Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was one of five children born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster). He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather was John W. Foster, who was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. His uncle (by marriage) Robert Lansing also was a U.S. Secretary of State. His nephew, Avery Dulles, was a Roman Catholic cardinal, Jesuit priest and noted theologian who taught at Fordham University.

Allen Dulles graduated from Princeton University, and in 1916 entered the diplomatic service. Dulles was serving in Switzerland and was responsible for reviewing and rejecting Vladimir Lenin's application for a visa to the United States. In 1920 he married Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor; their only son, Allen Macy Dulles Jr., was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War when a mortar fragment penetrated his brain.

In 1921, while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, Dulles exposed the infamous Protocols of Zion as a forgery, providing the story to The Times in London, whose article was reprinted by the New York Times. In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, becoming the first new director since the Council's foundation in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933.

After Allen Dulles graduated from college he became a diplomat and during his posts in different European countries he started to gather intelligence information. During the First World War, he was actually working as an intelligence officer. After the war, in the 1920s, he served five years as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department. In 1926 he joined the New York firm where his brother was a senior partner to start working as lawyer. From time to time, during the late twenties and early thirties, he served as legal adviser to the delegation at the League of Nations on arms limitation. There he had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov and the leaders of Britain and France.

Dulles was transferred from Britain to Bern, Switzerland, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war. He was assisted in intelligence gathering activities by a German emigrant Gero von Schulze - Gaevernitz. Dulles notably was heavily involved in the controversial and secret Operation Sunrise (secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy). He was featured in the classic Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring for his role in that operation. Dulles became the station chief in Bern, Switzerland, for the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). Dulles supplied the U.S. government with much sensitive information about Nazi Germany.

Many of his ideas were born during family retreats at the Henderson Harbour on the southeaster shore of Lake Ontario with his paternal grandfather, John W. Foster, who had been Secretary of State in 1892 under President Harrison; Robert Lansing a person related by marriage to his family, who was Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920 under President Woodrow Wilson; and his five year older brother, John Foster Dulles, who would be Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959 under President Eisenhower.

When First World War was over some military and intelligence services remained, as Allen said, in “skeleton form”, such as the G-2, CIC, and the Naval ONI. It is fair to remember here that the “marines” were always the force threatened to be sent out, or actually sent out, to intimidate Central and South America government if a USA corporation was to lose any business or land.

After Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 – 1945) decided to create an Intelligence group to combat the Japanese threat and set William J. Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, for the job. Donovan worked with Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer too. The office was initially called COI (Coordinator of Information) which was set up in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center, taking over offices staffed by Britain's MI6 and by June 1942 was renamed OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

In 1943 Frank Wisner was called in to join them. Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer who had been working at the Carter Ledyard and Milburn, a Franklin Roosevelt’s firm dedicated to corporate law, and would become the mad man of the Clandestine Service who would keep the CIA doing daring and dubious cover operations that demonstrated the agency were capable of changing governments in the Third World Countries almost at will. Wisner became the right hand of Dulles to overthrow Iranian’s President Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 because of Oil business, to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 for its intent to expropriate four hundred thousand acres from the United Fruit Company and later, in 1973, the Chilean’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende for nationalizing several USA companies.

Dulles worked on intelligence regarding German plans and activities. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti - Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missiles.

Dulles also received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and a foe of the Nazis. Kolbe supplied secret documents regarding active German spies and plans regarding the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. In 1945, he played a central role in negotiations leading to the unconditional capitulation of German troops in Italy. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief.

Dulles played an active role in connection with the formulation of the legislation setting up the CIA: The National Security Act of 1947. In 1948, he and two more people appointed by President Truman presented recommendations to the president to reform the CIA which eventually would make him director of it.

In the 1948 Presidential election, Allen Dulles was Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey's chief advisor. The Dulles brothers and James Forrestal helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. Under President Eisenhower, Dulles became CIA director.

Dulles is considered one of the essential creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was an indispensable guide to it in the critical period before the Cold War as well as the early part of the Cold War. He served to establish intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements.

Investigative authors, John Loftus and Mark Aarons, have described Allen Dulles "as one of the worst traitors in American history, an economic version of Benedict Arnold." They suggest Dulles was instrumental in financing Nazi Germany. Dulles, according to these authors, created a financial network among Nazi corporations, American oil, and Saudi Arabia. Together with his brother, John Foster, and Jack Philby, Allen Dulles established an international financial network for the benefit of the Third Reich. Near the end of World War II, Dulles successfully directed the smuggling of Nazi money back to his Western clients, carefully evading Allied surveillance. Like Jack Philby, Allen Dulles is also believed to be an "archetypical upper - crust" anti - Semite.

