Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles.

• Author: Weiner, Tim

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...