The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Mary was disappointed in marriage. Her first husband—the father of her two children—turned out to be a dull company man. Her second—a French-Swiss banker who traveled frequently on business to the Balkans and the Far East—promised to be more exotic. But once she was installed in his Zurich home, they settled into a marriage of convenience that left Mary ready for more adventure.

When Mary was introduced to Dulles in December 1942, shortly after he arrived in Switzerland, they instantly took to each other. At thirty-nine, she was a decade younger than the OSS man, and by her own account she was “at the height of my sexual prowess and usually always on the prowl.”

Mary was a big-boned woman with round cheeks and a ready smile that was all teeth. Nor was Allen the stuff of romantic dreams. Her first impression of him was of an aging man with “iron-gray hair” and the rumpled clothes of a distracted professor. But Mary not only possessed the right pedigree, she had a sharp intelligence and an accommodating warmth, and Dulles instantly knew he could put her to use. Mary, in turn, found herself immediately excited by the aura of power that seemed to surround Dulles. “He actually shimmered with it,” she later wrote in a journal. “It seemed to cling to him as phosphorescence does to the oars when one is rowing a boat at night.”

Here was the man who would finally take her into the world of action about which she had fantasized ever since she was a girl, when she watched Wild Bill Donovan parade down Fifth Avenue with his troops on Armistice Day. Ever since then, she wrote, “I longed for a life of adventure. I wanted to go everywhere, see everything.” She even daydreamed about being a “glamorous spy” like Mata Hari. Now she had found the man to make her dreams come true.

Dulles never made Bancroft an official OSS agent, but he quickly found a role for her, phoning her at her Zurich apartment every morning at nine thirty and giving her the day’s marching orders. She pumped information out of a variety of sources for him—from cleaning maids with German relatives to members of the intellectual and artistic elite in the German-Austrian exile community, a crowd with whom the well-read and over-analyzed Bancroft was more comfortable than Dulles.

Mary also proved that she was more tuned in to certain nuances of the spy craft than Dulles. She realized, for instance, that intelligence could be gathered from the enemy as well as Allied camps by tapping into the underground homosexual network that ran through Europe’s diplomatic and espionage circles. “One of my [OSS] colleagues was frantic,” Bancroft later recalled, “because he wanted to get a—how do the French say it, a tuyaux—you know, a line into this homosexual network. And he used to bang on the desk and say, ‘I wish Washington would send me a reliable fairy! I want somebody with a pretty behind so I can get into that fairy network and find out what the British are doing in North Africa!’” Her colleague couldn’t bring himself to discuss his delicate recruitment needs with the old-fashioned Dulles, who—as Mary repeatedly observed in her journals—had been born in the nineteenth century. So Mary broached the subject with Dulles, who did indeed prove clueless about the homosexual beau monde, including its sexual mechanics. “What do those people actually do?” he asked Mary.

Although Dulles and Jung met face-to-face in early 1943, Mary also continued to serve as the main link between the two commanding men in her life. Both men were excited by the idea of forging a pioneering marriage between espionage and psychology. Dulles’s reports back to Washington were filled with Jung’s insights into the Nazi leadership and the German people. Jung even correctly predicted that an increasingly desperate Hitler would likely commit suicide. Mary’s appointments with Jung became dominated by Dulles’s “ask Jung” questions, to the point that they more closely resembled espionage briefings than therapy sessions.

Dulles was so enamored with the flow of provocative psycho-political perceptions from Jung that he gave the psychologist an OSS number—Agent 488. After the war, the spymaster hinted broadly to a Jung family friend that the sage of Zurich had even contributed to the Allied cause by leaking information he had gleaned from sessions with patients who were connected to the enemy side. But this might have been an exaggeration from a spy chief who liked to pride himself on all the influential personalities he had in his pocket.

