Everyone Has Their Breaking Point

The Undercover Managers of Empire

Something was terribly wrong with Frank Wisner. The titular head of the CIA’s clandestine services, he was known for his long-winded speeches, his attention to detail, as well as his desire to micro-manage and have complete control over his operations, but he now appeared to be experiencing mental collapse. Friends and colleagues had for years begun to notice the out-of-place intensity, how he could look right through them, eyes glazed, and it was becoming impossible to ignore his bizarre behavior at work. His secretary, Billie Marone, handed him a stack of paychecks he had never bothered to cash; a sign either of his instability or independent wealth. “Here. Go buy yourself an Oldsmobile,” she told him in a stony manner.

In July 1958, Samuel Halpern, executive assistant to Wisner’s colleague Desmond FitzGerald, approached Wisner’s office and found Marone outside, crying. Her boss had been verbally abusive to her, dismissing her in a vicious way that was altogether uncharacteristic of him. Entering his nearby office, Halpern found Wisner to be an incoherent mess. Nothing he was saying made any sense. “It was like he couldn’t stop,” Halpern recalled. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on.” Halpern approached FitzGerald, who was then head of the Psychological and Paramilitary Warfare Staff. “It’s getting towards the end,” FitzGerald acknowledged.

FitzGerald convinced Wisner to go home and after a few months assisted in checking him into a psychiatric hospital. There he began to be treated for manic depression, which at the time meant psychoanalysis and electroshock treatment. This turned him into a shell of his former self and did nothing to help his condition. Wisner refused to speak about his time spent at the hospital, only saying to his colleague with disdain: “Des, if you knew what you’d done to me, you could never live with yourself.”

Following some time off from his work, Wisner was demoted to London’s Chief of Station. He showed signs to observers of having recovered, but by 1962 he had once more spiraled out of control and became an embarrassment for U.S. foreign relations. The final straw occurred when Wisner called a British cabinet minister at 2 a.m. and proceeded to recite revisions to a press release Wisner believed the minister should have issued the day before. Wisner’s successor in London had a look through his files upon arrival and destroyed them all; he found them to be “the ramblings of a madman.”

Animal Farm

In 1942 as the United States was entering World War II, Wisner experienced his first glimpse of patriotic pride for his accomplishments, albeit not in the manner he had hoped. After entering a subway car on crutches in his naval uniform, the passengers immediately stood up and applauded his sacrifice. Wisner, however, was embarrassed at the display as his job in the U.S. Navy largely amounted to pushing paper. His injury, in reality, stemmed from a touch football game. His childhood had been similarly sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. He was a member of one the two wealthiest families in Laurel, Mississippi, inheriting the gains from a logging company. As if to exemplify the silver spoon placed in his mouth from an early age, rather than put on his clothes in the morning as a child, Wisner would lay on his bed, lifting his limbs, while the maid took care of the mundane task.

Wisner grew fatigued of his law work on Wall Street and while the adventure he sought eluded him in the Navy, he discovered more interesting wartime pursuits by securing a transfer through a professor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. Working overseas, he encountered the defining moral outrage of his life as the Soviet Union moved to take over Romania, which served as a turning point in his ideology. In January 1945, the Red Army began assembling working age people “of German ethnic origin” and deporting them for the purposes of forced labor. Wisner tried to save those he knew from the Soviet deportation effort. The wife of an architect phoned him in the dead of night, explaining that the Russians were taking her husband away; could he stop them? Wisner had some success securing freedom for others but was unable to prevent the architect’s deportation. He watched in agony as trains took away a procession of Romanians begging and crying out for assistance. After this profound experience, Wisner was ready for the Cold War before it had even really begun. Upon his return to Washington, DC, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., then an OSS officer, witnessed Wisner’s furor on the issue which policymakers were not prepared to hear: “I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectation of harmonious relations after the war, but Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”

Wisner was known for his love of parties and social gatherings. “Have you ever seen such a collection of beautiful women?” Wisner marveled one night at a soirée to fellow attendee Elizabeth Graham. This comment made her upset with his self-assured manner; she translated it as having meant: “We have the best: the best wives, the best everything.” Notwithstanding her view, Wisner used his social skills to develop high-level contacts and create the best possible job for himself: he became the head of clandestine services at the newly formed CIA, under the banner of the purposely banal-sounding Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The group was tasked under the National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations with using “propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” Since he had lobbied for its creation, Wisner was asked to run the new organization, precariously located within the CIA but also reporting to the State Department and Pentagon, bypassing the Agency’s chain of command.

