The Invisible Government

In 1951, Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — the predecessor of British Petroleum — which had been extracting Iranian oil under terms that gave Iran a small fraction of the profits. The British government, enraged, sought American help. The Truman administration declined to participate in a coup. The Eisenhower administration, with Allen Dulles as CIA Director and his brother John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, agreed. C1

Operation Ajax, conducted by CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), used bribery, propaganda, hired agitators, and street violence to destabilize Mosaddegh's government. Mosaddegh was arrested, tried for treason, convicted, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to absolute power. The Shah's subsequent brutal rule — enforced by the SAVAK secret police, whose interrogation techniques were taught by the CIA — lasted until the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. C1 C2 The CIA officially acknowledged its role in the 1953 coup in declassified documents released in 2013. C1

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz under Operation PBSUCCESS. Árbenz had expropriated unused land from the United Fruit Company — an American corporation with extraordinary political connections in Washington, including to the Dulles brothers — to redistribute to landless Guatemalan peasants as part of a land reform program. C1 The CIA organized, trained, and supplied a small Guatemalan exile army and used psychological warfare and a military threat to force Árbenz's resignation. The military dictatorship that followed launched a civil war that lasted 36 years and killed an estimated 200,000 people. C2

MKUltra was authorized by Dulles in 1953 under the premise that the Soviet Union and China had developed mind control techniques and the CIA needed to match or counter them. Over the following two decades, the program conducted experiments at more than 80 institutions — universities, hospitals, prisons, and CIA safe houses — on subjects including prisoners, psychiatric patients, and members of the public recruited under false pretenses. C1

The experiments used LSD administered without subjects' knowledge or consent, hypnosis, electroconvulsive therapy at extreme intensities, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and the administration of other drugs. The goal was to find techniques to induce confessions, break down resistance, implant false memories, or create amnesia. C1 Several subjects suffered lasting psychological damage. At least one person — Frank Olson, a U.S. Army biochemist — died after being secretly dosed with LSD; his death was initially ruled a suicide, and subsequent investigations have raised credible evidence of homicide. C2

Dulles ordered the destruction of MKUltra records in 1973, when it became clear the Church Committee investigation was imminent. Approximately 20,000 documents survived because they had been misfiled in a financial records building and were discovered during a FOIA search in 1977. What was destroyed cannot be recovered. C1

President Kennedy fired Allen Dulles in November 1961, following the Bay of Pigs disaster. Kennedy reportedly told aides he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces." C3 — quote attribution disputed in exact wording The professional and personal animosity between Kennedy and Dulles was documented. C1

Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Eight days later, President Johnson appointed Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission, the body charged with investigating the assassination. Dulles — who had been fired by the man who was murdered, who had demonstrated institutional conflict with Kennedy's national security approach, and who had spent decades managing the CIA's most sensitive secrets — became, in practice, one of the Commission's most active members. He attended more sessions than any other member. C1

This profile does not assert that Dulles was involved in Kennedy's assassination. That claim is not supported by evidence graded C1 or C2 in this publication's system. C3 — conspiracy claims remain unverified What the profile asserts is the following documented fact: a man who had been fired by the president, who ran the agency that had been involved in multiple foreign assassinations, was placed on the commission investigating that president's death. This conflict of interest was never adequately addressed by any official body. LI