Allen Welsh Dulles learned to lie at Princeton. Not the small lies of undergraduates—exam answers, alibis for dormitory whiskey. The big lies. The lies that made history bend.

His brother Foster took to diplomacy. Allen took to shadow work. By 1953, they owned American foreign policy the way the Medicis owned Florence: through banks, through blood, through the strategic application of terminated assets in places the newspapers couldn't spell.

The Guatemala operation was a rehearsal. Iran was the proof of concept. But the real project—the one that kept Allen awake in his Georgetown townhouse, ice clinking in his third scotch—was domestic.

"Democracy," he told Cord Meyer that November, "is a managed outcome. The voters choose. We choose what they choose from."

The meeting was off-book. A hunting lodge in Virginia. Three men who'd known each other since prep school, plus one who'd earned his seat through darker credentials. They called it the Mockingbird Committee—an inside joke. The operation already had that name. This was something else.

This was the architecture.

"Eisenhower won't last," Foster said. He meant the heart. They all knew about the heart. "Nixon is manageable. But the Kennedy boy—"

"The Kennedy boy," Allen interrupted, "has a father who knows how money works. That makes him either controllable or dangerous." He paused. "We'll need to determine which."

The document that would later surface in James Angleton's safe—the one the Church Committee never found—outlined three scenarios. CONTINGENCY LOTUS. CONTINGENCY BRASS. CONTINGENCY LANCER.

Only one required what Allen called, in his patrician drawl, "kinetic resolution."

History would record that the Dulles brothers built the American Century. What history omitted: they believed they owned it. And ownership, as any banker's son knows, sometimes requires foreclosure.

[ hover over redactions ]