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It was a stunningly cynical and insubordinate gambit. The pact that Dulles envisioned not only dismissed the genocide against the Jews as an irrelevant issue, it also rejected
the president’s firmly stated policy against secret deal making with the enemy. The man in the White House, clinging to his anti-Nazi principles, was clearly one of those “outdated politicians” in Dulles’s mind. While boldly undermining his president, Dulles had the nerve to assure Hohenlohe that he had FDR’s “complete support.”
Hovering over the tête-à-tête at 23 Herrengasse was the presence of Heinrich Himmler. He was the Reich’s second most powerful man,
was given to explorations of the occult and other flights of fantasy.
“The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening an organization could ever receive,” Himmler told the leaders of his killing teams. He knew how to appeal to his men’s sense of valor and vanity, telling them, “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Even if Himmler had made it to Switzerland, however, he would not have found sanctuary. He was too prominent a face of Nazi horror for even Dulles to salvage.
Eleanor’s intelligence and determination would take her far, as she followed her brothers into the diplomatic corps, where she would eventually take over the State Department’s German desk during the critical years after World War II. But, as a brainy woman in a thoroughly male arena, she was always something of an outsider.
Clover Dulles called her cold and driven husband “The Shark.”
Foster’s reaction to his friends’ terrible dilemma unnerved his sister. “There’s nothing that a person like me can do in dealing with these men, except probably to keep away from them,” he later told Eleanor. “They’re safer, if I keep away from them.” Actually, there was much that a Wall Street power broker like John Foster Dulles could have done for his endangered friends, starting with pulling strings to get their families and at least some of their assets out of Germany before it was too late. Throughout her life, Eleanor wrestled with her brothers’ cold, if not cruel, behavior.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, when young Allen Dulles was serving in the U.S. embassy in Turkey, his first overseas posting after World War I, he fell for the most notorious anti-Jewish fabrication in history. One day the young American diplomat was given a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a secondhand bookstore in Istanbul’s old European quarter. The Protocols purported to offer a secret plan for Jewish world domination, and included tales about Christian children being sacrificed for Passover feast rituals and
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This was the desperate situation as Dulles began monitoring European developments—first from his OSS office in Rockefeller Center and later from his post in Bern. Among Dulles’s confidential sources was a German industrialist who was the first prominent figure inside the Nazi domain to provide credible information about the early stages of the Final Solution.
It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket—an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process, with other major German corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and
the poisonous culture of the U.S. State Department.
The State Department later sent the OSS a summary of the report that had originated with Schulte. Allen Dulles, still working out of the OSS offices in New York at the time, was one of those who received the message. The State Department flatly refused to believe Schulte’s account, calling it a “wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears.” Even Harrison’s concession that some Jews were dying as a result of the “privations” of war was stripped out of the State Department memo.
Rabbi Wise finally held a press conference two days before Thanksgiving, announcing that Hitler had already killed about two million European Jews and had plans to exterminate the rest. The New York Times
buried the story on page 10, The Washington Post on page 6. The press was reluctant to highlight such an explosive story since it lacked official government sources.
“conscription” of Hungary’s Jews.
When Dulles’s communications from Bern to Washington were declassified decades later by the government, scholars were able to decipher his wartime obsessions. Dulles’s interest was absorbed by psychological warfare tricks, such as distributing counterfeit stamps behind enemy lines depicting Hitler’s profile as a death’s skull, and other cloak-and-dagger antics. He was also deeply engaged with mapping out grand postwar strategies for Europe. But few of his more than three hundred communiqués mentioned the killing of Jews—and none carried a sense of urgency about the Final Solution. This glaring
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We cannot forget [for example] that one of the big war factories in Germany was the Opel Company which was owned and financed by the General Motors Corporation, a company in which Secretary Stettinius had a great interest. The biggest electric company in Germany was owned and financed by the General Electric Company of New York. We have here very potent reasons why a large and important group in this country is trying to pipe down on the serious investigations of [corporate Germany’s collaboration with the Nazis].”