Wisner was fascinated by the possibilities of psychological warfare and established his own group focused solely on this aspect of his mandate. A Virginian named Joe Bryan led the effort and staffed the team with members of a humor magazine from his time at Princeton. The results were as expected: “college boy stuff,” as one CIA officer described their work, which included the idea of dropping extra-large condoms in the Soviet Union and labelling them “medium” to give a misperception as to the size of American soldiers. A later surprise visit from upper management found members of the group using BB guns to fire at balloons in their office. The team also funded a Hollywood animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which took years to complete, with the CIA mandating changes to the script, including a happy ending. E. Howard Hunt, a Brown graduate and part-time spy novelist then working for the OPC, attributed the delays in the film’s production to “the leaden weight of a bureaucracy which began spreading within OPC,” which included “accountants, budgeteers and administrators.” The film’s eventual success, however, led the CIA to fund future film efforts such as, without a hint of irony, a live-action adaptation of Orwell’s novel 1984.

In three years, the OPC grew from overseeing 302 staff members to managing 2,812 operatives by 1952 in 47 stations across the world. It was becoming too much for Wisner to handle alone, as he continued to micro-manage memos that came his way, track operations across the globe, and control the public messaging at home. “You’d be sitting there, and he’d be on the phone to [New York Times Washington bureau chief] Scotty Reston explaining why some sentence in the paper was entirely wrong. ‘I want that to go to Sulzberger!’ he’d say. He’d pick up newspapers and edit them from the CIA point of view,” recalled an OPC staff member.

Wisner appeared to be losing his grip. “You began to wonder,” another colleague explained, who would receive phone calls from Wisner at all hours that involved pitching more elaborate propaganda campaigns. His personal involvement knew no bounds. Wisner approached Sam Halpern, then in the Far East Division, with an editorial he drafted himself that he wanted planted in the Asian press. The issue was, it was tone deaf to a population that was concerned with finding enough food to eat. “How is that going to look in Urdu?” Halpern asked him.

William Colby, then stationed in Rome and later to become the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), noticed Wisner’s tendency to want to address every story released to the public: “He was compulsive about answering everything. You could go crazy this way.” His ideas for covert action also knew no bounds. In 1952, he proposed a plan to assassinate Joseph Stalin using a car bomb, as the Soviet leader was expected to attend a summit in Paris. In the end, the summit never occurred and his proposal was rejected.

Wisner was pleased with the notion that the Americans were taking over the role of the British Empire, which was now without sufficient funds to put towards subversion. The CIA had plenty, siphoning off funds from the Marshall Plan to the tune of $200 million a year (an amount worth $2.3 billion today). Gilbert Greenway, an aide to Wisner, was amazed: “We couldn’t spent it all. I remember once meeting with Wisner and the comptroller. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘how can we spend that?’ There were no limits and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.” One of Wisner’s team members wore riding boots to his London office and wanted the Agency to pay for the stabling of his horses. “You want to go to jail?” responded the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston. Wisner avoided the typical channels of approval and often went to his administrative superiors at the State Department. “He didn’t want to clear anything with my office,” remembered Houston. “He tried to keep me out of it.” In another bout of wasteful spending through attempting to learn the mechanics of Soviet weaponry, Wisner funded a former Polish Air Force officer to the tune of $400,000 ($4.6 million) to assist in the purchase of a Russian MiG aircraft he claimed he could obtain on the black market. The agent instead traveled to a luxury hotel in Munich, spending lavishly on alcohol and women.

“Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British own an island nearby,” Wisner mused to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Washington liaison, Kim Philby. In their meetings, Wisner shared with Philby the Agency’s plots to subvert the Soviet Union in neighboring countries. Unbeknownst to Wisner, Philby was working for the Soviets and later became known as one of the most famous double agents in history. Following his defection to the Soviet Union, Philby described Wisner in his memoir as “a young man for so responsible a job, balding and running self-importantly to fat. He favored an orotund style of conversation which was disconcerting.” As a likely consequence of sensitive information being shared unwittingly with the Soviets, the CIA recorded a 98% capture rate for its agents sent into the Soviet Union.

Given the CIA’s intelligence failures of that era, including the Czech coup of 1948, riots in Bogota, and the Korean War, President Truman removed the first DCI in the Agency’s history, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and brought in the matter-of-fact General Walter Bedell Smith. Smith perused the CIA’s parking lot and was able to identify marked differences between the historical Office of Special Operations (OSO) staff, who drove modest cars and Wisner’s OPC staff, who could afford luxury cars. The days of Wisner’s independence from the CIA and technically reporting to the State Department were over. “Wisner, you work for me,” was Smith’s directive. Wisner, dismayed at the plans for the merger of the OSO and OPC groups, was pleased nonetheless to learn the identities of his new bosses: William Harding Jackson, Wisner’s former law partner in New York, and Allen Dulles, who Wisner also knew from their OSS days.

Smith was less than impressed with the hiring decisions made in the psychological warfare team of the OPC. When one officer was sent to a mental hospital after being discovered to have a proclivity for bestiality, Smith yelled, “Can’t I get people who don’t hire people who bugger cows?” The infantilism of the team’s ideas did nothing to improve his negative first impression. “If you send me one more project with goddamned balloons, I’ll throw you out of here,” he exclaimed.

Representing Reality

The CIA first tried to bribe Guatemala’s leader, Jacobo Arbenz, in the early 1950s with a Swiss bank account. After this failed, the Agency considered assassination, but did not want to make Arbenz a martyr. By 1953, Wisner and Allen Dulles, now DCI, decided that the next best method would be to scare him out of office with psychological warfare. When one of their new recruits asked “What right do we have to help someone to topple his government and throw him out of office?” the recruiter dodged the question, revealing only “a flicker of concern, a doubt” in his facial expression. Wisner and Dulles had no such doubts.

E. Howard Hunt was brought in to be head of propaganda for the operation. Before undertaking a new role in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, Hunt’s foray into propaganda and political action was first marked by disappearances of two assistants close to him in the CIA’s Southeast Europe Division. He discovered that the two men had been “allowed” to resign. One was a bachelor and the other had two children, but their routine CIA polygraphs had identified homosexuality, not permitted at the Agency, at least in men.

Hunt wondered why, since he had made a failed pitch for Arbenz’s ouster over a year before, the idea was now suddenly being put into motion. He was told that Arbenz’s land reform had been the final straw that decided his fate. The United Fruit Company (closely connected to Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State) and others had lobbied Washington, fearful of losing their foreign holdings and the National Security Council had given the CIA the green light. Hunt later discovered that this was not quite the case; the CIA had in 1952 attempted a coup in Guatemala that had involved preparing a list of assassination targets to help the covert action take place, but that their cover had been blown and the earlier coup d’état was canceled. Hunt did not relish the thought of becoming “United Fruit’s lapdog,” but proceeded to accept the assignment, agreeing with its broader aim. The CIA’s Iranian coup in 1953 against Mohammad Mosaddegh provided the blueprint for this covert action: it had been successful “after carefully preparing the minds of the target government and the population for such an event,” Hunt later wrote.

