by David Talbot
It was Jackie Kennedy who tipped off Dulles to the pleasures of James Bond, giving him a copy of From Russia with Love, which became one of his favorite spy novels. After he got hooked on Ian Fleming, the CIA director would send copies of new Bond novels to the senator and his wife as soon as he got his hands on them.
In typical fashion, Dulles played both sides of the 1960 presidential campaign, currying favor with Kennedy as well as Nixon. On July 23, the CIA director met with the Democratic candidate at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port to give him an intelligence briefing. After the election, Nixon charged that Dulles had given his opponent an unfair advantage at this meeting by briefing JFK about the CIA’s plans for a paramilitary invasion of Cuba. In his memoir, Six Crises, Nixon accused Kennedy of using this inside information to straitjacket him on the Cuba issue. When JFK demanded militant action on Cuba on the eve of the final presidential debate, Nixon—who could not reveal that the administration was indeed secretly planning such a course—was forced to take a cautionary posture, chiding Kennedy for his “dangerously irresponsible recommendations.”
Dulles later strongly denied Nixon’s accusation, insisting that he did not brief Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs operation until after the election. But his denial had a slippery feel to it. “Nixon indicated he thought he’d been double-crossed,” Dulles told former CIA colleague Tom Braden in 1964. “I said this is all a misunderstanding because as far as I know President Kennedy did not know about the training—from me anyway [italics added]. . . . He didn’t know anything about it from me, until after the election took place.” Dulles did not spell out whether any other CIA official might have tipped off Kennedy on the CIA chief’s authorization.
If Dulles used his Kennedy briefings to win points with the Democratic nominee, he also used these private sessions to gain inside information for the Nixon camp. On a Saturday evening in September 1960, Robert Kennedy—his brother’s notoriously aggressive campaign manager—phoned Dulles at home, interrupting a dinner he was hosting, to inform the CIA director that Jack wanted another intelligence briefing on Monday morning at his Georgetown home. It was the kind of brusque request that CIA officials would grow used to receiving from Bobby, who was not known for his patience or ingratiating manners when his brother’s pressing needs were at stake. Dulles was not used to being summoned in so peremptory a fashion, particularly by political operatives like Bobby Kennedy, who was more than three decades his junior. But, still eager to please the Kennedys, he showed up at JFK’s town house at the appointed hour.
When the presidential candidate, who was meeting with Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee at the time, kept the CIA director waiting, Dulles did not complain—and he even graciously allowed another waiting guest, a minor Middle Eastern prince, to see Kennedy before him. But after Dulles’s half-hour meeting with the Democratic nominee, the spymaster promptly sent a memo about their conversation to Andy Goodpaster in the White House, knowing that Eisenhower’s staff would certainly relay it to the Nixon campaign.
The September 21 Dulles memo focused on the U-2 controversy, of which Kennedy had already made a campaign issue. The CIA director, who was acutely aware of his responsibility for the crisis and how it was being exploited by the Democrats, informed Goodpaster that JFK asked him for his reaction to Countdown for Decision, a new book by retired Army general J. B. Medaris that was sharply critical of the Eisenhower administration’s handling of the U-2 affair. “As I mentioned to you,” Dulles wrote the White House aide in a follow-up memo a few days later, “I have reason to believe that this book will be cited in the campaign in view of certain statements which were made to me by Senator Kennedy when I briefed him last Monday.”
Despite Dulles’s efforts to help the vice president by informing on the Kennedy campaign, Nixon continued to hold a grudge about the CIA chief’s duplicity. Until the end of his Washington career, Nixon would harbor suspicions about the CIA and its political treachery. Nixon, who had carried water for the Dulles brothers ever since the Alger Hiss affair, had expected the spymaster’s uncompromising support in his run for the White House. But Dulles was not concerned with personal or political loyalties. By playing both sides of the closely contested 1960 race, Dulles ensured that he would be the victor, no matter who won.
