The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Kronthal’s proclivity for the espionage game derived, in part, from a lifetime of hiding his own personal secrets. He was a gay man with a weakness for young boys. The Gestapo discovered his sexual tastes while he was working in the German art market before the war. Later, while Kronthal was running the CIA station in Bern, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency, got access to Kronthal’s Gestapo files after penetrating the Gehlen Organization. The Soviets set up a “honey trap” for Kronthal in Switzerland, with Chinese boys as bait. He was secretly filmed and blackmailed, and by the time he returned to Washington in May 1952, Jim Kronthal was a double agent in the iron grip of the NKVD.

  It was Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the former Army intelligence officer who ran the CIA’s Office of Security, who informed Dulles that his protégé had been turned. Edwards’s internal security department was tasked with protecting the CIA against enemy penetration. The security unit was also in charge of what was delicately called “enforcement,” providing the muscle to eliminate any potential threats or embarrassments to the agency.

  On the night of March 31, as Dulles confronted Kronthal with the Office of Security’s revelations over dinner at his home, two agents from Edwards’s department were quietly eavesdropping in an adjoining room. The sense of betrayal was certainly overwhelming for Dulles. But the CIA director, whose fits of rage were legendary, held his fury in check that evening. The spy chief sounded sadly contemplative as he spoke with the traitor in whom he had invested so much hope, remarking on the mystery of personal demons and how they could set flame to the most promising careers.

  After the two men reviewed Kronthal’s impossible position and his dismal options, the shattered agent walked back home—a white brick town house with a small garden of spring daffodils in front, just two blocks from Dulles’s residence. He was followed by the two CIA security men. When Kronthal’s housekeeper arrived the next morning, his bedroom door was still closed and he had left a note that he was not to be disturbed. Later that morning, two men who identified themselves as colleagues of Kronthal appeared at his house and told the housekeeper they needed to bring him to an urgent meeting. When they opened his bedroom door, they found a lifeless Kronthal splayed across his bed, fully clothed, with an empty vial near his body.

  The investigation into Kronthal’s death was quickly taken over by Lieutenant Lawrence Hartnett of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police, a homicide detective with a history of helping tidy up CIA-related problems. Hartnett revealed that Kronthal had left a letter for Dick Helms, in which he revealed that he was “mentally upset because of pressure connected with work,” as well as a letter for Dulles. An autopsy concluded that Kronthal had taken his own life, but the report left more questions lingering than it answered, failing to determine the cause of his death or the contents of the vial found in his bedroom. Sometime before his death, Kronthal had mailed a letter to his sister, revealing his homosexuality (which came as no surprise to her) and referring to the “tremendous difficulties” that his sexual identity posed for him. He then signed off in a perplexing way. Kronthal’s final words to his sister were, “I can’t wait till 1984. Love, Jim.” Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother’s suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?

  The James Kronthal case was, like the Frank Olson matter later that year, another mess that Dulles’s Office of Security had to clean up. If Kronthal’s death was a suicide, it appeared to be assisted. This is what one high-ranking CIA official, Robert Crowley, later suggested. One way or another, said Crowley—who was interviewed after he retired by journalist Joseph Trento—Kronthal was induced to do the right thing for the good of the agency and of the men who had been his professional benefactors. “Allen probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much,” Crowley speculated. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect.”

  Dulles never spoke in public about Kronthal after he was gone. Kron-thal’s sister’s efforts to extract more information from the CIA about his death proved futile; the press made little effort to investigate the case. James Kronthal was dropped down the dark well where CIA complications disappeared.

  Until he was wounded in Korea, Allen Macy Dulles Jr. was the brightest hope of his family. A brilliant student, he excelled at Exeter, sped through Princeton in three years, and then took himself off to Oxford, where he completed his degree in history, writing his thesis on the permanent undersecretary system of the British Foreign Office. “Sonny,” as his father called him, intellectually outshone the elder Dulles, whose own academic performance had been indifferent.

  If Dulles took pride in his son’s educational achievements, he never showed it. At some point in their young lives, Dulles’s two daughters, Toddie and Joan, gave up any expectation that their father would shine his attention on them. But they kept hoping that Dulles would finally acknowledge their brother’s extraordinary mind. “Both my sister and I would have liked my father to recognize him and tell him that here was this next generation [of the family] producing special people,” Joan remarked late in her life.

  “I would imagine,” she said on another occasion, “that my brother, especially my brother, would have felt badly about having no special attention from his father.”

  Allen Jr. was closer to his mother, sharing her sensitive and perceptive temperament. He was acutely aware of Clover’s moods and the strains in his parents’ marriage. To one family observer, it seemed as if Dulles felt judged by his son.

  Sonny had thrived in the cloistered boys’ world of Exeter. But unlike his father, young Dulles recoiled from the hearty, fraternity-centered social life at Princeton. He was not elected to any of Princeton’s men’s clubs, and he dismissed the university’s intellectual atmosphere as insufficiently challenging.

  One of Allen Jr.’s classmates at Exeter, a friend with whom he remained in touch even after his life-altering war wound, was gay. There were rumors that Sonny, too, was similarly inclined.

