case after the collapse of her second marriage. “Pa, you will think indeed that you have a black sheep in me, but I am glad to be free, I shall live alone and bring up my children, mind my own business and I am sure I will be happy.”
Joan was clearly eager for her father’s reassurance, even his forgiveness. “Pa,” she continued, “I have never been scared of life and I am not now. I like being alive no matter what comes. I hope you know what I mean, and that you will not be either too angry or too upset.”
Joan finally found sanctuary, not only from her husband but from her father, by moving with her children to the remote New Mexico high desert. It was about as far as possible from her father’s world of power as she could venture. She made her home in Santa Fe, among artists and free spirits, returning to Zurich in the mid-1960s to study at the C. G. Jung Institute, where she became a certified psychoanalyst. After coming back home to Santa Fe, she married a prominent Jungian therapist named John Talley, with whom she lived and worked until his death in 2013.
Mary Bancroft believed that she had fallen in love with Allen Dulles. Among the many men in her life, she had only given her heart to two, and he was one. But Dulles himself was incapable of returning love. Jung told her this, in so many words. One day, while sitting in his study—a room stuffed with books, busts of Voltaire and Nietzsche, and primitive artifacts—Jung made an observation that stuck with Mary for many years. The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.
Mary remained enthralled by the Dulles mystique all her life. But through years of agonizing self-exploration, Clover and Joan finally arrived at something close to the truth. As Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
In the end, this is what Dulles’s wife and daughter came to understand about the man who dominated so much of their lives. The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.
7
Little Mice
On a sweltering morning in August 1950, a slim, blond, attractive twenty-eight-year-old woman named Erica Glaser Wallach woke from a restless sleep in her West Berlin hotel room, locked her papers and most of her money in the cupboard, and walked east through the Brandenburg Gate to her doom. The young German-born woman left behind her husband, a former U.S. Army captain named Robert Wallach who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, and their two infant children. She was weak with fear as she entered the headquarters of the SED, the East German Communist Party. But she was determined to go through with her mission.
A year before, Erica Wallach’s adoptive father, a hopelessly idealistic American Quaker relief worker named Noel Field, had disappeared after being lured to Prague with the promise of a university teaching position. When his equally wide-eyed wife, Herta, and younger brother, Hermann, went looking for Noel behind the Iron Curtain, they, too, vanished. Despite the obvious risk, Wallach was now determined to find out what had happened to the Fields, a family that had rescued her during the war when she was a seventeen-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain. Noel and Herta Field had whisked a sick and starving Erica and her ailing mother from a squalid French refugee camp, and later agreed to care for the teenage girl in Switzerland during the war when her parents fled to England. Wallach now felt honor-bound to track down the missing Fields, using her connections with German Communists whom she had met during the war.
When Wallach asked to see her old war comrades at the SED headquarters, she was told they were not available. She would later find out why: they were in prison, and Erica Wallach would soon join them. On her way out of the gloomy SED fortress, a hand suddenly gripped her shoulder. “Criminal police. Please come around the corner.” She didn’t even bother to turn around. “I knew that all was lost.”
For the next five years, Wallach would suffer harsh imprisonment, first in Berlin’s Schumannstrasse Prison, which she christened her “house of h
orrors,” and then, for the longest stretch, in Vorkuta, the dread prison labor complex in Russia’s Arctic wastelands a thousand miles northeast of Moscow. Wallach, the cultured daughter of a physician, learned to survive the gulag by giving up all hope that she would ever return to her family and the lost joys and comforts of her old life. She would rise early each morning in the dark with her labor gang and work as hard as she could to avoid freezing in the ferociously cold temperatures, shoveling gravel six days a week—and often seven—for new railroad embankments.
“This business of nothing to look at, the ugliness, the lack of color, the lack of good smell—that really is worse than the hunger,” Wallach later recalled. “But you get used to it. I finally after three years got used to the fact that I was totally alone in this world.”
