The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

Allen followed his brother to Princeton and after graduation entered the Foreign Service—but only because the United States had no civilian intelligence service. Like Edward Lansdale, Allen was a devotee of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, one of the first and most popular novels of espionage, and he aspired to follow in Kim’s footsteps.37 Posted during World War I in Vienna and Bern, Switzerland, Allen developed the case officer’s skill at cultivating sources and evaluating their information. In 1926 Allen, who had attended law school at night, left the government to become a high-paid international lawyer at his brother’s firm. His recreational interests were tennis, talking foreign policy over brandy and a pipe, and womanizing. He would torture his long-suffering wife by writing letters telling her of all the enjoyable hours he had spent on his frequent trips abroad with a variety of beautiful women. “I don’t feel I deserve as good a wife as I have,” he confessed, “as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies.”38 Allen Dulles’s life changed for good in 1942 when another New York lawyer with a roving eye—Wild Bill Donovan—recruited him for what would become the OSS. Before long, Dulles was back in his old stomping ground in neutral Switzerland, which in World War II, as in World War I, proved to be a playground for secret agents. Much like Lansdale, Dulles had, in the words of his biographer Peter Grose, a “marvelous, low-key way of speaking” that endeared him to most pe...