While Dulles valued Mary as a go-between with men like Jung, he also found more personal uses for her. One morning he came rushing into her apartment when he knew that her husband was away on business. “Quick!” he barked, dispensing with any foreplay. “I’ve got a very tricky meeting coming up. I want to clear my head.” When he had finished with her, Dulles quickly headed for the door. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s just what I needed!”

Afterward, Mary resolved to tell Dulles that she would no longer cooperate in “clearing his head,” no matter how stressful his upcoming meetings were. But she continued to make herself available to him.

The spy chief was confident enough in his control over Mary that he felt he could loan her out to a German Abwehr agent with whom Dulles had established a relationship. Dulles arranged for Mary, who was fluent in German, to work with the tall, imperious Nazi double agent Hans Bernd Gisevius on his memoirs. Gisevius had secretly turned against Hitler after his once promising Gestapo career had stalled, and in frustration he began feeding Dulles important inside information on German military operations. One day, Gisevius, who had grown enamored of Mary as they toiled together over his manuscript, begged her to come with him to Lugano, where he would have use of a “beautiful apartment” and where he would be meeting with the first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. The invitation appealed to Mary’s appetite for danger, but she turned it down. When she told Dulles about it, he was upset, not because he had a rival for his mistress’s affections, but because she had missed an opportunity to squeeze more information out of the amorous German. “Why the hell didn’t you go?” he snapped at her. “It might have been very interesting.”

Mary did, in fact, later become Gisevius’s lover. But, as she confided to Jung, shuttling back and forth between the two men proved to be emotionally draining.

Gisevius became one of the principal conspirators in the July 20, 1944, bomb plot against Hitler, barely fleeing with his life to Switzerland after it failed. When she discussed her German lover’s exploits with Jung, he was unimpressed with Gisevius’s moral character. The Abwehr man was fighting for the same thing that Hitler possessed, Jung told Mary: “pure power.” He added that Gisevius and his rival in the conspiracy ring, General Claus von Stauffenberg, “were like a pair of lions fighting over a hunk of raw meat.” When she gave Jung some pages from Gisevius’s book for his reaction, he pronounced them “saturated with Nazi ideology.”

Jung told Mary that she would always attract “extremely ambitious men interested in gaining power for themselves.” She would never be the type of woman who judged men like this, whatever their moral flaws. “Power was my natural element,” she later reflected. “I felt as at home in situations of power as a fish did in water.”

Dulles would gain notoriety for his promiscuity—at least among his biographers, some of whom expressed greater disdain for his sexual indiscretions than for his more egregious moral failings. But by Mary’s standards, he was by no means sexually reckless. She took umbrage when British traitor Kim Philby described Dulles as a “womanizer” in his memoir. “Kim Philby of all people!” she harrumphed. “[Allen] was nothing of the kind.”

One evening, while warming themselves by the fireplace at Herrengasse, Mary fell into conversation with Dulles about Napoleon’s love life. She told him that she had read that the great conqueror had enjoyed nine women during his life. “Nine!” exclaimed Dulles. “I beat him by one!” Mary was amused by Allen’s boast. “To anyone born in the 20th century as I was,” she later noted in her journal, “that seemed a very modest score, particularly for a man who had traveled the world as Allen had. It certainly did not qualify him as a womanizer in my book.”

Dulles was fortunate to find someone like Mary, a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible—or, as she herself put it, a woman with a “sophisticated point of view.” She had a curious way of explaining her moral dexterity, but Dulles certainly would have endorsed her way of thinking. “In order to engage in intelligence work successfully,” Mary observed, “it was essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what you were doing and why.”

But even the sophisticated Mary found herself unnerved by one of her conversations with Dulles. She had observed that despite his cunning reputation, Allen always seemed so “open and trusting,” even with people about whom he clearly harbored suspicions or whom he “actually had the goods on.” As he listened to Mary, Dulles grinned. “I like to watch the little mice sniffing at the cheese just before they venture into the little trap,” he told her. “I like to see their expressions when it snaps shut, breaking their little necks.”