On Wednesday evening, November 9, the day after JFK’s breathtakingly close victory, the president-elect and several members of his inner circle sipped cocktails in the living room at Hyannis Port, recovering from their all-night ordeal and savoring the hard-won moment. At one point, the group of insiders began discussing what Kennedy should do first as president. The group was keenly aware of the historical turning point and of the unique opportunities open to JFK with his generational changing of the guard. The first thing he should do, suggested one insider, is fire J. Edgar Hoover. While he was at it, said another, Kennedy should get rid of Allen Dulles. Both men were symbols of a reactionary past—and there was something sinister about their interminable reigns. A relaxed Kennedy encouraged the free-flowing conversation, and the guests retired to their rooms at the compound that night under the impression that the new president was in step with their recommendations. But the next morning, they were unpleasantly surprised to read in the daily papers that Kennedy had already announced that he was retaining both Hoover and Dulles.
Kennedy later explained to Arthur Schlesinger that, considering his slim margin of victory, he didn’t feel that he had sufficient political capital to uproot two Washington pillars like Hoover and Dulles. Jettisoning these “national icons,” as Schlesinger described them, would have provoked a sharp backlash from the influential network of allies that they had accumulated in the Washington bureaucracy and among the Georgetown and Manhattan chattering classes.
Schlesinger, ever eager to put Kennedy’s actions in the best possible light, later called JFK’s decision to include prominent Republicans in his administration—such as Dulles and C. Douglas Dillon, who was appointed Treasury chief—part of the youthful president-elect’s “strategy of reassurance.” The Harvard historian played a unique role in Kennedy’s life: special assistant to the president, political adviser, court chronicler, and liaison to the liberal and intellectual circles with which JFK had a complicated and often prickly relationship. “Here’s Arthur,” JFK wryly remarked one evening, as his adviser joined a casual staff gathering in the Oval Office. “He used to be a liberal. Maybe he can explain why they do these crazy things.” The bow-tied, bespectacled scholar seemed an unlikely member of the New Frontier inner circle, where handsome men of action—the kind who could throw a long, tight spiral and skipper a sailboat—dominated. But Kennedy had a respectful if sometimes teasing relationship with Schlesinger, often using him as a sounding board for new ideas and appointments that he was considering, as well as a voice of conscience.
When Schlesinger communicated to Kennedy liberals’ growing concerns about his political appointments, the president told him he understood, “but they shouldn’t worry. What matters is the program.” JFK assured his adviser that his policies would be solidly liberal, no matter who held positions in his administration. Besides, said Kennedy, he had given men like Dulles only a temporary reprieve—they would be gone soon enough. “We’ll have to go with this for a year or so. Then I would like to bring in some new people.” But Kennedy was not naïve about the workings of Washington power. After a thoughtful pause, he added, “I suppose it may be hard to get rid of these people once they are in.”
Kennedy already knew the man he wanted to replace Dulles—tall, brainy Richard M. Bissell Jr., the Groton- and Yale-educated chief of clandestine operations for the CIA. Bissell, a popular member of the Georgetown set, had managed to survive the political fallout from the U-2 disaster, even though he was in charge of the spy-in-the-sky program. With his impressive academic credentials, which included a degree from the London School of Economics, and his grasp of the latest surveillance technology, Bissell struck JFK as a man of the future.
In February, soon after Kennedy’s inauguration, Dulles organized a well-lubricated mixer for his top CIA men and Kennedy’s White House team at the Alibi Club, his favorite Washington watering hole. The venerable gentlemen’s club—located in an old brick town house that had changed little since the days of its founding, in the muttonchop era of President Chester A. Arthur—catered to an exclusive membership list, including Supreme Court justices, Joint Chiefs chairmen, and former presidents. After breaking the ice with “a pleasant three-cocktail dinner,” as one guest described it, the CIA men got up, one at a time, to explain their mysterious roles to the White House aides. Dulles himself was used to dominating these occasions. But on this evening, it was Bissell who took the spotlight. Dulles’s deputy introduced himself by saying, “I’m your basic man-eating shark,” an opening “with just the right mix of bravado and self-mockery to charm the New Frontiersmen,” as historian Evan Thomas observed.
