Allen Welsh Dulles (1893-1969) was a politician, lawyer, intelligence official, and former director of the CIA. He was born on April 7, 1893 in Watertown, New York His father was a Presbyterian minister and he was a grandson of a Secretary of State. He worked as a spy at the US embassy in Bern, Switzerland during World War I. He later worked with his brother, John Foster Dulles, as a lawyer and international finance specialist for the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. While working here he made many connections with key Nazi industrialists. He was legal counsel for the mega-corporations The Standard Oil Company and I.G. Farben.
Dulles was responsible for negotiating the agreement with Reinhard Gehlen, which formed the Gehlen Organization, in which the former Nazi spy chief set up operations gathering intelligence on the Soviets within the Office of Strategic Services. He was also important in the formation of the CIA, and he became Deputy Director of Intelligence in 1951.
In 1953, Dulles became Director of Central Intelligence. His first major action was overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry. He was an important figure in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, as he served on the board of the United Fruit Company. This put an end to democracy in Guatemala, as the right-wing dictatorship was restored. He ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, as was concluded by the Senate's Church Committee in 1975.
President John F. Kennedy dismissed him from his position as DCI after the failed The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. He was a member of the Warren Commission, and helped promote the "lone gunman" theory on Kennedy's assassination. Dulles wrote several books on foreign affairs and intelligence, including Germany's Underground (1947), The Craft of Intelligence (1963), and The Secret Surrender (1966). He died of influenza in Washington, D.C. on January 29, 1969.
Sources:
http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Dulles.htm
http://www.tenc.net/docs/gehlen2-a.htm
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/allen.dulles/
http://www.zmag.org/sommerscalam.htm | 
