Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan - Softcover

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Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He is the author of the bestsellers Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red, and The Commandos, as well as critically acclaimed works such as Disciples, the story of four CIA directors who fought for Donovan in World War II, and A Question of Loyalty, a biography of General Billy Mitchell. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Disciples

CHAPTER 1

ALLEN WELSH DULLES

He was born in Watertown, New York, on the morning of April 7, 1893, with congenital talipes equinovarus, commonly called a clubfoot. The medical profession since Hippocrates had treated the condition with slow mechanical pressure to bend the foot back out. With the advent of anesthesia doctors began surgically repairing the damage by the late 1860s. The parents found a Philadelphia orthopedist who successfully performed the operation on the baby. Even so, the family treated Allen Welsh Dulles’s deformity at birth as a dark secret not to be revealed to outsiders.

Edith Foster Dulles had worried about having a third child. The births of John Foster in 1888 and Margaret just fifteen months later had been difficult and doctors had warned her a third might kill her. Edith, however, found celibacy unbearable; she delivered two more daughters after Allen—Eleanor in 1895 and Natalie in 1898. Though the births did weaken her and she suffered migraines and bouts of depression, Edith remained a determined and domineering woman, active in social work and fluent in French and Spanish. “She was a person who said, ‘Now let’s stop fussing around, and let’s get this done,’?” recalled Eleanor.

Edith Foster had been born during the Civil War into what became diplomatic aristocracy. Her father, John Watson Foster, rose from major in the 25th Indiana Volunteers to a field commander for the Battle of Shiloh and to a Union general on retirement. After the war, the tall, erect officer, with his billowy white muttonchops and Harvard law degree, became President Ulysses S. Grant’s minister plenipotentiary to Mexico. More diplomatic postings followed—ambassador to the court of St. Petersburg under Tsar Alexander II in 1880, envoy to Spain in 1883. The family accompanied him overseas and Edith traveled throughout Latin America, Europe, and even Asia. In the waning months of Benjamin Harrison’s administration, Foster, who had become known as the “handyman of the State Department,” reached his pinnacle as secretary of state in 1892. He would not be the family’s only one. Edith’s sister Eleanor married Robert Lansing, a handsome lawyer-diplomat with a perpetually tanned face, who perfected an English accent, dressed like a dandy, and would become Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state in 1915.

The first time she met Allen Macy Dulles at a Paris soiree in 1881, Edith had not been terribly impressed by the slender young man, with his wide eyes and a soft boyish face, who had played on Princeton College’s football team and just graduated from its theological seminary. Dulles, then twenty-six, fell instantly in love with the eighteen-year-old girl and spent the next five years resolutely courting Edith until she agreed to marry him in 1886. He could claim distinguished lineage as well. His mother’s family had joined the Plymouth colony from the second voyage of the Mayflower in 1629. The ancestors of his father, Rev. John Welsh Dulles, fought in the Revolutionary War. One of seven children, Allen Macy had attended Philadelphia’s Hastings Academy, whose harsh discipline his brothers worried would kill him. Allen Macy survived and later thrived at Princeton, where in addition to playing what was then considered the brutal game of football he sang tenor in the glee club, excelled in philosophy, and became president of the Nassau Bible Society. After graduating in 1875, he taught briefly in Princeton’s prep school, then entered its seminary. He had been on a tour of Europe and the Middle East after graduation when he met Edith.

When he returned to America, Allen Macy Dulles was ordained by the Presbytery of Detroit and installed as pastor of the city’s Trumbull Avenue church. A year after their marriage, he moved to Watertown, a fast-growing trade and industrial center near Lake Ontario in upstate New York, to be pastor of its more upscale First Presbyterian Church. He first installed his growing family into a white clapboard parsonage nearby on Clinton Street, and later built a roomier manse with long colonnades on Mullins Street, where the church was also located. Dulles was a contemplative, imaginative, and, for his times, a liberal minister. He spent hours in his third-floor study crafting tightly written sermons so they would last no more than twenty minutes. No souls were saved after that, he believed. Twice he was nearly expelled from the church, for officiating the marriage of a divorced woman and for publicly questioning the Virgin Birth. Though he never earned more than $3,500 a year to support a family of seven, he was generous to a fault, often letting the town drunk, when he was down on his luck, sleep in a room in the house.

His was a happy home. Children from other families in the congregation found it fun hanging out at the house of this warm-hearted religious man because it was so welcoming. His own children had contests to see who could sing the most hymns. Reverend Dulles required them to bring a pencil and pad to church every Sunday to take notes on his sermon. The kids did not find this an onerous chore. They took what they had scribbled to Sunday dinner to discuss the sermon; if what they had written was not clear, Allen Macy always blamed himself for delivering his message poorly.

The Dulles children were all “live wires,” as one family member described them. Among the girls, Eleanor, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and usually had her nose buried in a book, was the intellectual dynamo. The oldest, John Foster, whom the family called Foster, had the strongest personality and an imperious look to him even as a boy. He was the leader of the five. Allie, which is what the family called his younger brother, was devoted to Foster and followed him everywhere when they were children.

Allie, who had his father’s eyes and soft features, was obsessively curious about others around him. As a young boy he listened intently to adult conversations on domestic and foreign policy issues of the day and, when he could write, began jotting down notes on what he had heard. He also developed at an early age a fixation with making others like him—although his sister Eleanor noticed that the irresistible charm her brother displayed could be interrupted at times by overpowering rage.

John Watson Foster, who preferred to be addressed as “General” even as secretary of state, was always the dominating presence in the Dulles family. In 1894, he built a red clapboard cottage for the clan with a circular porch that reached over the shore of Lake Ontario at a cove called Henderson Harbor. “Underbluff,” his name for this simple house, had a large living room and kitchen with wood-burning stove, a tin bathtub for scrubbing the children, kerosene lamps for light, and a hand pump for water because it had no plumbing or electricity. Allie and the other kids loved this summer retreat, where they swam, sailed, and fished for smallmouth bass in the lake and crowded around John Watson along a long wooden bench at night to listen to his Civil War stories. The General doted on Allen Macy’s children and “borrowed” each one of them to enjoy a winter season with him in Washington, when he could give the child a more sophisticated education than he thought his son-in-law could provide. He brought in tutors and governesses and allowed each grandchild to eavesdrop on the salons he hosted with the capital’s powerful at his stately town house on 18th Street near other...