Where Was Allen?

As my book The Devil's Chessboard observed, former CIA director Allen Dulles spent the fateful weekend of November 22, 1963 -- when President Kennedy was assassinated and Lee Harvey Oswald was silenced two days later -- at Camp Peary, a top-secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as "The Farm." What the hell was Dulles -- the disgraced spymaster fired by JFK two years earlier, after the CIA's disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs -- doing at a clandestine CIA facility that weekend?

I raised that relevant question after seeing Dulles's own calendar, which showed that's where he was. (Thanks to JFK researcher Lisa Pease for alerting me to these pages.) But then, after my book was published, something strange happened. The Dulles calendar pages indicating his whereabouts that weekend, which are kept along with his other papers at the Princeton University Library, disappeared. Poof!

Now through the diligent research of a Princeton archivist and a Kennedy scholar, those daybook pages have been dug up. Whether they disappeared for nefarious reasons or there is a benign explanation, the question remains: what the hell was Allen Dulles doing at a secret CIA post that weekend?

The CIA refuses to comment. Just like the agency still illegally withholds almost 5,000 JFK documents. What are the spooks still hiding six decades after the assassination?

President-elect Kennedy with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Richard Bissell, the spymaster’s deputy—also fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs debacle—looms over them.