(See Cover)
What enables the wise sovereign and good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
—Sun Tzu, On the Art of War (500 B.C.)
A century hence, if the world has not reverted to savagery, students of history may learn that the year of Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration and Joseph Stalin's death was a significant milestone. In midsummer 1953, however, the shape of the new era was not yet apparent. In Washington and Moscow, men unaccustomed to the exercise of national power were still groping toward policies of their own. Each group felt strongly the force of the ancient maxim: "Know your enemy." Enemies of the U.S. have started and lost two great wars largely because they miscalculated American strength and direction. On its part, through failure to know its enemy, the U.S. had suffered at Pearl Harbor one of the most spectacular and costly surprises of history. Neither the U.S. nor its enemies was likely to forget the value of foreknowledge.
The basic nature and long-range goals of the enemy can usually be determined from public sources, e.g., Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, the writings of Stalin. This kind of information is easy to get, not always easy to understand. Along with it, a nation will seek to know the enemy's specific strength (capabilities) and his probable course of action in specific circumstances (intentions). These specifics hostile nations usually try to conceal from each other. They must be ferreted out by "intelligence." The best definition of intelligence in the military-political sense is: "information which is hard to get."
Top man of U.S. intelligence at this critical point in history is Allen Welsh Dulles, 60, whose older brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, must, along with the President and the defense chiefs, construct policy toward the enemy out of the information brought in by Allen's Central Intelligence Agency. Because the Communist tyranny is conducted behind the thickest cloak of secrecy and deceit the modern world has ever known, a high proportion of the information about this enemy is of the hard-to-get variety. Because modern weapons threaten whole nations, a U.S. chief of intelligence must bear the kind of responsibility that Winston Churchill in World War I ascribed to Admiral Jellicoe. commander of the British Grand Fleet: "The only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." In that sense, Allen Dulles has the most important mission in the long, sordid, heroic and colorful history of the intelligence services. This scholarly, hearty, pipe-smoking lawyer is in strange contrast to some of his famous predecessors in intelligence history.