CIA releases classified files of former director

Nearly 8,000 pages of documents covering the tenure of Allen Dulles, Class of 1914, the CIA’s longest-serving director, are now available online through the University website.

Having access to online material will benefit faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students engaged in research projects, history professor Julian Zelizer, who specializes in American political history, said in an e-mail.

“It is a very valuable source of material,” Zelizer said. “Historians don’t have that many documents, of this quality, available online. Most of our time is spent traveling from archive to archive. So to be able to explore this material from an office or home is tremendous.”

The documents, declassified 11 months ago, will shed more light on Dulles’ long government career, and their digitization will also bring a part of the University’s vast research resources into the 21st century, Daniel Linke, curator of public policy papers at the Mudd Manuscript Library, said. “This is Mudd Library’s first truly digital collection.”

“We dipped our toes into the digital collection waters,” Linke said. “We could have had 7,800 paper documents, and you would have had to come in and flip through them. Now anyone in the world can look through these. I think we’re going to see more of this kind of thing where we find more ways to make one-of-a-kind documents widely available.”

After Dulles’ death in 1969, the CIA collected documents spanning Dulles’ entire career with the agency. The CIA did not release any of the documents to the University until 1974, when it transferred 150,000 pages. Additional letters, memoranda and reports totaling 7,800 pages were released in digital form last March. The CIA, however, continues to withhold the remaining documents as classified. After looking through the new collection, Linke said he could not figure out why the agency felt a need to keep th0se documents private.

“The whole episode raises questions about how the government classifies documents because I don’t think they can justify what happened,” he said, adding that items like newspaper clippings, magazine articles and programs from public events in Dulles’ personal files never should have been classified in the first place.

The files released to Prince-ton last spring highlight Dulles’ work as an intelligence officer during World War II and include more than 1,000 war telegrams from the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. Documents from later in his tenure focus largely on his leadership of the agency from 1953 to 1961, during which period Dulles played a large role in shaping U.S. intelligence operations. The Cold War documents are to this day redacted to block the names of specific correspondents and events.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

Under Dulles’ leadership the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 but was unsuccessful in its attempts to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Failed efforts to oust the communist dictator culminated with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and Dulles retired shortly thereafter. Two years later, Dulles sat on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.

Dulles earned a bachelor’s degree in 1914 and a master’s degree in 1916, both in politics. His brother John Foster Dulles, Class of 1908, served as former President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state from 1953 to 1961.