by Tim Weiner
Wisner was ready for a hot war. He argued that the United States should battle its way into Berlin with tanks and artillery. His ideas were rejected, but his fighting spirit was embraced.
Kennan had insisted that covert operations could not be run by committee. They needed a top commander with the full backing of the Pentagon and the State Department. “One man must be boss,” he wrote. Forrestal, Marshall, and Kennan all agreed that Wisner was the man.
He was just shy of forty, deceptively courtly in appearance. He had been a handsome man in his youth, but his hair was starting to thin and his face and torso were starting to swell from his thirst for alcohol. He had less than three years’ experience as a wartime spy and crypto-diplomat under his belt. Now he had to create a clandestine service from scratch.
Richard Helms observed that Wisner burned with “a zeal and intensity which imposed, unquestionably, an abnormal strain” on him. His passion for covert action would forever alter America’s place in the world.
4. “THE MOST SECRET
THING”
Frank Wisner took charge of American covert action on September 1, 1948. His mission: to roll the Soviets back to Russia’s old boundaries and free Europe from communist control. His command post was a crumbling tin-roofed shanty, one of a long row of temporary War Department buildings flanking the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Vermin scuttled down the corridors. His men called the place the Rat Palace.
He worked himself into a controlled frenzy, twelve hours or more a day, six days a week, and he demanded the same of his officers. He rarely told the director of central intelligence what he was doing. He alone would decide whether his secret missions conformed to American foreign policy.
His organization soon grew bigger than the rest of the agency combined. Covert operations became the agency’s dominant force, with the most people, the most money, the most power, and so they remained for more than twenty years. The CIA’s stated mission had been to provide the president with secret information essential to the national security of the United States. But Wisner had no patience for espionage, no time for sifting and weighing secrets. Far easier to plot a coup or pay off a politician than to penetrate the Politburo—and for Wisner, far more urgent.
Within a month, Wisner had drawn up battle plans for the next five years. He set out to create a multinational media conglomerate for propaganda. He sought to wage economic warfare against the Soviets by counterfeiting money and manipulating markets. He spent millions trying to tip the political scales in capitals across the world. He wanted to recruit legions of exiles—Russians, Albanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians—for armed resistance groups to penetrate the iron curtain. Wisner believed there were 700,000 Russians adrift in Germany who could join the cause. He wanted to transform one thousand of them into political shock troops. He found seventeen.
On Forrestal’s orders, Wisner created networks of stay-behind agents—foreigners who would fight the Soviets on the opening days of World War III. The goal was to slow the advance of hundreds of thousands of the Red Army’s troops in Western Europe. He wanted arms, ammunition, and explosives stockpiled in secret caches all over Europe and the Middle East, to blow up bridges, depots, and Arab oil fields in the face of a Soviet advance. General Curtis LeMay, the new chief of the Strategic Air Command and the controller of American nuclear weapons, knew that his bombers would run out of fuel after dropping their weapons on Moscow, and on their return flights his pilots and crews would have to bail out somewhere east of the iron curtain. LeMay told Wisner’s right-hand man Franklin Lindsay to build a ratline inside the Soviet Union—an evacuation route for his men to escape overland. Air force colonels barked commands at their CIA counterparts: steal a Soviet fighter-bomber, preferably with its pilot stuffed in a gunnysack; infiltrate agents with radios onto every airfield between Berlin and the Urals; sabotage every military runway in the Soviet Union at the first warning of war. These were not requests. They were orders.
Above all, Wisner needed thousands of American spies. The hunt for talent, then as now, was a constant crisis. He set out on a recruiting drive that ran from the Pentagon to Park Avenue to Yale and Harvard and Princeton, where professors and coaches were paid to spot talent. He hired lawyers, bankers, college kids, old school friends, veterans at loose ends. “They would pull people off the streets, anybody with warm blood who could say yes or no or move arms and legs,” said the CIA’s Sam Halpern. Wisner aimed to open at least thirty-six stations overseas within six months; he managed forty-seven in three years. Almost every city where he set up shop had two CIA station chiefs—one working on covert action for Wisner, the other working on espionage for CIA’s Office of Special Operations. Inevitably they double-crossed one another, stole each other’s agents, fought for the upper hand. Wisner poached hundreds of officers from the Office of Special Operations, offering higher salaries and the promise of greater glories.
He commandeered aircraft, arms, ammunition, parachutes, and surplus uniforms from the Pentagon and its bases in the occupied zones of Europe and Asia. He soon controlled a military stockpile worth a quarter of a billion dollars. “Wisner could call on any agency of the Government for personnel and such support as he may require,” said James McCargar, one of the first men Wisner hired at the Office of Policy Coordination. “The CIA was, of course, a publicly known agency whose operations were secret. OPC’s operations were not only secret, the existence of the organization itself was also secret. It was, in fact, for its first years, and this must be emphasized, since few people now seem aware of it, the most secret thing in the U.S. Government after nuclear weapons.” And like the first nuclear weapons, whose test blasts were more powerful than their designers anticipated, Wisner’s covert action shop grew faster and spread farther than anyone imagined.