Other scholars have a completely different take on Allen Dulles than Loftus and Aarons. They point out that in 1935 Allen Dulles returned from a business trip to Germany appalled by the Nazi treatment of German Jews, and despite his brother, Senior Partner John Foster Dulles' objections, led a movement within Sullivan and Cromwell to close the Berlin Office. As a result of Allen Dulles' efforts, the Berlin Office of Sullivan and Cromwell was closed and the firm ceased to conduct business within Nazi Germany.

In the years preceding World War II, Allen Dulles became increasingly concerned with the threat that Nazi Germany posed to Western democracies and world peace. As the Republican Party began to divide into Isolationist and Interventionist factions, Allen Dulles became an outspoken Interventionist, running unsucessfully in 1938 for the Republican nomination in the Sixteenth Congressional District of New York, on a platform calling for a strengthening of U.S. defenses. Allen Dulles collaborated with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the Editor of Foreign Affairs, on two books, Can We Be Neutral? (1936), and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939) where they concluded that diplomatic, military and economic isolation, in a traditional sense, were no longer possible in an increasingly interdependent international system. Allen Dulles also helped a number of German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.

In 1953, Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence, which had been formed as part of the National Security Act of 1947; earlier directors had been military officers. The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the Eisenhower administration's new Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created MK - Ultra, a top secret mind control research project which was managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies.

At Dulles's request, President Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. In March, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential communist subversion of the Agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were still potentially damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and intentionally fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him. In fact, the CIA had been seriously compromised and "duped by Soviet and Chinese intelligent services" from its inception. Dulles discredited McCarthy, knowing that revelations of these facts would lead to the agency's destruction as well, presumably, as that of his own career and reputation.

In the early 1950s the U.S. Air Force conducted a competition for a new photo reconnaissance aircraft. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's Skunk Works submitted a design number called the CL-282, which married sailplane like wings to the body of a supersonic interceptor. This aircraft was rejected by the Air Force, but several of the civilians on the review board took notice, and Edwin Land presented a proposal for the aircraft to Dulles.

The aircraft became what is known as the U-2 'spy plane', and it was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in 1957 greatly enhanced the CIA's ability to monitor Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance. Ironically, the aircraft eventually entered service with the Air Force.

In 1953, Dulles was also involved in the covert operations that led to the removal of Mohammad Mossadeq, prime minister of Iran, by the Shah. Rumors of a Soviet takeover had surfaced due to the recent nationalization of the Anglo - Iranian Oil Company. In actuality, British diplomat Christopher Woodhouse had pitched the idea of a coup d'état to President Eisenhower to try to regain British control of the oil company. Woodhouse would later say, "Not wishing to be accused of using Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasize the communist threat [to Iran].

Dulles found success in his participation with the CIA's first attempts at removing foreign leaders by covert means. Notably, the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran was deposed in 1953 (via Operation Ajax), and President Arbenz of Guatemala was removed in 1954. The Guatemalan coup was carried out under the CIA code name Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company. Dulles saw this kind of clandestine activities as an essential part of the struggle against communism.

At the direction of President Eisenhower, Dulles established Operation 40, comprising 40 officials and agents whose primary area of operations was the Caribbean region, including Cuba. On March 4, 1960, La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition destined for the armed forces of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, an officer of the Department of State Security (G-2), later claimed that this was the first successful act carried out by Operation 40.

Operation 40 not only was involved in sabotage operations but also, in fact, evolved into a team of assassins. One member, Frank Sturgis, claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time."

Over the next few years Operation 40 worked closely with several anti - Castro Cuban organizations including Alpha 66. CIA officials and freelance agents such as William Harvey, Thomas G. Clines, Porter Goss, Gerry Patrick Hemming, E. Howard Hunt, David Sánchez Morales, Carl Elmer Jenkins, Bernard Barker, Barry Seal, Frank Sturgis, William Robert Plumlee ("Tosh" Plumlee), and William C. Bishop also joined the project.

Several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti - Castro Cubans directly against Fidel Castro undermined the CIA's credibility. However, the reputation of the agency and its director declined drastically after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco and Allen Dulles and his staff (including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and Deputy Director Charles Cabell) were forced to resign in September 1961. President Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

George H. W. Bush was a fund raiser and eventually a recruiter for Operation 40.

Dulles published the book The Craft of Intelligence in 1963.

On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy, though Kennedy had bitterly fired him. The appointment was later criticized by some historians, who have noted that Kennedy had fired him, and he was logically unlikely to be impartial in passing the important judgements charged to the Warren Commission. Despite his knowledge of the several assassination plots by the CIA against Castro, he is not documented to have mentioned these plots to any investigating authorities during the Warren Commission.

In 1969 Dulles died of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 75. He was buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Allen Dulles was portrayed by Vyacheslav Salevich in the Soviet TV miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). In the film The Good Shepherd, William Hurt portrays the fictional head of the CIA, Phillip Allen, who appears to be based on Dulles. In the film JFK, Jim Garrison suspects Dulles of participating in the cover up surrounding John Kennedy's assassination and attempts to subpoena him.