The tensions between Donovan and Jackson began to grow in July when the OSS chief moved to take over what Nuremberg prosecutors referred to as the trial’s “economic case.” As Wall Street lawyers, Donovan and Dulles considered themselves uniquely equipped to take charge of the case against the industrialists and bankers who had financed Hitler’s regime. But such a role would have given the two OSS men the ability to control the legal fates of German business figures who had strong ties to their own Wall Street circles—including infamous former clients of the Dulles brothers.
Jackson quickly discovered that his concerns had been well founded. As the trial’s start date approached that fall, Donovan began communicating with Goering and Schacht, whom he recognized as the two most financially astute men among the accused.
But due to Dulles’s carefully calibrated interventions, a number of Europe’s most notorious war criminals—men who should have found themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, where they almost certainly would have been convicted of capital crimes—escaped justice. Some were helped to flee through “ratlines” to Franco’s Spain, the Middle East, South America, and even the United States. Others were eased into new lives of power and affluence in postwar West Germany, where they became essential confederates in Dulles’s rapidly growing intelligence complex.
Dulles returned home to New York, where, on December 3—a few days before leaving government service—he was asked to talk about postwar Germany at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The United States must not go too far in its efforts to cleanse Germany of its Nazi past, Dulles told the meeting. “Most men of the caliber required to [run the new Germany] suffer a political taint,” he said. “We have already found out that you can’t run railroads without taking in some [Nazi] Party members.”
The negotiations for Operation Sunrise, as Dulles optimistically christened his covert peace project, were a highly delicate dance. Exposure could spell disaster for both men. According to Wolff, during their diplomatic courtship, Dulles identified himself as a “special representative” and “a personal friend” of President Roosevelt—neither of which was true. In fact, by negotiating with the SS general, Dulles was clearly violating FDR’s emphatic policy of unconditional surrender. Just days before Wolff was trapped at Villa Locatelli, Dulles had been expressly forbidden by Washington from
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Operation Sunrise saved few lives and had little impact on the course of the war. It did succeed, however, in creating a new set of international tensions that some historians would identify as the first icy fissures of the Cold War. The Dulles-Wolff maneuvers aggravated Stalin’s paranoid disposition. While he was still alive, Roosevelt, whom Stalin genuinely liked and trusted, was able to reassure the Soviet leader that the United States had no intention of betraying an alliance forged in blood. But after FDR’s death, Stalin’s fears
Time magazine—which, under the ownership of his close friend Henry Luce, could always be counted on to give Dulles good press—trumpeted
Throughout the war, Dulles had used his OSS command post in Switzerland to look out for Sullivan and Cromwell business clients in Europe. Stopping the war before these clients’ manufacturing and power plants in industrial northern Italy were destroyed was a priority for both men.
separate peace deal but because Himmler’s right-hand man was certain to be placed high on the list of Nazi war criminals. Even many years later, when the evidence against Wolff had grown to utterly damning proportions, the old spy refused to pass judgment on him. “The conclusions [about Wolff] must be left to history,” wrote Dulles in his carefully calibrated Operation Sunrise memoir. He was delaying a judgment that, for many, had long since been obvious.
Wolff should have been sitting in the dock at Nuremberg as part of the first round of defendants. But it was the cruder and less-connected executioner Ernst Kaltenbrunner who would hang for the sins of the SS. Nor was Wolff in the dock the following year, when the Doctors’ Trial began, though he would be singled out by prosecutors as one of the principal “masterminds” behind the Dachau experiments. Throughout the Nuremberg proceedings and the legal challenges that confronted him in later years, Wolff was watched over by his twin guardian angels—Dulles and Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. They made
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Dulles threw his cloak of protection over Wolff from the very start.
