Allen Dulles, a 1916 Princeton graduate, served as Director of Central Intelligence under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. His career as America’s master cold war spy began in the rubble of Berlin in World War II. It ended with the disastrous invasion of Cuba, a battle led by the CIA and known forever as the “Bay of Pigs” — a synonym for intelligence failure. How Dulles rose from Wall Street to Washington to the inner corridors of the White House is the story of how the CIA became a powerful global force in the first decades of the Cold War.

Commentary by Frederick P. Hitz ’61, currently senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law and former inspector general of the CIA.