The Burgeoning Fissures of Dissent: Allen Dulles and the Selling of the CIA in the Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs

Abstract

AbstractThis article documents the efforts of Allen Dulles, upon his forced retirement from the Central Intelligence Agency in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, to promote his former agency in the face of mounting public criticism of its activities. It argues that the first wave of critical press regarding the CIA in the early 1960s was an early indication of the breakdown of the Cold War consensus – a phenomenon usually identified as occurring later in the decade in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Dulles, who as head of the CIA for most of the 1950s relied upon a compliant media to maintain the CIA's anonymity in public life, was confronted by an increasingly recalcitrant American media in the following decade that were beginning to question the logics of government secrecy, CIA covert action and US foreign policy more generally. In this respect the Bay of Pigs and the media scrutiny of the CIA and US foreign policy that it inspired can be regarded as an early precursor to the later emergence of adversarial journalism and a post‐consensus American culture that contested the Vietnam War and America's conduct in the Cold War more generally.