Veteran journalist Douglas Waller has written the definitive biography of a man who is largely unknown in the United States but who nonetheless had a profound influence on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. In early September 1948, Waller's subject—Frank Gardiner Wisner—became head of the newly formed Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which, despite being a department of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was initially controlled by the State Department, where it was temporarily housed. Not until October 1950 did the CIA gain de facto jurisdiction over the OPC. Both before and after that time, Wisner's office was responsible for countering the new U.S. adversary, the Soviet Union, by any means necessary. In effect, the OPC was a “dirty tricks” directorate designed to “fight fire with fire” through propaganda, economic warfare, and something ominously but ambiguously titled “preventive direct action.”Wisner, it turns out, was the ideal man for the job. A Wall Street lawyer in peacetime and a senior operative in Romania for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war, he had no interest after the war in returning to the drudgery of contracts and debentures, preferring instead to continue with espionage and derring-do. A declassified CIA history later described him as “a man of intense application” and “a singular choice to create a covert organization”—an early indication that his unbridled enthusiasm and energy masked a manic-depressive personality.At war's end, Wisner had prophetically warned that Soviet forces were behaving badly in Romania and showing no sign of a willingness to leave. His assessment was not received well by his boss, OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who cautioned Wisner not to let his personal views color his reporting.Here Waller is too sympathetic to Donovan, whom he portrayed in a biography published in 2010. Donovan subscribed much too long to the romantic fantasy that Joseph Stalin would be a reliable U.S. ally in the postwar world. Documents that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union show that Donovan not only gave the Soviet foreign intelligence director, Pavel Fitin, the names of OSS clandestine operatives in Eastern Europe but even promised to help Fitin deploy Soviet agents in postwar France and Germany. Donovan's generosity and bonhomie were not reciprocated. Duncan Lee—a senior member of Donovan's staff—had already been secretly recruited as a Soviet agent. Lee reported to Fitin: “The Soviet gov't. made a tremendous impression on Donovan, and he is enthralled by it. He regards Stalin as the smartest person heading any govt. today. He said that Americans have no reason to be afraid of the line—communist domination of the world.” Another Soviet spy's assessment in 1944 of U.S. intelligence likewise seems applicable to the CIA during Wisner's tenure: “The main principle of the entire OSS is the principle of amateurishness.” (Quoted in Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, New York: Knopf, 2014, pp. 62–64.)Waller is also too kind to George Kennan, who, as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, wrote the top-secret memorandum that created the OPC and personally suggested Wisner to head the organization. Many years later—after the consequences of his actions had become manifest in Third World coups and assassinations—Kennan tried to distance himself from that role, claiming that the OPC was “the worst mistake I ever made” (p. 202). Waller rather limply describes Kennan's remorse as “somewhat hypocritical” (ibid.). More accurate, and honest, is another writer's description of Kennan as “a two-faced weasel”—for more on this, see Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts (New York: Doubleday, 2020), p. 155.But except for those rather minor shortcomings, the book is impressively researched, well-written, and persuasive in showing how, as the Cold War intensified—and North Korea's invasion of South Korea foreshadowed a coming global conflagration—the OPC, and Wisner, correspondingly flourished. Both were absorbed into the fledging CIA's Plans directorate, which Wisner headed. Waller aptly notes: “By 1952, one Central European nation had forty different CIA covert operations going on in it—it was impossible for any one person to keep track of them all” (p. 247).And therein lay the problem. Intoxicated by their ability to carry out foreign policy through plausible denial, the State Department, the Pentagon, and even the president assigned missions to the CIA's one-man spy shop. “They were ambitious plans—and totally unrealistic,” Waller concludes (p. 178).One harebrained scheme, however, was evidently Wisner's own invention. Operation “Fiend” parachuted Albanian exiles into their native country in a futile effort to foment a revolution. But “Fiend,” as Waller observes, was only the exemplar of “a number of half-baked initiatives that had not been carefully vetted.” A related operation, which dropped leaflets on the Albanian capital, Tirana, urging residents to overthrow their Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, ignored the fact that half the inhabitants were illiterate. Despite clear indications that “Fiend” had been compromised from the outset, Wisner and the CIA persevered, at the cost of many lives lost.Subsequent efforts by various CIA directors to exert control over Wisner and the Directorate of Plans failed or were thwarted, often by Wisner himself. One key reason was that “rolling back” the Soviet bloc was too alluring a prospect. As Waller observes, “Truman went along enthusiastically with an expanded agency knee-deep in covert warfare” (p. 250).The same was also true of Truman's successors. Dwight Eisenhower approved several CIA projects to overthrow sovereign governments, in which Wisner played a significant role. Waller does a thorough job of describing Wisner's active participation in CIA Operations “Ajax” and “PBSuccess”—supporting the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, respectively—citing numerous declassified agency documents. These operations, despite their seeming success, became the model for the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, which proved to be a fiasco.Wisner's refusal to delegate authority and his insistence on working six days a week—often well into the night—caused great mental strain. Moreover, the director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover—who saw the CIA and Wisner as his chief rivals in the Washington bureaucracy—sought to undercut Wisner at every turn. The Soviet Union's violent suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution finally pushed Wisner over the edge into clinical depression.After Wisner apparently recovered, the CIA sent him to the London embassy as station chief, believing that the position would be less stressful. But his psychological problems eventually returned, and he shot himself at his family farm on 29 October 1965. Wisner's service to the CIA and the United States is commemorated by a star on the Wall of Honor at CIA headquarters.In assessing Wisner's legacy, Waller quotes a newspaper obituary: “There has passed the greatest cold war soldier in American history” (p. 520). But Waller notes that this verdict is probably too generous: “Ultimately, none of Wisner's efforts had had an appreciable impact on the Cold War, at least in terms of defeating Soviet Communism” (pp. 524–525). Moreover, the CIA's early triumphs—including support for the coups in Iran and Guatemala—seem, at best, hollow victories in hindsight insofar as “the long-term unintended consequences of those operations proved disastrous for American interests and the cause of human rights” (p. 523).Waller writes early in the book that Wisner “was spying, he believed, for a greater good” (p. 174). “But to what end and at what cost?” Waller properly asks in the conclusion (p. 520).
Gregg Herken (Wed,) studied this question.