The president made no secret of his plan to shake up the CIA and to replace Dulles with his number two man. Kennedy’s father had served on the foreign intelligence advisory board that had urged Eisenhower to overhaul the management of the spy agency. Joseph P. Kennedy had made his son fully aware of Dulles’s dangerously unsupervised management style. After the November election, a member of Kennedy’s transition team, aware of his low opinion of the CIA’s leadership, asked him, “There must be someone you really trust within the intelligence community. Who is that?” Kennedy could think of only one man. “Richard Bissell,” he answered.
But Allen Dulles had no intention of relinquishing power anytime soon, not even to one of his right-hand men like Bissell. To Dulles, the Kennedy transition was just one more seasonal Washington cycle that had to be finessed. In the days leading up to Kennedy’s inauguration, the press was filled with stories about all the fresh new faces in Washington. But many of the Kennedy appointments had closer ties to the Dulles old guard than they did to the new president.
Among them was McGeorge Bundy, the owlish Harvard dean whom Kennedy appointed national security adviser. The long ties between Dulles and the Boston Brahmin Bundy family had been fortified when the CIA director rescued Mac Bundy’s brother, CIA officer Bill Bundy, from Joe McCarthy’s pyre. Mac Bundy regarded Dulles as a benevolent uncle, maintaining a warm correspondence with him that lasted until the end of the elder man’s life. When Bundy became dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953—at age thirty-four, the youngest in the school’s history—he used his post to identify future prospects for the CIA among the student body’s best and brightest. Dulles could be assured that with Mac Bundy in the White House—and with his brother Bill moving to Kennedy’s Defense Department, where the press dubbed him “the Pentagon’s secretary of state”—the CIA director had eyes and ears in two of the most important command posts in the Kennedy administration.
Kennedy’s New Frontier was laced throughout with other Dulles loyalists, especially in the foreign service and national security agencies. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower, had a long partnership with Dulles, going back to their wartime intrigues in Operation Sunrise. Kennedy’s choice for secretary of state, Dean Rusk, was well known to the Dulles brothers from their membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation, where Rusk served as president and Foster as a trustee. Rusk’s State Department continued to be filled with Dulles men and women, including Eleanor Dulles herself, who remained at the German affairs desk. Even Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, had worked for the CIA in the early 1950s, specializing in psychological warfare. The “doyenne of decorum” had also served as an assistant to Dulles’s close ally, Ambassador Clare Booth Luce, in the U.S. embassy in Rome.
Dulles was confident enough that the Dulles era would continue under JFK that he made boasts to that effect on the Washington dinner party circuit, within full earshot of Kennedy loyalists. Shortly after Kennedy took office, the painter William Walton, a close friend of JFK and Jackie, found himself at a gathering at Walter Lippmann’s house where Dulles was a fellow guest. “After dinner, the men sat around awhile in an old-fashioned way, and [Dulles] started boasting that he was still carrying out his brother Foster’s foreign policy. He said, you know, that’s a much better policy. I’ve chosen to follow that one.” Walton, who loathed the CIA boss, couldn’t believe Dulles’s audacity. The spymaster knew that Walton was one of Kennedy’s inner circle, but he felt no need to hold his tongue. Dulles was clearly sending the new president a message—and Kennedy’s close friend duly delivered it. Early the next morning, Walton phoned JFK at the White House and reported what Dulles had told Lippmann and his guests. “God damn it!” swore Kennedy. “Did he really say that?”
“The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Kennedy declared in his inaugural address. But, in fact, the Dulles old guard was deeply reluctant to give up power to the New Frontier team. In fact, the power struggle between the new president and his CIA director started before Kennedy was even sworn in, when Dulles took advantage of the transition period to carry out a brazen act of insubordination.
