On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before the nation, his voice steady, his expression grave,

and announced the creation of a special commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

America was desperate for reassurance.

The Cold War was burning hot.

Rumors of foreign plots were spreading.

The country needed certainty, clarity, and closure.

Johnson promised all three.

Then he read the names.

Chief Justice Earl Warren would chair the commission.

Senator Richard Russell.

Congressman Gerald Ford.

And then—almost casually—former CIA director Allen Dulles.

The name passed without pause.

But it should have stopped the room cold.

Allen Dulles was not just another elder statesman.

He was the man Kennedy had fired.

The man Kennedy had humiliated.

The man who had presided over the Bay of Pigs disaster and then quietly blamed the young president for its failure.

The man who had lost the most powerful intelligence position on Earth because Kennedy no longer trusted him.

And now, impossibly, that same man was being asked to investigate Kennedy’s violent death.

This was not rumor.

Not speculation.

Not conspiracy theory.

It was documented fact.

And it was the moment the Warren Commission’s credibility began to rot from the inside.

To understand why Dulles’s presence was so dangerous, you have to understand who Allen Welsh Dulles really was.

He was not merely a former CIA director.

He was the CIA’s living embodiment.

Born into American diplomatic royalty, Dulles grew up surrounded by power.

His grandfather was Secretary of State.

His uncle was Secretary of State.

His brother, John Foster Dulles, would dominate American foreign policy under Eisenhower.

For decades, the Dulles family didn’t advise U.S.

foreign policy—they were U.S. foreign policy.

During World War II, Allen Dulles ran intelligence operations in Switzerland, cultivating Nazi officials, building clandestine networks, and laying the groundwork for what would become America’s permanent intelligence state.

When the CIA was created in 1947, Dulles was there at its birth.

By 1953, he was its undisputed master.

Under Dulles, the CIA stopped being a passive intelligence-gathering agency and became an aggressive covert weapon.

Iran, 1953: a democratically elected prime minister overthrown.

Guatemala, 1954: a government toppled to protect corporate interests.

Regime change became routine.

Secrecy became doctrine.

Plausible deniability became religion.

Dulles believed presidents should not control intelligence agencies—they should be shielded from them, allowed to deny knowledge if operations went wrong.

In his world, democracy was an inconvenience.

Stability mattered more than consent.

By the time John F.

Kennedy took office in 1961, Allen Dulles was the most powerful unelected man in America.

The collision between them was inevitable.

Kennedy was young, skeptical, and deeply uneasy with Cold War absolutism.

Dulles was old, rigid, and utterly convinced that compromise with communism was weakness.

Their breaking point came in April 1961, on a beach in Cuba.

The Bay of Pigs invasion was Dulles’s project.

Planned under Eisenhower, inherited by Kennedy, and sold to him with confidence bordering on deception.

Dulles assured Kennedy the invasion would succeed, that the Cuban people would rise up, that U.S.

involvement could remain hidden.

Almost none of this was true.

The invasion collapsed in humiliation.

Cuban exiles were killed or captured.

Castro emerged stronger.

The United States was embarrassed before the world.

Kennedy realized something chilling: the CIA had manipulated him.

In September 1961, Kennedy forced Allen Dulles out.

Officially it was a retirement.

In Washington, everyone knew better.

Kennedy had fired the king of spies.

Privately, Kennedy told friends he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

For Dulles, this was not just professional defeat.

It was personal disgrace.

Yet Dulles never truly left power.

Though fired, he remained in Washington.

He kept his security clearance.

He continued receiving briefings.

He advised his former subordinates.

The CIA kept him close because he knew too much—about coups, assassinations, foreign alliances that could never be publicly acknowledged.

Cutting him loose entirely was too dangerous.

And Dulles was bitter.

He despised Kennedy’s restraint, his refusal to invade Cuba during the missile crisis, his pursuit of détente, his nuclear test ban treaty.

In private, Dulles mocked him as naïve, weak, unworthy of command.

Many within the CIA shared that contempt.

Then, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was killed.

The assassination detonated a crisis of legitimacy.

Was it the Soviets? Castro? Domestic extremists? Johnson feared panic, escalation, even nuclear war.

He needed a clean answer, fast.

So he formed the Warren Commission—and in doing so, committed an almost incomprehensible act of political recklessness.

Allen Dulles was appointed to investigate the murder of the man who had fired him.

The conflict of interest was staggering.

If the CIA had any connection—direct or indirect—to the conditions surrounding Kennedy’s death, Dulles had every incentive to bury it.

And from the moment the commission began its work, that is exactly what he did.

Dulles positioned himself as the commission’s intelligence authority.

Whenever questions arose about the CIA, covert operations, or foreign plots, Dulles spoke with absolute confidence.

He interpreted classified materials.

He decided what mattered and what didn’t.

Most of the other commissioners lacked intelligence backgrounds.

They deferred to him.

In effect, Dulles became the gatekeeper between the CIA and the investigation.

What he did not disclose was explosive.

During his tenure—and continuing afterward—the CIA had engaged in secret plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

These plots involved organized crime figures, poison pills, exotic weapons, and deniable cutouts.

If the commission had known this, it would have fundamentally altered the investigation.

Castro’s potential motive for retaliation would have demanded scrutiny.

Oswald’s pro-Castro activities would have taken on terrifying significance.

Dulles told them none of it.

He lied by omission, and the omission shaped history.

Instead, Dulles relentlessly pushed the lone gunman narrative.

He distributed books to fellow commissioners about disturbed assassins acting alone.

He framed Oswald as a psychologically typical loner seeking significance.

Every road leading toward conspiracy, institutional failure, or intelligence blowback was quietly redirected.

At the same time, Dulles maintained close contact with active CIA leadership.

He dined with CIA Director John McCone.

He met with Richard Helms, head of covert operations.

This was not disclosed as a conflict.

It was treated as normal.

A man supposedly investigating the CIA was coordinating with it behind closed doors.

By September 1964, the outcome was inevitable.

The Warren Report concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

No conspiracy.

No institutional failure.

No CIA involvement.

Case closed.

But the truth had not been found.

It had been managed.

In the 1970s, the dam finally cracked.

The Church Committee revealed the CIA’s assassination plots.

Investigators were stunned that the Warren Commission had never been informed.

Richard Helms admitted he assumed Dulles would handle it.

He hadn’t.

He buried it.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations later acknowledged that Dulles’s presence likely impeded the investigation.

That was bureaucratic language for something much harsher: the investigation had been compromised from the start.

There is no evidence Allen Dulles ordered Kennedy’s assassination.

But the evidence that he protected the CIA, concealed critical facts, and shaped the official narrative is overwhelming.

He did not solve Kennedy’s murder.

He controlled its aftermath.

The man JFK fired did not pull the trigger.

But he helped decide what America would be allowed to believe about it.

That is the true scandal.

Not a single gunman on a Dallas street—but a system powerful enough to investigate itself and declare itself innocent.

History calls it the Warren Commission.

But power remembers it as something else entirely: a cover story written by the man who had the most to lose if the truth came out.