Frank Wisner - CIA

CIA

Wisner was recruited in 1947 by Dean Acheson to join the State Department's Office of Occupied Territories. In 1948, the CIA created a covert action division, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Frank Wisner was put in charge of the operation and recruited many of his old friends from Carter Ledyard. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

In 1947 Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media. In 1952, he became head of the Directorate of Plans, with Richard Helms as his chief of operations. This office had control of 75% of the CIA budget. In this position, he was instrumental in supporting pro-American forces that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala following the Alfhem affair.

The FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Senator Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.

Hoover and Senator McCarthy succeeded in forcing CIA director Allen W. Dulles to dismiss one of his key staff members, Carmel Offie in 1953 over Wisner's objections.

Wisner worked closely with Kim Philby, the British agent who was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy.

He was also deeply involved in establishing the Lockheed U-2 spy plane program run by Richard M. Bissell, Jr.

Wisner was devastated when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As OPC director, he believed that an important opportunity for "rollback" was forfeited in October–November 1956, when Hungarian reformist leader Imre Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and when he and Hungarian insurgents called on the West for help against invading Soviet troops. President Eisenhower, however, deemed it too risky to intervene militarily in a landlocked country such as Hungary, and he feared it might trigger a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Moreover, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mistakenly believed that Nagy sided with the Soviet Union. On October 25, 1956, Dulles sent a telegram to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade expressing his fears that the Imre Nagy–János Kádár government might take "reprisals" against the Hungarian "freedom fighters". By the next day, October 26, State Department officials in Washington assumed the worse about Nagy, asserting in a top secret memorandum: "Nagy's appeal for Soviet troops indicates, at least superficially, that there are not any open differences between the Soviet and Hungarian governments." While some inflammatory broadcasts by the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe by themselves certainly neither caused the Hungarian Revolution nor the subsequent Soviet crackdown, the Kremlin leaders exploited the foreign radio broadcasts as an ex post facto excuse. But Wisner took this in stride. "hey do this because... they can’t stand the truth; they can’t stand the thing being understood throughout the world or within the Soviet Union as a genuine revolt."

Soon after the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian revolution, Wisner suffered a breakdown, and was diagnosed as a manic depressive. He underwent psychoanalysis and was subjected to electroshock therapy. After spending 6 months at The Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, he was released in 1958. CIA Director Allen Dulles named Wisner Chief of the CIA's London Station, but he was still suffering from mental illness. In 1962, he was recalled to Washington, D.C., and agreed to retire from the CIA.