Patrice Lumumba was fleeing for his life. Sworn in less than six months earlier as the Congo’s first democratically elected leader, following the end of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule, Lumumba was now on the run from the CIA-backed Congolese military forces that had deposed him. Lumumba had broken free from house arrest in the capital, Leopoldville, on the evening of November 27, 1960. He was now making his way through a tropical downpour across the countryside to Stanleyville, a bastion of loyal nationalism some 750 miles to the east, where he hoped to raise an army and reclaim his office. Lumumba was driven in a new blue Peugeot, with his wife, Pauline Opango, and their two-year-old son, Roland, part of a three-car convoy that included other high officials from his toppled government.
The election of Lumumba in June 1960 had electrified the Congo, a nation that had been enslaved and plundered by its Belgian rulers for over three-quarters of a century. In the late nineteenth century, King Leopold II had carved an empire out of this benighted African territory through a system of forced labor so vicious that Joseph Conrad modeled the colonial nightmare in his novel Heart of Darkness on it, calling Leopold’s rape of the Congo “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” The hands chopped from the arms of Congolese men who refused to work under their colonial masters’ yoke became a world symbol of Belgium’s vile rule. After Leopold, the looting of Congo continued, with rubber and ivory being replaced by gold, diamonds, copper, and tin as the objects of Western desire. Global mining companies turned the mineral-rich African nation into their private jewelry box, with huge fortunes amassed in Brussels, London, and New York.
But Patrice Lumumba’s election threatened this long reign of greed. Lumumba, a slender, graceful man with glasses and a trim mustache and goatee, looked more like the postal clerk he had once been (one of the few civil service jobs open to Africans under Belgian rule) than a fiery nationalist leader. But he spoke with a heartfelt eloquence that dazzled his followers and alarmed his enemies.
On June 30, the Congo’s independence was formally celebrated in the flag-draped National Palace in Leopoldville. King Baudouin of Belgium, a young monarch who never fully took to his role, and would become known as “the sad king,” delivered a fatuous speech, praising his royal predecessors for bestowing the “fabric of civilization” on the primitive nation. The handsome king, who wore a white colonial uniform and round spectacles that gave him the wide-eyed look of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, seemed oblivious to the country’s shameful past. It fell to Lumumba, who followed the king to the microphone, to set him straight. The Congo’s colonial history, said the new prime minister, was “much too painful to be forgotten.” Lumumba spoke passionately about his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage forced upon us”—years that were “filled with tears
, fire and blood.” But he ended on a hopeful note, vowing, “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.”
Lumumba’s ardent remarks lifted up the Congolese people, who danced in the streets of the capital to celebrate their freedom. But King Baudouin and the other Western representatives who attended the independence ceremony were insulted by the prime minister’s frank remarks. Lumumba had “marred the ceremonies,” sniffed the New York Times correspondent.
After Lumumba’s Independence Day speech, national security officials in Washington and Brussels—who were already monitoring the rise of the charismatic Congolese leader—began regarding him as a serious threat to Western interests in the region. More than his defiant rhetoric, it was Lumumba’s refusal to be bought off by the multinational corporations controlling the Congo’s wealth that undoubtedly sealed his fate. In speeches to his followers, Lumumba opened a door on the corrupt backroom dealings that continued to dominate African capitals in the neocolonial era. The United States, he declared, was rubbing its hands over the Congo’s uranium deposits—the same deposits that supplied the uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking to dinner guests at a political event in October 1960, Lumumba said that he could have made millions of dollars if he had been willing to “mortgage the national sovereignty.”
Dulles, Doug Dillon (then serving as a State Department undersecretary), and William Burden, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, led the charge within the Eisenhower administration to first demonize and then dispose of Lumumba. All three men had financial interests in the Congo. The Dillon family’s investment bank handled the Congo’s bond issues. Dulles’s old law firm represented the American Metal Company (later AMAX), a mining giant with holdings in the Congo, and Dulles was friendly with the company’s chairman, Harold Hochschild, and his brother and successor, Walter, who served in the OSS during the war. Ambassador Burden was a company director, and Frank Taylor Ostrander Jr., a former U.S. intelligence official, served the Hochschild brothers as a political adviser.
