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Less than two months after Pearl Harbor, Dulles was back in Government service, this time with what was to become the Office of Strategic Services. A few months later he headed off for Switzerland by way of Spain and unoccupied Southern France. He very nearly failed to make it. Alarmed by the North African invasion, the Germans had decided to take over Vichy France. At the Swiss border, Dulles was held up by a French official who seemed more impressed by the watchful eye of the local Gestapo man than by Dulles' impassioned references to Lafayette and Pershing. Finally, when the Nazi ambled off to a tavern for his regular noontime beer, the Frenchman gave Dulles the nod, and he crossed into Switzerland, the last American to arrive there legally for nearly two years.
The Conspirators. In Bern, which was teeming with spies, counterspies, exiles and dissidents from a dozen regimes, Dulles set up OSS headquarters for Europe. Often sick with the gout, Dulles worked late into the night, meeting agents under the cover of darkness. In time, his office became a center of the European Resistance, and one of the biggest and most effective intelligence-gathering units in the Allied world.
Through Hans Gisevius, an anti-Nazi German intelligence officer, Dulles learned the details of the German underground's plot to assassinate Hitler. Dulles was never able to persuade the Allied powers to support the conspirators, but when the plot failed, he did succeed in saving Gisevius, who fled Germany with forged Gestapo papers and a Gestapo identification ring—all supplied by OSS.
From another anti-Nazi German, known by the code name "Wood," Dulles got the text of 2,600 top-secret German Foreign Office documents. It was on information supplied by Wood that Dulles found the first evidence that someone in the British embassy in Turkey was selling vital Allied secrets to the Nazis. Following up Dulles' lead, the British eventually discovered that the culprit was Ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen's valet "Cicero," who, thanks to the movie Five Fingers, has become World War II's best-publicized spy.
The war over, Dulles went back to Manhattan and his law practice, but he was too deeply engrossed in intelligence work to stay on the sidelines long. In 1950, when General Walter Bedell Smith became director of Central Intelligence, Dulles agreed to serve as his chief of operations for six months, stayed on to become deputy director. Last January, when Smith was named Under Secretary of State. Dulles took command of CIA.