  “Well, there could have been all kinds of experimentation at prep school,” Joan observed. “I know nothing except [my brother] professed interest in girls and had a girlfriend. . . . I never saw him with girls, but there was somebody he liked—I can’t think of her name right now. . . . Of course that was still an era when you didn’t come out in any way.”

  Even before his brain injury, Allen Jr. seemed to inhabit his own world. “He was very introverted,” said Joan. “He took after my mother in that respect. And he was someone who wasn’t that aware of people. I mean . . . you’d go out in New York walking with him, and he’d be ten feet ahead.”

  In 1950, shortly after getting his degree at Oxford, Sonny stunned his family by announcing he was joining the Marines, as war broke out in Korea. His uncle Foster used his connections to line up a comfortable stateside desk job for him, far from harm’s way. But the twenty-two-year-old enlistee volunteered instead for duty in Korea. It was as if he were still trying to win his father’s admiration by outperforming the old man. The senior Dulles had fought both world wars in bars and hotels, surrounded by suave foreign agents and accommodating mistresses, and never firing a gun. Sonny would show him what real heroes were made of.

  Sonny’s letters to his father from the Marine Corps were filled with a new assertiveness. He lectured the senior Dulles about the deficiencies of the military, filling page after page with detailed critiques of the wasteful and corrupt supply system and the unfairness of the commendation process. He even made suggestions on how to improve the CIA’s recruiting methods. Dulles’s letters of reply, which he signed “Affectionately, Allen W. Dulles,” were not particularly warm, but they showed respect for his son’s intricate line of thinking.

  By summer 1952, Allen Jr. found himself on the front lines in Korea as a second lieutenant with the First Marine Division. He displayed a gung ho attitude in combat that was sometimes reckless. On the night o
f November 14, the young lieutenant took charge of a rifle platoon that was dug into an advanced position. Despite being nicked in the leg by a North Korean shell fragment, he charged an enemy sniper’s nest by himself, braving intense fire. His gun was shot out of his hand and he was wounded in the wrist, but that day he was lucky. “He didn’t have to do any of that, but I guess he felt he had something to live up to,” said Robert Abboud, one of Sonny’s commanding officers, who had known young Dulles ever since they were prep school debate opponents. “He never wanted to be treated differently from the rest of us.”

  The next morning, after he was patched up, Lieutenant Dulles returned to the embattled outpost. Once again defying heavy machine gun and mortar fire, Dulles crawled within thirty yards of the enemy position, armed with rifle grenades, and began to direct a Marine mortar attack on the North Koreans. Shortly before the enemy soldiers began to pull back, the lieutenant was hit in the head by fragments from an 81 mm mortar shell, which lodged in his brain. “I was there when they brought him back in,” recalled Abboud. “He kept trying to get off the stretcher and go back. Some of his men were crying. I’ve never really known anyone quite like him.”

  Allen Jr. was evacuated to a U.S. naval hospital in Japan, where he underwent brain surgery. Clover, who was on one of her Jungian sojourns in Switzerland at the time, flew to her son’s bedside. His surgeons told her that they were not able to remove all the deeply embedded shrapnel from Sonny’s brain and that he would never fully recover.

  By late February 1953, young Dulles was strong enough to be flown home. His father, who was to be confirmed the following day as CIA director, greeted Sonny at Andrews Air Force Base. Dulles was photographed hovering solicitously over his son, as he was unloaded from the plane on a stretcher, with his head swathed in bandages. “How do you feel, son?” he asked. “You’re looking good.” Sonny’s soft reply was inaudible.

  As the young man underwent further treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he seemed to recover some of his old self. He recognized people, made jokes, and inquired about the latest world events. But other times, he stared off into the distance, began shaking with fear, or erupted in angry outbursts at those around him.

  When Sonny was discharged to his parents’ home in Georgetown, it soon became clear that Clover would need help to care for him. A young marine was recruited as a companion for Allen Jr., and the injured young man tried to resume something resembling a normal life. Dulles arranged an undemanding clerical job for his son in the State Department, and he even began taking road trips with friends. But these experiments in independence did not turn out well. In August 1953, Dulles wrote an apologetic letter to the American consul general in Montreal, explaining that his brain-damaged son had forgotten his car registration when he left on a driving trip to Canada, and asking the diplomat’s help in relaying the document to Sonny, which he needed to reenter the United States. The following year, Dulles had to intervene to sort out a car insurance problem when Sonny was involved in a collision, the details of which could not be recalled by the young man. “My son was very severely wounded in the head and has only partially regained his memory and certain other mental faculties,” Dulles explained in a letter to the United Services Automobile Association.

  Allen Jr. still showed flashes of his brilliance. He continued to read voraciously, but he had trouble retaining information. Once familiar geography was now a mystery to him. He felt most comfortable in New York City, and his parents experimented with letting him stay there for brief periods. They rented a room for him in “a lovely, old brownstone that was lived in by an older lady,” recalled Joan. But the young man had lost what doctors called his “executive function.” He had a hard time organizing his thoughts and making his way through life. “He couldn’t really think, and he couldn’t really put two and two together,” Joan said. “And he began to get really depressed, and crazy.”

