Dulles Allen - The devils chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the rise of Americas secret government

Allen and Clover Dulles, around the time of their 1920 wedding. A sensitive, artistic woman, Clover grew increasingly confounded by their secrecy-filled marriage. My husband doesnt converse with me... about anything, she confided in her diary. (COURTESY OF JOAN TALLEY)

SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann (center) translates a conversation between Italian air marshal Italo Balbo and Adolf Hitler. The adaptable Dollmann smoothly shifted between the worlds of decadent Italian royalty and Nazi powerand later made himself useful to U.S. intelligence.
(BPK, BERLIN/BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK MNCHEN ABTLG. KARTEN U. BILDER/HEINRICH HOFFMANN/ART RESOURCE, NY)

Among the devils whom Dulles quietly bargained with during World War II were SS leader Heinrich Himmler (shaking hands with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, far right) and SS general Karl Wolff (to the immediate rear of Himmler). (ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES)

Goering, Hitlers second-in-command, enjoys himself at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946. William Donovan, Dulless OSS boss, even tried to cut a deal on Goerings behalf, outraging the top U.S. prosecutor. (KURT HUTTON/GETTY IMAGES)

Reinhard Gehlen, Hitlers spy chief on the eastern front, was among the rats rescued after the war by Dulles, who helped install Gehlen as the powerful director of West Germanys intelligence apparatus. (AP PHOTO)

William Gowen, a young U.S. Army intelligence agent, tried to track down war criminals fleeing justice through the Nazi ratlines in Italy. But he was no match for Dulles and his counterintelligence protg in Rome, James Jesus Angleton. (COURTESY OF WILLIAM GOWEN)

Clover Dulles (left) and Mary Bancroft formed a lifelong bond when they met in Switzerland during the final days of the war. The women took to calling Dullesthe cold, relentless man who dominated their livesThe Shark. (COURTESY OF JOAN TALLEY)

Quaker relief worker Noel Field was one of the innocent little mice who fell into Dulless trap during the Cold War. ( CORBIS)

The young congressman Richard Nixon (far right), with fellow members of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, rode the anti-Communist inquisitions to power with the help of the Dulles brothers. ( BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Harry Dexter White, the most celebrated New Deal economist, was one of Nixons victims. ( BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his aide Roy Cohn in 1954, was such a powerful exploiter of the red scare that he became a threat to President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers. ( BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (left) and President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over a growing U.S. empire enforced by nuclear brinksmanship terror and CIA cloak-and-dagger intrigue. (COURTESY OF JOAN TALLEY)

The maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills, who rode a motorcyle that he built himself, was Americas most incisive analyst of the Cold War power elite. His provocative scholarship won a wide followingand got him listed by the CIA as an intellectual threat even after his premature death in 1962. (PHOTO BY YAROSLAVA MILLS. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF C. WRIGHT MILLS)

The shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and Queen Soraya arrive at the Rome airport in August 1953, in flight from their countrys democratic uprising. A CIA-engineered coup would soon put the shah back on the Peacock Throne. ( BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Wealthy, young, attractive, and dedicated to uplifting their impoverished country, President Jacobo Arbenz and his wife, Maria, were the Kennedys of Guatemala. But Arbenz was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored military rebellion in 1954 after his land reforms antagonized United Fruit Company and the Dulles brothers. (CORNELL CAPA/GETTY IMAGES)