ALLEN DULLES WAS LATE FOR A TENNIS GAME IN THE SWISS capital of Bern. The twenty-four-year-old who would one day become America's master spy, the patriarch of the Central Intelligence Agency, had just arrived by train from the U.S. mission in Vienna to take up his new post, and he'd run into an old friend from his school days--a buxom Swiss lass who played quite a passable game of tennis. Now he was at the U.S. legation in the Hirschengraben seeing to his luggage and was just closing up the office when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as a Russian revolutionary who needed to speak immediately with someone at the legation. Dulles insisted it was quite impossible and to ring back on Monday. The caller insisted, urgency in his voice. Dulles refused, hung up abruptly, and went off to his tennis match. The next night, the Russian was sealed into a Swiss train with his comrades for the trip across Germany to the Finland Station in the Russian capital of Petrograd. The caller was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. How different might the world have been had he answered the call of the revolutionary rather than the call of the blonde, Dulles wondered barely two years later as he began packing his bags again, this time for Paris and the peace talks that were to mark his true debut on the world stage. Though Dulles never learned what was on Lenin's mind--he may simply have hoped to open a dialogue with the West--it's entirely possible such an overture might have led to the young American staying in Switzerland. Excerpted from A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today by David A. Andelman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