Dulles arranged for Wolff to be diagnosed with a nervous disorder, and in spring 1946 he was transferred to a psychiatric institution in Augsburg, Austria.
Wolff stirred the pot further by sending a similar letter to Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had worked closely with Dulles as the U.S. Army’s point man on the Sunrise negotiations. Lemnitzer shared Dulles’s strong anti-Soviet sentiments, and he had colluded with the OSS official to keep the secret talks with Wolff going forward, even after President Roosevelt and the Allied command thought they had pulled the plug on Sunrise. After the German surrender, the ambitious Lemnitzer had also worked with Dulles to promote Sunrise in the press as an espionage triumph. When Wolff’s letter reached
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Angleton, however, was lost in his own passion. He had found strong support for his views from Allen Dulles in the months after the war, as Dulles lingered in Europe, hoping that President Truman would anoint him commander of the shadow war against the Soviet Union. In October 1945, Dulles visited Rome with Clover, ostensibly to revive their marriage after the strains of separation during the war. But he had another mission as well: to organize the Italian front in the new Cold War. Angleton, who was wired into the Vatican, helped arrange a secret meeting for Dulles with Pope Pius XII, who had
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Pagnotta did snare another fugitive who was living in the Via Archimede apartment, SS officer Eugen Wenner, who had also played a part in the Operation Sunrise maneuvers. It soon dawned on Pagnotta’s team that Angleton was operating a safe house on Via Archimede for a stream of Nazi fugitives who were connected to Sunrise and other Dulles operations. They even traced the car driven by Dollmann’s chauffeur to Angleton’s father, who kept a villa nearby in Parioli. Nobody would get to know the deeply clever ways of Angleton in Rome better than William Gowen, who, at age eighteen, was one of the
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Nonetheless, by 1947, many in the American military hierarchy shared the Dulles-Angleton view that fighting Communism was a bigger priority than prosecuting fascist war criminals.
Pavelic´ was under the protection of Croatian officials in the Vatican and other fascist sympathizers.
That sleight of hand was likely performed by Frank Wisner, a close collaborator of Dulles’s from their days in the OSS who had recently been appointed head of the State Department’s clandestine operations unit, the Office of Policy Coordination. But it was Gowen who would take the fall for the Vajta escapade. It did not take him long to figure out who was responsible for setting him up. Pearson had been fed the false story by Raymond Rocca, Angleton’s deputy in Rome.
Years after both men returned to America, Angleton continued to keep an eye on Gowen. Back in Washington, where he eventually became the all-powerful chief of CIA counterintelligence, Angleton invited Gowen to lunch at the Army-Navy Club and even to his home in Virginia. “You know, he was a very devious character,” Gowen said, “but he wanted to give me the impression that he was very friendly.
Dulles and the CIA knew that there was great potential for embarrassment with Dollmann. As the years passed, the agency’s memos on the colorful SS veteran revealed rising levels of anxiety and exasperation.
Jung deemed Hitler a “medicine man” who ruled more through magic than political power.
Before the war, standing near the two leaders at a Berlin military parade, Jung once had the occasion to observe Hitler and Mussolini together.
“I couldn’t help liking Mussolini. . . . You have the homely feeling with Mussolini of being with a human being. With Hitler, you are scared.”
Dulles, for his part, approved of his wife and mistress’s submitting to Jung’s treatment. He told Mary that he realized analysis could be “useful” for others, but he was convinced that he himself had no need for
men were excited by the idea of forging a pioneering marriage between espionage and psychology. Dulles’s reports back to Washington were filled with Jung’s insights into the Nazi leadership and the German people. Jung even correctly predicted that an increasingly desperate Hitler would likely commit suicide. Mary’s appointments with Jung became dominated by Dulles’s “ask Jung” questions, to the point that they more closely resembled espionage briefings than therapy sessions.
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.
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.
putting himself forward as one of the Republican Party’s leading wise men on foreign affairs.
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.
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.
