ALLEN DULLES

The polygraph, better known as a lie detector, is a highly unreliable device that is easy to defeat and has a very high percentage of false positives. It is illegal to use as evidence in the courts of most civilized country, but it is used by intelligence agencies and some law enforcement agencies as a form of intimidation as many people do not realize the shortcomings.

At the time Dulles was the Assistant Secretary & Near East Division chief of the State Department. The Turks were killing, starving and displacing Armenians—Mostly Christians—in Turkey. Like modern ethnic cleansing and genocides such as Kosovo, Rwanda, and Sudan, the magnitude of the atrocities was denied by the perpetrators and their apologists and other countries did not want to publicly admit the genocide lest they be forced to intervene by public opinion. Previously, the Armenians had slaughtered many Turks, especially the Armenians allied with Russia, and the two groups to this day have a continued distrust of each other—see {51838}, {638251}, {620602}, {620603}, {620604}, {620605}, {620600}, and {620606}

On post-World War II Germany:

When the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion attempt of Cuba failed, over 15,000 Cubans recruited for the operation were in the United States:. Almost all eventually settled in the U. S.

Dulles was writing about the World War II Abwehr, the German intelligence service.

After this, no other member of the Executive branch went before McCarthy again

Reinhard Gehlen was a vicious, fanatical Nazi intelligence officer who offered his files, men and services to Allen Dulles in Germany at the end of World War II. Dulles accepted the offer despite much criticism:

At the time Dulles was the Assistant Secretary & Near East Division chief of the State Department. Congress was outraged over the Turkish massacres of the Armenians, the Russian pogroms against the Jews, and the Belgian atrocities against the Blacks in the Congo. However, the State Department was then more interested in maintaining relations for our corporations than the moral aspects of mass murder within a country.

Dulles had little regard for the immorality of using Nazis as agents including major war criminals—even when it was against U. S. law and policy. The CIA continued to be insensitive and over the years employed some of the worst right wing murders and war criminals, The “precedent” was set after WWII by Dulles. See also {633240}.

This is a noteworthy quotation as it shows the nasty side of American intelligence activity in the aftermath of WWII. Mykola Lebed, 1909-1998 was a Ukrainian Nationalist war criminal working with the Nazis who was responsible for the murder and ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, He was convicted, and imprisoned for the murder, in 1936, of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki but was released when the Nazis occupied Poland. However, he was anti-Russian and our CIA enlisd his “services” to spy on the Soviets in the Ukraine. Then in 1949 he emigrated to the United States. As a war criminal, the law required that he be sent back to Europe, but this letter from the CIA Director “persuaded” the immigration authorities to not only allow him into the country, but the CIA paid him and he lived until in New York City until his death. There was no legal basis for his entry into the United States but the arrangements were made in secret. Polish patriots who had greatly assisted the Allies in fighting the Germans in WWII with great losses, did not even know that the war criminal that had tortured and murdered so many Poles was not only alive and well and living in New York, but was being paid by the United States government. The issue of what criteria are used for American intelligence agencies to use agents and what “rewards” can be given has been in controversy ever since. In one case in the late 20th century, the CIA actually employed an agent in South America who murdered and raped American nuns doing humanitarian work. The argument on the other side is that for espionage one wants terrible people with no moral compunctions as they make good agents. The question has always been at what moral cost and does a sociopath really make a good agent. See {633239}.

There was no national uprising. Not a single Cuban came to assist the Bay of Pigs invaders, nor was there even one sabotage action or other revolutionary action anywhere in Cuba. The conviction of the CIA that Castro was hated by the Cubans and the overwhelming majority of Cubans would welcome an invasion was so completely wrong that it was stunning. The assurances the CIA planners had received that there would be an uprising came from Cuban anti-Castro émigrés who were being paid by the CIA to organize the invasion force. They would only continue to get paid if the American authorities felt that there was a very good chance of success so they turned out to have a serious conflict of interest. But the CIA planners had been hearing this from Cuban exiles not involved with the invasion and they had a strong bias that no communist government could be a popular one. It was a great illustration of the fact that experienced professional intelligence analysts and operatives are susceptible to self-delusion and confusing wishful thinking with reality.

Dulles was a master at manipulating presidents. Instead of just presenting his Bay of Pigs plan to Kennedy and assuring him of his belief in its likely success, Dulles brought in the comparison with Eisenhower, a great general with extensive foreign policy experience. If Ike would give the go ahead with a lesser success probability plan, then it showed the confidence that Eisenhower had in Dulles and the Central Intelligence Agency staff. If Kennedy were to kill the Bay of Pigs plan, then either he did not have the courage that Ike had or he was substituting his military judgment for Eisenhower’s. Kennedy approved the operation which was a terrible example of military planning. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs Debacle, never again had great confidence in the professional military and espionage. Many political scientists and historians credit this negative experience with the Bay of Pigs with giving Kennedy the confidence to not follow the recommendations of the leading military and intelligence staff when faced with the Cuban Missile Crises—even when members of the Joint Chief’s of Staff (Curtis LeMay was the most forceful) told him unequivocally that his failure to act more forcefully would likely weaken if not destroy the independence of the country. President Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, took a much more proactive role in the Missile Crises than they did in the Bay of Pigs.

Dulles was a master of fending off calls for CIA reform. In this case he pretended to look for another agency to take over covert operations, but found in each case that they could not keep secrets well enough. In the 21st century, the CIA was still handling covert operations and have relinquished nothing.