Allen Dulles Quotes
There are some things I don’t tell the President. It’s better if he doesn’t know.
This is a major issue for the nation. How can the president be responsible if he is not informed? However, some argue that the President must have “plausibility deniability” so he can deceive foreign leaders without lying to them. The laws require that nothing may be withheld from the President but there are some in the agency including past directors who believe that they sometimes should lie to the President or withhold information when it is in the national interest—which of course only they judge without any checks and balances.
Allen Welsh Dulles, 1893-1969, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Quoted in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Helms and his top executives had decided to withhold from the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination many of the material facts known to the CIA. The most dramatic was the fact that under Helms, the Central Intelligence Agency had hired organized crime figures to assassinate Fidel Castro, thus the Kennedy killing might have been a retaliation. This may seem shocking but the Central Intelligence Agency has been a problem ever since its inception. The agency frequently lied and withheld critical material of the President –see {634612}.
What makes this quotation important is that the Central Intelligence Agency disobeyed the order and implemented a number of covert operations in Indonesia and CIA Director Alan Dulles did not tell the President. See {634612} for his rationale.
Allen Welsh Dulles 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.
