Allen W. Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles ( ; April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American lawyer who was the first civilian director of central intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He was fired by John F. Kennedy over the latter fiasco. Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Between his stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration and is the namesake of Dulles International Airport. Early life and family Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, one of five children of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, and his wife, Edith ( Foster) Dulles. He was five years younger than his brother, John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of state and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat, Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, was secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, while his uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing was secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Dulles graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig–Cliosophic Society, and entered the diplomatic service in 1916. In 1920, he married Martha "Clover" Todd (March 5, 1894 – April 15, 1974). They had three children: daughters Clover and Joan, and son Allen Macy Dulles II (1930–2020), who was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War and spent the rest of his life in and out of medical care. According to his sister, Eleanor, Dulles had "at least a hundred" extramarital affairs, including some during his tenure with the CIA.