Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [16]
When he became director in 1953, according to one biographer, “Dulles had already decided the CIA must reach into every corner of the world.”23 By the end of the decade, he had achieved that aim, establishing a network of stations embedded in U.S. diplomatic missions that spanned the planet. (The Agency also maintained offices in several major American cities.) Persuaded that “covert operations should be increased in intensity and number,” the director filled the Agency’s upper ranks with people who shared his view as well as his fascination with tradecraft and his appetite for risk taking. Within the Agency itself, Dulles’s intense personal interest in all aspects of clandestine activity earned him this nickname: the Great White Case Officer.24
When it came to choosing subordinates, Dulles prized zeal rather than balance. Those he placed in top jobs possessed impressive talents and flawed personalities: Frank Wisner, his deputy director for covert operations and then station chief in London, succumbed to madness and committed suicide; James Jesus Angleton, the alcoholic chief of CIA counterintelligence, famously descended into paranoia; William K. Harvey, station chief in Berlin, toted pearl-handled pistols, consumed a daily pitcher of martinis with lunch, and bragged incessantly of his sexual exploits; and Tracy Barnes, a compulsive adventurer, combined extraordinary bravery with a complete absence of common sense. Dulles himself was an inveterate womanizer and indifferent father.
Whatever their personal flaws, Dulles’s men shared their chief’s profound sense of duty. Without hesitation or question, they would literally do anything the Agency asked of them. By their own lights they were honorable men, unswervingly committed to a righteous anticommunist crusade. William Colby, one of Dulles’s eventual successors, likened the ethos of the early CIA to “an order of Knights Templar,” out “to save Western freedom from Communist darkness.”25
Dulles’s CIA pursued vast ambitions informed by equally vast doses of self-confidence, unencumbered by the slightest inclination toward introspection. Dulles and his chief lieutenants were literally too busy to think. Although addictions to alcohol and tobacco were commonplace, adrenaline was their true drug of choice.
Dulles and other senior CIA officials existed in a state of permanent auto-intoxication. Theirs was a life of crowded hours: secret White House briefings, Georgetown parties with Washington’s smart set extending late into the night, whirlwind trips abroad to consult with allies or green-light some new scheme. They were in the thick of things. They knew the secrets. And anyone who was anyone knew that they knew, endowing them with a status that ranked several notches above mere celebrity.
When CIA officers spoke of waging the Cold War, it was the noun not the adjective that they emphasized. Of the Soviet bloc Dulles wrote, “[W]e are not really ‘at peace’ with them, and we have not been since Communism declared its own war on our system of government and life.”26 Americans may remember the 1950s as an interval of relative quiet before the storms of the following decade broke. For Dulles and the CIA, the Eisenhower era was the opposite of quiet. The Agency was actively engaged in all-out, no-holds-barred conflict.
The stakes in that conflict could not have been higher. To Dulles, persuaded that the Kremlin had launched “a master plan to shatter the societies of Asia and Europe and isolate the United States, and eventually take over the entire world,” thwarting that plan required intense