McCargar had toiled for the State Department in the Soviet Union during World War II, where he learned quickly that “the only methods which would help you get your work done were clandestine.” He had single-handedly evacuated Hungarian political leaders from Budapest, delivering them to a safe house in Vienna set up by Al Ulmer, the first CIA station chief in that occupied capital. The two became friends, and when they found themselves in Washington in the summer of 1948, Ulmer invited McCargar to meet his new boss. Wisner took them both to breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, the fanciest in Washington, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. McCargar was hired on the spot as a headquarters man and placed in charge of seven nations—Greece, Turkey, Albania, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. When he reported for work in October 1948, “there were only ten of us, including Wisner, a couple of officers, the secretaries, and myself—ten people,” McCargar said. “Within a year, we were 450, and a few years after that there were so many thousands.”
“WE WERE SEEN AS KINGS”
Wisner sent Al Ulmer to Athens, where he set out to cover ten nations, across the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea. The new station chief bought a mansion on a hilltop overlooking the city, a walled compound with a sixty-foot-long dining room and top-drawer diplomats for neighbors. “We were in charge,” Ulmer said many years later. “We ran things. We were seen as kings.”
The CIA began channeling clandestine political and financial support to Greece’s most ambitious military and intelligence officers, recruiting promising young men who might someday lead the nation. The connections they cultivated could pay great dividends later on. First in Athens and Rome, then across Europe, politicians, generals, spy chiefs, newspaper publishers, union bosses, cultural organizations, and religious associations began looking to the agency for cash and for counsel. “Individuals, groups, and intelligence services quickly came to see that there was a force abroad in the world around which they could rally,” said a secret CIA chronicle of Wisner’s first years in power.
Wisner’s station chiefs needed cash. Wisner flew to Paris in mid-November 1948 to talk that problem over wit
h Averell Harriman, the Marshall Plan’s director. They met in a gilded suite at the Hotel Talleyrand, once the home of Napoleon’s foreign minister. Under the gaze of a marble bust of Benjamin Franklin, Harriman told Wisner to dip as deeply as he needed into the plan’s grab bag of dollars. Armed with that authority, Wisner returned to Washington to meet Richard Bissell, the Marshall Plan’s chief administrator. “I had met him socially and knew and trusted him,” Bissell remembered. “He was very much part of our inner circle of people.” Wisner came right to the point. Bissell was baffled at first, but “Wisner took the time to assuage at least some of my concerns by assuring me that Harriman had approved the action. When I began to press him about how the money would be used, he explained that I could not be told.” Bissell would learn soon enough. A decade later he took Wisner’s job.
Wisner proposed to break communist influence over the largest trade federations in France and Italy with cash from the plan; Kennan personally authorized these operations. Wisner chose two talented labor leaders to run the first of those operations in late 1948: Jay Lovestone, a former chairman of the American Communist Party, and Irving Brown, his devoted follower; both men were dedicated anticommunists, transformed by the bitter ideological battles of the 1930s. Lovestone served as executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee, a spin-off of the American Federation of Labor; Brown was his chief representative in Europe. They delivered small fortunes from the CIA to labor groups backed by Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church. Payoffs in the gritty ports of Marseilles and Naples guaranteed that American arms and military materiel would be off-loaded by friendly longshoremen. The CIA’s money and power flowed into the well-greased palms of Corsican gangsters who knew how to break a strike with bare knuckles.
One of Wisner’s more genteel tasks was underwriting an arcane association that became an influential CIA front for twenty years: the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He envisioned “a vast project targeted on the intellectuals—‘the battle for Picasso’s mind,’ if you will,” in the elegant phrase of the CIA’s Tom Braden, an OSS veteran and Sunday-night-supper regular. This was a war of words, fought with little magazines, paperback books, and high-minded conferences. “I think the budget for the Congress for Cultural Freedom one year that I had charge of it was about $800,000, $900,000,” Braden said. That included the start-up funds for the high-minded monthly called Encounter, which created a swirl of influence in the 1950s without selling more than forty thousand copies an issue. That was a kind of missionary work that appealed to the liberal-arts majors newly arrived at the agency. It was a good life, running a little paper or a publishing house in Paris or Rome—the junior year abroad of American intelligence.
Wisner, Kennan, and Allen Dulles saw a far better way to harness the political fervor and intellectual energies of Eastern European exiles and channel them back behind the iron curtain—Radio Free Europe. The planning began in late 1948 and early 1949, but it took more than two years to get the radios on the air. Dulles became the founder of a National Committee for a Free Europe, one of many front organizations financed by the CIA in the United States. The Free Europe board included General Eisenhower; Henry Luce, the chairman of Time, Life, and Fortune; and Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood producer—all recruited by Dulles and Wisner as a cover for the true management. The radios would become a powerful weapon for political warfare.