  Sonny’s debilitated mental condition placed an emotional and financial strain on the family. For the next two decades, he would go back and forth between expensive institutions and home care. Unlike his brother, Allen Dulles was not a wealthy man. His salary as CIA director, $14,800 [about $130,000 today], was healthy enough for him to maintain the family’s comfortable home on Long Island, but he had long since burned through his partner’s equity from Sullivan and Cromwell, and he could only afford to rent his second home in Washington because the owner, the relative of an old colleague, charged a token sum. The family’s finances were soon stretched by the cost of private treatments and medical consultations for Sonny, which ate away at the family’s savings, including Clover’s modest inheritance.

  Though Dulles himself rarely showed it, Sonny’s gravely reduced abilities wore down the family’s spirit too. Allen Jr. had been headed for a distinguished career in academia or public life, but now he had trouble finding his way home when he went out for lunch. Now and then, Sonny would stare at his father—and at Uncle Foster and Aunt Eleanor, too—with a look of such rage that it made Dulles shudder. He sometimes launched into angry denunciations of his father as a Hitler-lover and Nazi collaborator, outbursts that the family labeled “paranoid,” but were close enough to the truth to unnerve the senior Dulles. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him,” Dulles began saying to Clover.

  By 1954, Dulles turned in desperation to MKULTRA-sponsored doctors for help with Sonny. It is unclear whether Dulles paid for his son to be treated by these CIA-connected physicians, or whether their compensation came in the form of the generous agency research contracts that they received.

  Among the first CIA-funded medical experts the spymaster enlisted to treat his son was the eminent Dr. Harold Wolff, chief of the neurology department at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center and former president of the American Neurology Association, who became one of the agency’s leading experts on mind control. Wolff was a sophisticated and cultured medical scientist with an international reputation for his research on migraine headaches, which he himself sometimes suffered. His global roster of patients included both the shah of Iran and the shah’s political nemesis, Prime Minister Mossadegh.

  An intense and tightly wound man, Wolff set himself the goal of a new experiment every day. Dr. Donald Dalessio, who interned with the renowned neurologist and later worked with him as a research associate, remarked that Wolff’s “relentless drive for accomplishment epitomized the migraine personality that he so vividly documented in hundreds of patients.” He ordered his life around a “strict attention to the clock,” said Dalessio, “so that he was always on time, always prepared.” Trained by the renowned Russian father of behavior science, Ivan Pavlov, Wolff spent long hours in his sixth-floor laboratory at New York Hospital researching the mysteries of the brain. The lab was simple and “not cluttered with gear and impedimenta which characterize today’s [scientific facilities],” observed Dalessio, “for it was made to study people, not animals or molecules or other subunits, but functioning human beings.”

  The wiry, balding neurologist brought an obsessive drive even to his recreational life, swimming every day at his athletic club, mountain climbing, and challenging his younger colleagues to slashing squash games on the rooftop court of his hospital—“an eerie place,” recalled Dalessio, “where the wind would shriek about the stone battlements.” The son of an artist, Wolff also married an artist, and he and his wife listened to classical music every day and visited a museum or art gallery every week.

  Wolff was a supremely confident man. After his death, another migraine specialist commented that his career was marked by a “mixture of greatness and narrowness.” The narrowness came from “a desire to be on top and to win, and from an intellectual point of view, his dogmatism” and overcertainty about his medical theories. When Wolff was asked by a colleague why he had never bothered to be board-certified in neurology, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then replied, “But who would test me?” When Wolff was asked by the CIA to take a leading role in its MKULTRA progra
m, he had no moral qualms. He himself would set the ethical boundaries of his mind control experimentation.

  Wolff was sufficiently aware of the professional, and perhaps legal, pitfalls of the MKULTRA research to make sure that the CIA would assume responsibility for the most risky procedures. In a revealing passage in Wolff’s CIA grant proposal, he wrote that his Cornell research team would test “potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)” on behalf of the agency, “to ascertain [their] fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood.” But Wolff carefully stipulated that any dangerous experiments would have to be conducted at CIA facilities, not in his hospital. “Where any of the studies involve potential harm to the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of necessary experiments.”

  In 1955, Wolff agreed to become president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the primary CIA front for channeling research funds to a wide array of mind control researchers in medicine, psychology, and sociology. Wolff’s prestige became a major asset for the CIA as the agency attempted to bend the science profession to its Cold War aims. The neurologist also benefited greatly from the relationship, garnering CIA grants of up to $300,000 for his own research projects, and steering millions more to academic colleagues in various disciplines.

  Wolff became a friend of Dulles and was an occasional dinner guest at his Georgetown home. His dominating personality made him one of the few men who could hold his own in Dulles’s company. It was only natural for the CIA director to ask the prominent neurologist if there was anything he could do for his son. Wolff, of course, readily agreed to treat Allen Jr.—it was the least he could do for such an important benefactor. But, as a result, Sonny became another victim of his father’s MKULTRA program.