himself. On his return, he wrote a short book about his impressions, which were dire. Summing these up in his memoir, he wrote:

I questioned most pessimistically both the hope that Hitler, armed, would draw back from the ultimate test of wills and the thesis of many that his reign would prove to be only a flash in the pan. A people had in sober and awful truth disappeared.

These impressions grew rapidly to the conviction that Germany, once rearmed, would be a tremendous threat to the peace of Europe and to the US itself.

By this time, Armstrong had renewed a friendship from Princeton days with Leading Character No. 4, Allen W. Dulles, who had tried the Foreign Service and wound up a lawyer in New York. Later much criticizedfor decisions in his last years as head of the CIA and as a member of the Warren Commission, the Allen Dulles of the 1930s and 1940s, and also of the 1950s when I had the honor to work under him on the national estimates side of the Agency, was in key respects like Armstrong, gregarious, wide-ranging, open to new ideas and people, and nonpartisan. That he was of his time in believing that in the face of a Stalinist Soviet Union (and before that Hitler's Germany), it was moral and necessary to use clandestine methods will not, I hope, preclude a fair judgment of his life and service.

At any rate, Allen Dulles was an extremely active leader in the affairs of the Council from the late 1920s