Mary was taken aback by this outburst. She told him she found it repellent, but Dulles would have none of her outrage. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Don’t you realize that if I had not caught them, they were about to catch me?” It did not occur to Mary to ask why “little mice” could be so threatening, or how he could take such pleasure from their suffering.

Clover Dulles had great hopes for her second daughter, Joan, after she graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, where many of her classes had been integrated with Harvard’s due to the wartime shortage of professors. Clover wanted her daughter to escape the confinements of domestic life by pursuing a life of adventure. After graduating, Joan joined the Frontier Nursing Service, an organization that imported British midwives—because midwifery was outlawed in America—to help deliver babies in the back hills of Kentucky. Joan escorted the midwives on horseback through the remote hills and hollows of the Bluegrass State, sometimes riding for as long as five hours to reach their destinations. The young woman was enchanted by the beauty of the Kentucky backcountry and was thrilled by the rugged work.

In April of the following year, as the war was coming to an end, Joan sailed for Europe with her aunt Eleanor, who was on a diplomatic assignment to Austria, a country that was rapidly turning into a front line in the Cold War. Vienna, which was divided into Allied occupational zones, was suffused with the danger and intrigue later displayed in the 1949 film The Third Man. Joan was once threatened with arrest by Russian soldiers as she traveled by train through the Soviet zone. Government officials in the Western zones often disappeared off the streets, snatched by Soviet agents.

Not much more than a year out of college, Joan seemed well on her way to fulfilling her mother’s hopes of creating a bold life for herself. She had studied international law and relations at Radcliffe, and she seemed well positioned to follow her aunt’s pioneering path as a female diplomat, or even her father’s as a legendary spy. She could speak French and German and was learning Russian, a language that she particularly loved, finding it “just like music.”

But Allen Dulles had other plans for his daughter.

While Joan was living in Vienna, her father introduced her to one of his young agents from the war, a well-born and well-connected Austrian named Fritz Molden. The son of a prominent newspaper editor and a widely respected author and poet, Molden and his family had suffered cruelly at the hands of the Gestapo during the war. After escaping from a Wehrmacht punishment battalion on the eastern front that he had been forced to join, Molden took up with the Austrian resistance, where he was put in touch with Dulles. Molden grew attached to Dulles, though the spymaster kept asking the young man to “prove himself” by risking his life for him. After the war, the Communists accused Molden of continuing to work as a paid agent for Dulles, but he denied it.

When Joan and Fritz married in spring 1948, it was clearly a marriage of convenience—for Joan’s father and her new husband. Molden, who became secretary to Austrian foreign minister Karl Gruber after the war and later an influential journalist and diplomat, was a vital intelligence connection for Dulles. The marriage was also a wise move for Molden. For the young, ambitious Austrian, having Allen Dulles as a father-in-law was obviously a big feather in his cap. But the match proved much less successful for Joan.

Just like her mother many years before, Joan had great difficulty explaining why she had married her husband. Joan suffered the same severe pre-wedding doubts that Clover had before marrying Allen. Joan found Fritz a “very erratic character, always given to creating dramatic situations,” as she later wrote her mother. She worried about marrying “someone who wasn’t ever satisfied with the simple everyday aspects of life.” But, in the end, Joan gave in to the implacable intensity of her suitor and went through with the marriage, resigning herself to the fact that she would never have children or enjoy a stable family life with such a man.

Her marriage to Molden, who openly reveled in the company of other women, soon developed a striking resemblance to that of her parents. He often disappeared on mysterious rendezvous, leaving her to wonder when she would see him again.

“Fritz was a ladies’ man, that’s for sure,” Joan recalled years later. “He was so extroverted that you just never knew where he was. He’d say, ‘Let’s rent a sailing ship in the Greek islands,’ and I didn’t know how many of his girlfriends would be on board or for how long we’d be at sea. Do I see similarities with my father? Probably, probably.”