“THE HEAT OF CONFUSION”
Wisner had high hopes that Allen Dulles would be the next director of central intelligence. So did Dulles.
In early 1948, Forrestal had asked Dulles to run a top secret investigation into the structural weaknesses of the CIA. As election day approached, Dulles was putting his final touches on the report that was to serve as his own inaugural address at the agency. He was confident that Truman would be defeated by the Republican Thomas Dewey, and that the new president would elevate him to his rightful place.
The report, which remained classified for fifty years, was a detailed and brutal indictment. Count One: the CIA was churning out reams of paper containing few if any facts on the communist threat. Count Two: the agency had no spies among the Soviets and their satellites. Count Three: Roscoe Hillenkoetter was a failure as director. The CIA was not yet “an adequate intelligence service,” the report said, and it would take “years of patient work to do the job” of transforming it. What was needed now was a bold new leader—and his identity was no secret. Hillenkoetter noted bitterly that Allen Dulles had all but engraved his name on the director’s door. But by the time the report landed in January 1949, Truman had been re-elected, and Dulles was so closely associated with the Republican Party that his appointment was politically inconceivable. Hillenkoetter stayed on, leaving the agency effectively leaderless. The National Security Council ordered Hillenkoetter to implement the report, but he never did.
Dulles began telling his friends in Washington that unless something drastic was done at the CIA, the president faced disaster abroad. A chorus of voices joined him. Dean Acheson, now secretary of state, heard that the CIA was “melting away in the heat of confusion and resentment.” His informant was Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, FDR’s cousin, and the future chief of the CIA’s Near East and South Asia division. Forrestal’s intelligence aide, John Ohly, warned his boss: “The greatest weakness of CIA stems from the type and quality of its personnel and the methods through which it is recruited.” He noted “a complete deterioration of morale among some of the better qualified civilians who would like to make CIA a career and the loss of many able individuals who simply could not stand the situation.” Worse yet, “most of the able people left in the Agency have decided that unless changes occur within the next several months, they will definitely leave. With this cadre of quality lost, the Agency will sink into a mire from which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to extract it.” The CIA would then become “a poor to mediocre intelligence operation virtually in perpetuity.” These messages could have been written half a century later. They would accurately describe the agency’s woes in the decade after the fall of Soviet communism. The ranks of skilled American spies were thin, the number of talented foreign agents next to none.
The capabilities of the CIA were not the only problem. The pressures of the cold war were fracturing the new leaders of the national-security establishment.
James Forrestal and George Kennan had been the creators and commanders of the CIA’s covert operations. But they proved unable to control the machine they had set in motion. Kennan was becoming a burnt-out case, seeking seclusion in his hideaway at the Library of Congress. Forrestal was beyond the edge. He resigned as secretary of defense on March 28, 1949. During his last day in office, he broke down, moaning that he had not slept in months. Dr. William C. Menninger, the most prominent psychiatrist in the United States, found Forrestal in the midst of a psychotic episode and committed him to a psychiatric ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
After fifty haunted nights, in the final hours of his life, Forrestal was copying out a Greek poem, “The Chorus from Ajax,” and he stopped in the middle of the word nightingale. He wrote “night,” and then he fell to his death from his sixteenth-floor window. Nightingale was the code name of a Ukrainian resistance force Forrestal had authorized to carry out a secret war against Stalin. Its leaders included Nazi collaborators who had murdered thousands of people behind the German lines during World War II. Its members were set to parachute behind the iron curtain for the CIA.
5. “A RAICH BAIND MAN”
In World War II, the United States made common cause with communists to fight fascists. In the cold war, the CIA used fascists to combat communists. Patriotic Americans undertook these missions in the name of the United States. “You can’t run the railroads,” Allen Dulles said, in an unfortunate turn of phrase, “without taking in some Nazi Party members.”
More than two million people were adrift in American-occupied Germany. Many among them were desperate refugees from
the spreading shadow of Soviet rule. Frank Wisner sent his officers directly into the displaced-persons camps to recruit them for a mission he defined as “encouraging resistance movements into the Soviet World and providing contacts with an underground.” He made the case that the CIA had to “utilize refugees from the Soviet World in the national interests of the U.S.”
Over the objections of the director of central intelligence, he wanted to send guns and money to these men. The Soviet exiles were very much in demand “as a reserve for a possible war emergency,” the agency recorded, though they were “hopelessly split between groups with opposing aims, philosophies and ethnic composition.”
Wisner’s orders gave rise to the first of the agency’s paramilitary missions—the first of many that sent thousands of foreign agents to their deaths. The full story began to reveal itself in a CIA history that first came to light in 2005.
“THE LESS WE SAY ABOUT THIS BILL, THE BETTER”
Wisner’s ambitions faced a huge hurdle at the start of 1949. The agency lacked the legal authority to carry out covert action against any nation. It had no constitutional charter from Congress and no legally authorized funds for those missions. It still operated outside the laws of the United States.
