Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles.

The Central Intelligence Agency has fallen into such a grim mid-life crisis that we forget how alive it was in its youth under Allen Dulles' command. "God, we had fun," Alfred C. Ulmer, Jr., Princeton '39 and for four years the C.I.A.'s grand vizier of the Far East, reminisced recently. "We went all over the world and we did what we wanted." Dulles sent him into the great world to hobnob with kings, to sail the Mediterranean on the yachts of Greek magnates, to make and break prime ministers, to dispatch young men on great adventures, and if they disappeared, ah well, c'est la vie. That was Allen Dulles' C.I.A. O Great White Case Officer, what has become of your creation?

Allen Welsh Dulles' career began, astonishingly, before America's entry into World War I. As the third secretary of the United States Embassy in Vienna, he attended the funeral of the Emperor Franz Josef I, who ruled most of Central Europe from 1848 to 1916. Stationed in Europe for most of the war, Dulles was present at the destruction of 19th-century Europe and at the creation of its 20th-century incarnation.

When the United States entered the Great War, the embassy staff decamped for Switzerland. In Bern on Easter Sunday 1917, the 24-year-old Dulles committed one of history's more embarrassing intelligence blunders. Passing through his office en route to a tennis match, he was asked to take a telephone call from a disreputable-sounding Russian emigre. The czar had abdicated and Russia was going revolutionary with possibly interesting consequences for the future, but Dulles at that moment was less interested in the game of nations than in his game of tennis. No, Dulles said, the United States has no time to meet with you and your gang of rabble today. Tomorrow, perhaps. Pity, said the voice, tomorrow will be too late.

Dulles told the story 40 years later to classes of newly minted C.I.A. officers: the tale of how, Grose writes, "the future director of the Central Intelligence Agency, strategist of the Cold War, muffed the chance to meet Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That Monday, Lenin and his motley band left Switzerland on a sealed train for Russia, for the Finland Station. Everyone loved the story, Allen above all." You can see the new recruits sitting in their charcoal-gray suits watching the tweedy professor, the smoke from his pipe curling to the ceiling, as he instructs them in his error, punctuating his remarks with his mirthless chuckle.

One of the major themes of Gentleman Spy, though to my mind an understated one, emerges from the extraordinarily complex rivalry between Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles. Their careers intertwined for more than 40 years, from World War I until Foster's death in 1959. The conventional wisdom seems to have been that when Allen ran the C.I.A. and Foster ran the State Department under President Eisenhower, American foreign policy was a smoothly tuned dynamo, a far more seamless web than today's knotty tangle, and that when it came to using the C.I.A. as a covert means to State's overt ends, foreign policy under the Dulles brothers doubled its power. But there is ample evidence here that the brotherhood of Allen and Foster was closer to that of Cain and Abel.

Could the origins of the deep and sometimes destructive rivalry between State and the C.I.A. lie in the often nasty relations between the Dulleses? Almost all retired American ambassadors of a certain age can tell entertaining stories of how the Agency's station chief in their embassy lied through his teeth, ran operations behind their backs, or screwed them on some previously established understanding. One octogenarian diplomat who served in the Far East tells how he flew back to Washington to confront Allen Dulles about a botched double-agent operation in his country; a defector whom the C.I.A. station chief had sworn was in another hemisphere had redefected under the station chief's nose. And Allen Dulles, the diplomat's friend, looked him in the eye and swore it would never happen again. But it did.

Consider the ways in which Foster and Allen dealt with one another between 1920 and 1940. Foster, then an international banker, tried to strongarm Allen, the junior diplomat, into feeding him inside information on investment opportunities in postwar Europe. Allen declined with cold formality. Foster persisted; Allen recoiled. Allen eventually was persuaded to leave the foreign service for the opportunity to get rich with Foster at Sullivan and Cromwell, which in those days was less a New York law firm than a city-state of finance capital. Foster eagerly plunged into the business of loaning a billion dollars to German industry. Allen worried about his reputation, "given the taint of my environment." He kept his hand in the great game, attending disarmament conferences in Europe in 1933 and having politely diplomatic chats with Hitler and Goebbels. Though the two men did not alarm him at the time, Allen's experiences helped shape a book he published in 1936 warning against neutrality should war come. Foster replied with a contrary, isolationist book arguing that Hitler was a passing storm and only the hysterical feared war.

By early 1939, Allen was arguing that the United States had to gird up against the Nazis. In October 1939, after Hitler's invasion of Poland, Foster continued to contend that the Allies' position was in no way morally superior to Germany's. And after Pearl Harbor, he tried to stop his partners and associates at Sullivan and Cromwell from enlisting, warning that their jobs would not be waiting for them when and if they returned.

Allen thumbed his nose at his big brother and joined the Office of Strategic Services. So many legends, some of them true, have grown up around the O.S.S. that Peter Grose's thoroughly documented account of Allen's years in Bern is bracing. For nearly three years, he met strangers with Slavic accents in back streets and took tea with a parade of posers, professors, defectors, and cut-throats, organizing networks that ran from Bologna to Berlin.

