Washington, D.C.

October 1949

Smoke filled the study of the Georgetown home of the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. A fire burned energetically, casting warm light across the room. Outwardly, the two-story brick home looked right at home in the upper-crust Washington neighborhood, white windows adorned with black shutters looking out over a well-kept lawn. Ivy crept up one wall, trimmed tastefully.

Within, powerful men plotted a coup.

The Dulles brothers were a powerful duo inside the Beltway, and now that John had the President’s ear on a daily basis their power had only grown. Allen’s committee on the operations of the CIA had stolen much of the wind from Eberstadt and, really, Herbert Hoover’s sails. Parts had been moved, deliberately, for months.

Goings-on in the world helped. Czechoslovakia fell to the communists, blindsiding the American intelligence community. Bolivia went red and the whole mess around Paraguay blew up into a regional conflict the Truman Administration failed to get a lid on. The French flirted with communism, their communists holding a plurality in the Assembly. Now China fell to communism. The reds encroached from every side, and kept appearing to surprise the United States government-- expressly what the Central Intelligence Agency should be endeavoring to prevent.

Fools passed on opportunity, but the Dulles brothers were not fools. John Foster Dulles called together the closest advisors in his orbit, which happened to be one largely shared by Allen. Paul Nitze, former advisor to President Truman and anti-Soviet diplomat; James Jesus Angleton, current CIA functionary; Desmond FitzGerald, an old OSS hand; Frank Wisner, one of the fathers of the CIA: they all gathered in the Georgetown home and opened a bottle of scotch whiskey, lit up their cigars, and “solved all the world’s problems.”

“Agency’s a goddamn mess,” Wisner lamented, standing in front of the fire. “Nobody knows their head from their ass. Virginia could go commie and the Admiral wouldn’t hear about it until reds kicked in his office door.”

This drew sardonic laughter from some of the men in the room, but the attitude was deadly serious.

“Fortunately, gentlemen, I believe the President agrees,” John Dulles said, standing up to pour himself another whiskey. “China was a breaking point. He had Chip Bohlen on the phone for an hour demanding to know how Chiang collapsed so quick after coming so close to tamping down on this communist business last year.”

FitzGerald looked particularly irate at the mention of China, where he’d served under “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell for the duration of the war. “I still can’t figure that out myself. Pour one out for Bohlen.”

“How’s Forrestal handling that?” Angleton asked, cleaning a spot from his glasses.

Dulles sat back down with a huff. “Wide-eyed and red-faced, rest assured. He advocated deploying 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a landing, but the President wasn’t sure the military was in a state to take on half of China.”

“Now might be the only time to do it,” FitzGerald opined.

Dulles scoffed. “You try running for office on the ‘invade China’ platform.”

Silence settled in for a moment before Wisner piped up to bring the focus back to the United States’ intelligence woes. “Someone ought to talk to the President about the Agency.”

“And say what?” Dulles asked, looking at Wisner.

Wisner cleared his throat. “Something about Hillenkoetter. Like I said, Agency’s a mess.”

The White House was still abuzz with news out of China when, at the second National Security Council meeting after Mao Zedong’s “proclamation” of the People’s Republic of China, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter strode confidently into a political trap.

President Dewey, Secretary of State Dulles, Secretary of Defense Forrestal, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and specifically cleared staffers were present when the questioning began. Dulles demanded answers as to the Central Intelligence Agency failing to accurately report the sorry state of Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army, or failing to give any appreciable warning of the impending collapse of Nationalist resolve. Hillenkoetter defended himself ably enough, but the questions kept coming. Why had the Agency been so wrong about the Soviet atomic program? The Soviets built a bomb four years before the CIA said they should be able to.

It swiftly became clear to Hillenkoetter that he had walked into a courtroom with himself and his Agency on trial.

President Dewey looked on impassively, hands folded in front of his mouth and a pensive look on his face while his eyes shifted from right to left, from Dulles to Hillenkoetter. At no point did he put a stop to the assault occurring in front of him.

What about Bolivia? Dulles pressed. The communist wound in South America had festered for six months, and CIA had done nothing of note to resolve the situation. Hillenkoetter countered-- CIA had no mandate to “do something” about a foreign government, their business was intelligence gathering. This, of course, merely set Dulles for his next attack. Why had the CIA been caught flat-footed there, then?

After half an hour things had begun to get heated. Hillenkoetter, a Vice Admiral in the United States Navy, began to ruffle at his rough handling by civilian diplomats. He’d commanded the USS Missouri in combat, stood on her bridge while she laid waste to Japanese targets. This treatment was absurd coming from a man who’d hid in Washington during the War.

At last, Dulles pushed Hillenkoetter too far. He looked at the head of the table. “Mr. President, if I have lost your confidence I will tender my resignation as Director of Central Intelligence.”

There was a long beat as the tables’ eyes all shifted to President Dewey, whose hands dropped at last. He spoke deliberately, straightening up. “Have it on my desk tomorrow morning.”

Hillenkoetter cleared his throat. “I will, then, Mr. President.”

The vacated office of Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, located in central Washington D.C. among several government buildings running the individual segments of the CIA, soon had a new resident. The US Senate had been sent reeling like much of the American political establishment by Mao’s victories and were eager for someone to blame. A column published by Stewart Alsop in the New York Herald Tribune laid blame at the feet of the CIA’s “feckless” Director-- that Alsop was another member of the Dulles brothers’ circle of confidants naturally went unspoken-- and the Senate latched onto the story. Swiftly, they set to work confirming the President’s appointed successor: Allen W. Dulles.

In short order the work began. The acrimony between the CIA and the State Department dispelled immediately, as John and Allen Dulles had little desire to compete against each other. In one of his first acts as DCI Allen Dulles brought the Office of Policy Coordination, a clandestine organ of the US Government, firmly under the control of the CIA and set to work integrating it, allotting office space in the same building as the DCI’s office for the erstwhile OPC to operate. Dulles maintained Frank Wisner in his role in charge of OPC, changing the title to Assistant Director for Policy Coordination and bringing Wisner directly under him. In the role of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Dulles brought along his colleague William Harding Jackson from the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee.

A reassessment of CIA’s activities and the Agency’s goals began as Dulles initiated implementation of several of the recommendations he’d made earlier in the year. He began planning for an Office of National Estimates, per his report, which would serve as a two-tiered body producing intelligence estimates for US policymakers in the United States. The first tier would be intelligence analysts, the second tier would be a revision board that, for lack of a better phrase, checked their work.

The Dulles brothers had pulled off their first coup, dramatically reforming the US intelligence community and placing it, firmly, under their thumb.