Wallach learned to ingratiate herself with her fellow prisoners—Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish women, and even one American who had found small and less small ways of offending the Soviet state. She became a different person than the naïve woman who had walked through Brandenburg Gate that morning in August 1950. She even looked like someone else—muscled and thick and callused from her labors. The young woman made a grim new life for herself there “at the end of the earth” among the drunken, homesick Soviet guards and her fellow penal colony inmates. She found ways to break up the barren monotony of her days by listening to the Ukrainians’ melancholy folk songs and attending the Sunday “salons” hosted by the educated women whose latrine-cleaning duties were the foulest of all prison jobs, but gave them enough leisure to indulge their intellectual curiosity.
In the end, the hardened Wallach decided that surviving a frozen hell like Vorkuta was a matter of mental adjustment. “Horror, fear, mental torture,” she would later write, “are not physical facts but creations of one’s own spirit. They were not forced upon me by outside acts or conditions, but lived within me, born of the weakness of my own heart. . . . I did not have to break if I did not want to.”
While Wallach was enduring Vorkuta, the Fields were suffering their own nightmares behind the Iron Curtain. After Noel Field was arrested by Czech authorities in May 1949, he was drugged and driven to a secret location in Hungary. There he was dropped down a coal chute and subjected to a variety of tortures, including beatings, sleep deprivation, and round-the-clock interrogations.
Noel’s brother Hermann Field, who was an architecture professor, suffered less vicious treatment after he was grabbed by Polish secret police three months later in Warsaw while searching for his brother. But he spent the first several months of his five-year incarceration in solitary confinement, which wore terribly on his spirit. When a field mouse suddenly appeared in his cell, Hermann was beside himself with joy. The mere brush of the mouse’s fur against Hermann’s leg was the source of enormous comfort. One night, while sleeping, he accidentally crushed the mouse, which had crawled under his mattress. Hermann was so grief-stricken that he feared he would lose his mind. “A person living a normal life simply cannot comprehend how sharply such apparently trivial happenings affect a human being deprived of all living contact and driven to the very edge of loneliness,” he later observed.
During the harsh interrogations to which all four members of the Field family were subjected, including Erica Wallach, one name kept coming up. “How do you know Allen Dulles?” the inquisitors repeatedly asked. The spymaster was the one thread that seemed to connect all four of the deeply unfortunate prisoners as they languished in their cells.
By the time Noel Field was taken prisoner in Czechoslovakia in 1949, it had been nearly four years since Allen Dulles occupied an official position with U.S. intelligence. After the war, Dulles had returned to the fold at Sullivan and Cromwell, a business routine he now found quite dreary. “I must admit that these days I find it hard to concentrate on my profession of the law,” Dulles confessed to a friend. “Most of my time is spent reliving those exciting days when the war was slowly dying.”
A steady stream of former OSS colleagues came to pay their respects at Dulles’s Wall Street office, chatting about the war while “the Old Man,” as he was already affectionately known in spy circles, though he was only fifty-two, puffed genially on his pipe. But these conversations were not simply fond exercises in nostalgia. The men who called on Dulles—OSS veterans like Richard Helms, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, and Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt—all shared the Old Man’s view that the blissful reign of postwar peace would be short-lived and that the West must quickly gird itself to confront the growing threat from the East.
That threat was not simply a convenient creation of “Western imperialism.” Stalin’s military machine might have been no match for America’s global reach and nuclear firepower. But it was quite capable of crushing democratic aspirations in Eastern Europe, which the Soviets, following the devastation of World War II, felt they were entitled to controlling as a buffer zone from Western aggression. American intelligence officials like Frank Wisner, who had been stationed in Romania near the end of the war and had witnessed the beginnings of the Soviet-dominated police state there, deeply empathized with the liberation struggles of the peoples in the Eastern bloc.