Allen led a charmed and challenging life during World War II; thanks to the efficient Swiss railways, he could have "a clandestine meeting with a cut-out at the French, German, or Italian border, a civilized luncheon...or a less gentlemanly encounter with a guerrilla leader in sleepy Lugano, and still be home for dinner with Mary by nightfall, in time to draft a hurried dispatch for Washington." (Mary was Mary Bancroft, his extra-marital lover.) Once the Swiss frontiers opened in 1944, his effective one-man show succumbed to the onslaught of the ever-expanding O.S.S. bureaucracy, which by now numbered more than 10,000 officers. His final year of the war was a series of byzantine plans, carried off at great risk, usually amounting to very little at the end of the day. The war in Italy took its course without much help from him and his spies.

Back at Sullivan and Cromwell after the war, Dulles couldn't wait to get back in the game. By 1950, when he joined up as a consultant to the C.I.A., the brand-new agency was booming. From its birth in 1947, the agency had grown like a hormone-addled teenager, from 300 covert operators at seven overseas stations to nearly 6,000 working in 47 foreign cities in 1952. Grose has uncovered new material from the agency's first years, including a proposal to assassinate Stalin should he travel to Paris for a summit conference. But from the start, Grose underscores, the agency was all but incapable of carrying out its main mission, its real reason for being: to find out what was going on in Russia. It signed up dubious sources, bought drivel from human paper mills and sent a number of foreign agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. Nothing worked very well. The fury of a hundred covert operations made little lasting change for the better, save where anti-communist political parties in Europe used the C.I.A.'s money and psychological warfare to counter Soviet-supported political parties in the fifties.

Dulles took over the C.I.A. in January 1953 and ran it with single-minded devotion until November 1961. For better and for worse, he remains the dominant figure of American intelligence. On his watch came most of what the C.I.A. views as its successes in the fifties and sixties, including the development of the U-2 spy plane and the coups in Guatemala and Iran, and most of the failures as well. Most of the really dirty work for which the C.I.A. paid dearly during the Senate investigations of the seventies also took place under Dulles: the spying on Americans, the mind-control experiments, the botched assassination plots. He was devoted to covert action and loved the monkey business involved in the toppling of a nation or the suborning of a source. Dulles was something of a romantic about the uses of intelligence. He was furious, Grose recounts, when a German visitor remarked on the difficulty of hiring the best and brightest young men for espionage because "intelligence is so...schmutzig, a barely polite word for 'filthy.' For Allen, intelligence was anything but schmutzig."

A nasty business though it may have been, Dulles' C.I.A. was a refuge for Brahmins, intellectuals, and liberals under Eisenhower. While Foster's State Department continued the witch hunts begun in the late forties, Allen's Agency stood up to Senator McCarthy's rants and beat back his threats. A fellow bored with advertising or law or journalism could get his hands on the hidden machinery of American foreign policy and make a difference. Plenty of people who voted for Adlai Stevenson worked for the C.I.A.; it wasn't all about Reds under the bed. Sometimes, for lack of anything better to do, the C.I.A. supported the non-Communist left abroad or the occasional literary magazine. And the C.I.A. rarely lacked for money, attention, or influence at the highest levels of government.

Still, there were rumblings from without. The debate over the secrecy and power of the Agency started under Dulles and never stopped. "The argument that the C.I.A. is something apart, that it is so secret that it differs in kind from the State Department or, for that matter...the Department of Agriculture, is untenable." A recent editorial? Actually, Walter Lippmann wrote that in 1953. This year, in the miserable aftermath of the Aldrich Ames spy case, both Congress and the C.I.A. vowed to set up commissions to figure out where the Agency's operations directorate ran off the rails. Such commissions have come and gone before. Back in 1956, at Eisenhower's direction, two barons of the foreign policy establishment, David Bruce and Robert Lovett--one a prominent foreign service officer and the other a former secretary of Defense, both friends and colleagues of Dulles--were asked to report on the operations directorate. Though their report remains classified, Grose has ferreted out some passages.

Bruce and Lovett reported that the men who had launched the United States into the business of secret warfare "could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it." The C.I.A.'s operations officers were intelligent but "politically immature" men without sufficient adult supervision "who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being." These officers, "busy, monied, and privileged," had become a secret society separate from American government. But what were the costs, Bruce and Lovett asked, of the failures racked up by the covert operators? Weren't they "responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us in many other countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? What will happen tomorrow?" The questions were never answered.

Seven months after Dulles left the Agency in response to the inglorious Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a callow 21-year-old named Rick Ames walked into the marble lobby for his first day of work at the new headquarters out in Langley, Va. The headquarters was and is a monument to Dulles, far more personal than the airport named after his brother. But it now has an indelible graffito on its face: the vicious critique offered by Ames, a C.I.A. man all his life, at his sentencing last April.

The espionage business...was and is a self-

serving sham, carried out by careerist bureau-

crats who have managed to deceive several

generations of American policy makers about

both the necessity and the value of their work.

There is and has been no rational need for

thousands of case officers and tens of thou-

sands of agents working around the world,

primarily in and against friendly countries.

The information our vast espionage network

acquires at considerable human and ethical

costs is generally insignificant or irrelevant to

our policy makers' needs. Our espionage es-

tablishment differs hardly at all from many

other federal bureaucracies, having trans-

formed itself into a self-serving interest group,

immeasurably aided by secrecy.

Nothing in this thoughtful and meticulously researched biography contradicts that tirade. Gentleman Spy, at once a short history of the American Century, a fading photo album of the lost Anglo-Saxon kingdom of People Like Us, and a blueprint of the architecture of American foreign policy from World War II to the Bay of Pigs, stands as a testament to the limits of a secret agency in a democratic society.