Joan divorced Molden in 1954, but, as if to not disappoint her father, she quickly replaced him with another high-ranking Austrian diplomat named Eugen Buresch. The son of a former Austrian chancellor, Buresch had succeeded Molden as director of the Austrian Information Service in New York. The following year, after being named Austria’s ambassador to Iran, Buresch took Joan off to Tehran, another highly sensitive diplomatic posting. Joan suddenly found herself amid the imperial splendor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s court, the emperor reinstalled on the Peacock Throne by her father, after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Joan gave birth to two children with Buresch, a boy and girl. Like Fritz Molden, Joan’s second choice for a husband seemed crafted primarily for her father’s professional benefit. Iran was not only an oil-rich nation, it was a strategically located CIA surveillance platform bordering the Soviet Union. To have a son-in-law acting as his eyes and ears inside the shah’s court was an espionage boon for Dulles, who by then was running the CIA.

But, again, the marriage turned out to be much less beneficial for Joan. In July 1959, Joan wrote her father a painful letter, made all the more poignant by its resolutely upbeat tone, informing him that she and Buresch had separated. Joan, who was living with her young children in Switzerland at the time, had recently visited her parents in Washington but found it easier to tell her father about the failure of her second marriage through the post. The separation had not been her idea, she assured her father—she “would have gone on trying endlessly for the sake of the children,’’ she wrote. But, in any case, she was “very glad to be alone again.”

Joan had good reason to welcome the breakup. Buresch, it turned out, had a violent streak. “Every six months, or every time I do something he doesn’t approve of,” she wrote her father, “he gets terrible fits of rage and tries to beat me up, etc. etc. Last summer, because I tried to come to Europe to see mother, he nearly kicked me out.” When she said, “kicked me out,” Joan added, she meant it “literally.” Apparently Buresch vented his fury with his feet as well as his fists.

Joan did not dwell on the abuse that “Gino,” as she called her husband, meted out. She was much more concerned that her father not worry about her, or worse, write her off as a hopeless case after the collapse of her second marriage. “Pa, you will think indeed that you have a black sheep in me, but I am glad to be free, I shall live alone and bring up my children, mind my own business and I am sure I will be happy.”

Joan was clearly eager for her father’s reassurance, even his forgiveness. “Pa,” she continued, “I have never been scared of life and I am not now. I like being alive no matter what comes. I hope you know what I mean, and that you will not be either too angry or too upset.”

Joan finally found sanctuary, not only from her husband but from her father, by moving with her children to the remote New Mexico high desert. It was about as far as possible from her father’s world of power as she could venture. She made her home in Santa Fe, among artists and free spirits, returning to Zurich in the mid-1960s to study at the C. G. Jung Institute, where she became a certified psychoanalyst. After coming back home to Santa Fe, she married a prominent Jungian therapist named John Talley, with whom she lived and worked until his death in 2013.

Mary Bancroft believed that she had fallen in love with Allen Dulles. Among the many men in her life, she had only given her heart to two, and he was one. But Dulles himself was incapable of returning love. Jung told her this, in so many words. One day, while sitting in his study—a room stuffed with books, busts of Voltaire and Nietzsche, and primitive artifacts—Jung made an observation that stuck with Mary for many years. The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.

Mary remained enthralled by the Dulles mystique all her life. But through years of agonizing self-exploration, Clover and Joan finally arrived at something close to the truth. As Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

In the end, this is what Dulles’s wife and daughter came to understand about the man who dominated so much of their lives. The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.

7

Little Mice

On a sweltering morning in August 1950, a slim, blond, attractive twenty-eight-year-old woman named Erica Glaser Wallach woke from a restless sleep in her West Berlin hotel room, locked her papers and most of her money in the cupboard, and walked east through the Brandenburg Gate to her doom. The young German-born woman left behind her husband, a former U.S. Army captain named Robert Wallach who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, and their two infant children. She was weak with fear as she entered the headquarters of the SED, the East German Communist Party. But she was determined to go through with her mission.

