Who was Alex Gaunt and what was his affect on the Dulles' Gaunt was uh a British intelligence
officer who came to work in the United States and Allan Dulles as a young man got to meet
him Allan Dulles was fascinated by him he had this diffuse interest in the inner workings
of peoples minds but I don't think he really understood what intelligence was as a business
because the United States in those days didn't have a peace time intelligence service but
Gaunt to him was just the epitome of this fascinating swashbuckler who operated behind
the scenes and I think uh Allan Dulles wanted to be like him Allan Dulles also had a favorite
book he liked this book Kim by Rudyard Kipling which is sort of a book for young adults it's
uh essentially about a young kid who grows up to realize that being a secret agent to
the British is the real way to serve the cause of humanity Allan loved this book and it was
even on his bed table when he died it's one of these childish fantasies like the James
Bond books that he loved that allowed him to believe there's never going to be any bad
affect to covert action and in fact it's good for everybody I want to read you a paragraph
you wrote that uh one hardly knows what to think uh it says around the same time uh Allie
was informed by British officers that a young Czech woman he was dating who worked with
him at the American legation and had access to his code room was passing information to
Austrian agents they had decided British officers had decided she must be liquidated and he
understood it as a necessity of war time counter espionage one night he took her to dinner
and then instead of squiring her home delivered her to two British agents who were waiting
in front of the fourteenth century Nydegg Church she was never heard from again what
kind of a person does that quite a way to end a date yeah boy forever yeah uh Allan
was one tough guy I think I spin this forward to the period in the nineteen fifties when
he was running uh the CIA one of his major projects was sending exiled groups of fighters
into places like Soviet Georgia Soviet Latvia Albania try to stir up trouble uh every single
agent that he sent was immediately captured and killed uh this never bothered him and
when he was asked about it he would shrug and said well at least we're getting experience
for the next war so uh he sent people off to die without any real uh qualms and I think
without even insisting that there be some real benefit some real positive outcome to
it there was never any prospect that six kids landing on the beach in Albania were going
to overthrow the Albanian government but uh just the fact that they would be there even
if they only lasted a couple of hours he thought might send a message to the Communists so
that was worth sacrificing lives for and then multiply that times the lives that have been
lost in places like Guatemala over the last fifty years and you get into the tens even
hundreds of thousands of deaths for which he can be held indirectly responsible you
know one one wishes to think and we've been acculturated I believe to think that before
people are sent on these kinds of missions there's a great deal of thinking soul searching
and so forth that goes on about the missions and the possibilities of success and uh how
to avoid uh the deaths of the people on the mission essentially you're saying that's a
lot of baloney he just sent 'em off that's it that's right that's really there was none
of that serious thinking now we now realize that one of the reasons that soldiers were
waiting to pick up every one of those insurgents or rebels or would be fomenters of dissent
was that the chief representative of British intelligence to the CIA Kim Philby was actually
working for the Russians and he knew all these plans and he would just send them a note telling
them what beach to be waiting on when these kids landed that happened over and over but
it never lead Allan Dulles to start to think uh maybe something was wrong
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