As they chatted in Dulles’s law suite and gathered for drinks at William Donovan’s town house on Sutton Place, this rarefied group of OSS veterans—who straddled the worlds of espionage, foreign affairs, and finance—were already plotting to create a powerful intelligence apparatus for the coming Cold War. Spurned by Harry Truman, Donovan began to feel that his own hopes for a return to postwar action would never be realized. “Our war is over, Allen,” he told Dulles one day. But Dulles would have none of it. The man’s irrepressible ego and ambition never ceased to amaze Donovan.
In truth, while Dulles punctually showed up for work at Sullivan and Cromwell each morning, he never retired from the intelligence game. No sooner had he resumed his life in New York than he began taking a leadership role in prestigious organizations and placing himself at the center of postwar political debates. At the end of 1945, Dulles was elected president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus. Dulles would huddle with his colleagues in a soundproof room at the council’s headquarters on the Upper East Side as if he were already running the robust new spy agency that he envisioned.
Dulles’s stubborn insistence on staying in the middle of the postwar action paid off. In April 1947, he was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.
Despite his controversial ties to Nazi Germany, John Foster Dulles had also managed to keep a foot in the political arena, putting himself forward as one of the Republican Party’s leading wise men on foreign affairs. Both Dulles brothers pinned their political hopes on New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the GOP front-runner for the 1948 presidential nomination. Dewey, a former Wall Street lawyer with an impressive political résumé, was the Eastern establishment’s clear pick for the White House that year. Political prognosticators overwhelmingly predicted that Dewey would easily outclass President Harry S. Truman—a political hack from Missouri whom many New Deal loyalists considered unfit to carry on the Roosevelt mission and who, in fact, was facing a challenge on the left from independent candidate Henry Wallace, FDR’s onetime vice president and secretary of agriculture. Dewey, already picking out his drapes for the White House, let it be known that Foster would be his secretary of state and Allen would take charge of the new intelligence agency that he had helped create.
It was Allen who had the tougher views on foreign policy at this stage of the brothers’ collaboration. As Foster started to flesh out his ideas for the Dewey campaign, he showed his brother a draft of his thoughts on the Soviet threat, in which he suggested that the United States and Russia might somehow find a mutual “accommodation.” Allen promptly dismissed
such soft thinking. “The difference between us,” Allen told Foster, is that “you hold out the hope of some satisfactory accommodation being possible between the Soviet system . . . and the rest of the democratic world. I doubt this.” Foster would eventually fall in step with his younger brother’s hard Cold War line.
Harry Truman had inherited Franklin Roosevelt’s antipathy toward the Dulles brothers and their circle. The Dulleses’ close connections to the Dewey camp did nothing to soften Truman’s sentiments. He would dismissively refer to Foster as “that Wall Street fella” or, more bluntly, as “that bastard.” Truman was equally suspicious of Allen, who kept pushing the administration to take full advantage of the broad powers granted the newborn CIA under the National Security Act of 1947. The president, however, took a dim view of a powerful spy agency, fearing that it might turn into a rogue outfit, and he insisted that the CIA serve primarily as a coordinator of intelligence reports for the White House.
Allen Dulles believed that the shadow war between the West and the Soviet bloc would have few if any rules, and he was contemptuous of any attempts in Washington to put limits on the conflict. He assumed that the United States faced an utterly ruthless enemy in Moscow, and he was prepared to match or go beyond whatever measures were employed by Russia’s KGB and the Eastern bloc’s other security services. Dulles’s aggressive Cold War stance found a key ally in President Truman’s defense secretary, James V. Forrestal, a former Wall Street investment banker at Dillon, Read who moved in Dulles’s circles and who shared Dulles’s suspicions about the Soviet Union. In early 1948, Forrestal persuaded the politically vulnerable Truman, who knew he was facing a tough challenge from Dewey, to appoint Dulles to a blue-ribbon committee to study the year-old CIA and propose ways to make it more effective.