A year before, Erica Wallach’s adoptive father, a hopelessly idealistic American Quaker relief worker named Noel Field, had disappeared after being lured to Prague with the promise of a university teaching position. When his equally wide-eyed wife, Herta, and younger brother, Hermann, went looking for Noel behind the Iron Curtain, they, too, vanished. Despite the obvious risk, Wallach was now determined to find out what had happened to the Fields, a family that had rescued her during the war when she was a seventeen-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain. Noel and Herta Field had whisked a sick and starving Erica and her ailing mother from a squalid French refugee camp, and later agreed to care for the teenage girl in Switzerland during the war when her parents fled to England. Wallach now felt honor-bound to track down the missing Fields, using her connections with German Communists whom she had met during the war.

When Wallach asked to see her old war comrades at the SED headquarters, she was told they were not available. She would later find out why: they were in prison, and Erica Wallach would soon join them. On her way out of the gloomy SED fortress, a hand suddenly gripped her shoulder. “Criminal police. Please come around the corner.” She didn’t even bother to turn around. “I knew that all was lost.”

For the next five years, Wallach would suffer harsh imprisonment, first in Berlin’s Schumannstrasse Prison, which she christened her “house of horrors,” and then, for the longest stretch, in Vorkuta, the dread prison labor complex in Russia’s Arctic wastelands a thousand miles northeast of Moscow. Wallach, the cultured daughter of a physician, learned to survive the gulag by giving up all hope that she would ever return to her family and the lost joys and comforts of her old life. She would rise early each morning in the dark with her labor gang and work as hard as she could to avoid freezing in the ferociously cold temperatures, shoveling gravel six days a week—and often seven—for new railroad embankments.

“This business of nothing to look at, the ugliness, the lack of color, the lack of good smell—that really is worse than the hunger,” Wallach later recalled. “But you get used to it. I finally after three years got used to the fact that I was totally alone in this world.”

Wallach learned to ingratiate herself with her fellow prisoners—Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish women, and even one American who had found small and less small ways of offending the Soviet state. She became a different person than the naïve woman who had walked through Brandenburg Gate that morning in August 1950. She even looked like someone else—muscled and thick and callused from her labors. The young woman made a grim new life for herself there “at the end of the earth” among the drunken, homesick Soviet guards and her fellow penal colony inmates. She found ways to break up the barren monotony of her days by listening to the Ukrainians’ melancholy folk songs and attending the Sunday “salons” hosted by the educated women whose latrine-cleaning duties were the foulest of all prison jobs, but gave them enough leisure to indulge their intellectual curiosity.

In the end, the hardened Wallach decided that surviving a frozen hell like Vorkuta was a matter of mental adjustment. “Horror, fear, mental torture,” she would later write, “are not physical facts but creations of one’s own spirit. They were not forced upon me by outside acts or conditions, but lived within me, born of the weakness of my own heart … I did not have to break if I did not want to.”

While Wallach was enduring Vorkuta, the Fields were suffering their own nightmares behind the Iron Curtain. After Noel Field was arrested by Czech authorities in May 1949, he was drugged and driven to a secret location in Hungary. There he was dropped down a coal chute and subjected to a variety of tortures, including beatings, sleep deprivation, and round-the-clock interrogations.

Noel’s brother Hermann Field, who was an architecture professor, suffered less vicious treatment after he was grabbed by Polish secret police three months later in Warsaw while searching for his brother. But he spent the first several months of his five-year incarceration in solitary confinement, which wore terribly on his spirit. When a field mouse suddenly appeared in his cell, Hermann was beside himself with joy. The mere brush of the mouse’s fur against Hermann’s leg was the source of enormous comfort. One night, while sleeping, he accidentally crushed the mouse, which had crawled under his mattress. Hermann was so grief-stricken that he feared he would lose his mind. “A person living a normal life simply cannot comprehend how sharply such apparently trivial happenings affect a human being deprived of all living contact and driven to the very edge of loneliness,” he later observed.