Accompanying Donovan in his wartime ascent was another middle-aged corporate lawyer who, though different in background and temperament from Wild Bill, nonetheless shared his sense of unfulfilled potential—and his fascination with the clandestine. From the age of seven, when he wrote a history of the Boer War that was published by his proud family, Allen Dulles appeared bound for great things. The grandson of one secretary of state and nephew of another, he had served with distinction in several U.S. missions during World War I, discovering in the elegant Swiss city of Bern a penchant for espionage that was, as writer Burton Hersh has noted, “damned near glandular.”18 He was also a member of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference, advising Woodrow Wilson as the president attempted to make the world safe for democracy. After these heady early experiences, however, nothing else quite measured up. Like Donovan, Dulles made a great deal of money out of the law and investment banking, and tried unsuccessfully for political office—in his case, a Manhattan congressional seat—while continuing to travel and dabble in intelligence. The weight of his family’s expectations was burdensome, especially because next to the “somber granite edifice”
that was his older brother John Foster Dulles, he could not help looking lightweight.19
The eve of World War II found Dulles as genial and raffish as ever (qualities that apparently made him irresistible to women—his sexual conquests, in addition to his long-suffering wife Clover, included the queen of Greece, a daughter of Toscanini, and Clare Booth Luce) but drifting professionally. This explains why, when Wild Bill Donovan invited him to run the New York office of the COI in 1941, he leaped at the chance. In November 1942, after a year spent gathering data on the Nazis and perfecting his spying tradecraft under the tutelage of William Stephenson, who shared his office building in New York, Dulles returned to Bern as Donovan’s European second-in-command.20 He spent most of the rest of the war in Switzerland, “a prisoner in Heaven.”21
By this point, of course, the United States was a belligerent power, and the COI had been reconstituted as a military agency, the Office of Strategic Services. Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS has been the subject of much mythmaking regarding its contribution to both the eventual Allied victory and the later creation of the CIA. In fact, the organization was excluded from most of the major theaters of the war, badly hampered by fric-
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tion with rival services and Donovan’s notoriously poor administrative skills (which one subordinate likened to a person “pouring molasses from a barrel onto the table”), and involved in some frankly harebrained schemes, including a plan to drive Hitler insane with lust by showering his headquarters with pornography.22 For all that, there were individual acts of astonishing bravery, such as those performed by the Jedburghs, who in 1944 parachuted into occupied France to help the resistance cut Nazi supply lines ahead of the Normandy landings, not to mention the unsung efforts of the nine hundred or so Washington-based scholars in the OSS’s Research and Analysis branch, who strove to retrieve and analyze every available scrap of information on the Axis powers.23 There were also some notable espionage coups, such as Dulles’s success in establishing links with anti-Hitler elements in Germany, including the Abwehr officers who plot-ted to assassinate the Führer in 1944.24 For all his managerial shortcom-ings, Donovan deserves credit for having called into existence, almost overnight, a remarkably diverse and dynamic organization, which at the very least proved a considerable nuisance to the enemy—and partly laid the foundations of America’s postwar intelligence establishment.