Volume 41, Number 20 · December 1, 1994
The Spook of Spooks
By Thomas Powers
Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
by Peter Grose
Houghton Mifflin/A Richard Todd Book, 641 pp., $30.00
Allen Welsh Dulles was not the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the best, certainly not the wisest, or even the most aggressive, although in that category he comes in a very close second, after William Casey, whose most extravagant secret efforts to win the cold war may be plausibly blamed on the brain tumor which killed him. But Allen Dulles probably had the deeper natural instinct for what his biographer Peter Grose, echoing Kipling, likes to call The Great Game, and he was without question the most important director of the CIA in its first half century—granting, for the moment, that the agency will finish the full fifty years without being sliced up or killed altogether by an irritated Congress.
Review, 4200 words
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