The headquarters for this new operation was located in a partially closed military air base in Opa-Locka, Florida. The presence of attractive female secretaries onsite, not to mention large communication equipment and cables, made the Agency’s work on the base less clandestine than they had hoped. The military personnel who regularly worked there became suspicious of the interlopers now sharing meals with them at the mess hall. Part of the propaganda efforts involved recording a series of terror radio broadcasts to be aired on invasion day over the Guatemalan airwaves. In addition, the CIA prepared pamphlets, leaflets, and articles destined for the press and hired Guatemalans to provide feedback on the suitability of the propaganda being proposed for their home country. The anti-government leaflets were dropped by the thousands in remote areas of Guatemala expected to be out of reach from the propaganda planted in the press. The goal was to prepare the country psychologically for the overthrow and then demonstrate a show of force, similar to the techniques employed in the Iranian coup. From Opa-Locka, the CIA airlifted approximately 140 soldiers to Honduras for them to be trained.

The CIA employed a group of newspapermen from Guatemala kept in a safehouse and tasked them with preparing the propaganda messages. The journalists’ patience grew thin, however, with their prolonged separation from any female companionship and they threatened to go on strike if the situation were to remain unchanged. Having the ability to secure flights without the need for immigration paperwork, the Agency flew the newsmen’s girlfriends to Opa-Locka to prevent any strike action. A sullen security officer had to endure his colleagues jokingly accusing him of being the operation’s pimp, to which he reacted in violent anger each time the suggestion was made. His day job in actuality involved making traffic tickets disappear for CIA personnel and Guatemalan agents, as well as resolving any immigration issues that arose if these agents happened to be arrested and threatened with deportation due to their lack of legal status.

During the course of the covert operation, the CIA’s initial preferred candidate to lead Guatemala developed throat cancer and sought treatment in New Orleans. The Agency was left with Colonel Castillo Armas as the only candidate they found to be suitable for the role. To secure intelligence from inside the Arbenz administration, a CIA officer disguised as a European businessman secured the defection of a senior member of Arbenz’s staff. Through this contact, the Agency was able to learn up-to-date information, including the placement and movement of Arbenz’s troops and the timing of Czech arms shipments, to allow the Agency to plan an attack in advance of a bolstered Guatemalan defense. The government of Guatemala was catching on to the CIA’s plot, however, writing in a white paper picked up by the press that the “Government of the North” had endorsed Arbenz’s ouster. Florida HQ cabled to the CIA Guatemala Station a series of ideas to discredit the paper. Under headings such as “Ridicule,” “De-emphasis,” “Diversionary,” and “Positive Stand,” Hunt’s team provided a series of potential responses, including a press tactic for distraction: “If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth [of] sextuplets in remote area to take play away.”

After an attempt at bombing and invasion that amounted to a “pathetic” effort in the words of the local CIA Chief of Station, Wisner pushed ahead for a greater invasion with more airpower. Dulles took this request to President Eisenhower, who listened as Assistant Secretary of State Henry Holland explained how they would be violating numerous laws and treaties by attacking a neutral country with U.S. pilots. Eisenhower asked Dulles what the chance of success was and Dulles replied, “about 20 percent” with the planes and without them, “zero.” The President granted the CIA’s request. “Allen,” Eisenhower admitted after the meeting, “the figure of 20 percent was persuasive. If you had told me the chances would be 90 percent, I would have had a much more difficult decision.”

Hunt had already moved on to his next assignment in Tokyo when the news of Arbenz’s overthrow in June 1954 was heard around the world. Hunt noted that Ernesto “Che” Guevara was in Guatemala at the time of the coup and that it spurred him to travel north to join the Cuban revolution. Guevara’s first wife recounted: “It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism.” Hunt later quipped, “Che Guevara and Fidel Castro learned more from the Guatemalan defeat than did the United States.”

The CIA paid a visit to the new military junta, who were meant to be only a caretaker government until Armas could take power. They had made the mistake of selecting a leader the CIA had not approved. “We’ve been double crossed. BOMB!” wrote Enno Hobbing, a CIA officer, in a cable to Washington. The Agency met with the unapproved leader, Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz. After extoling some of the virtues of Arbenz’s land reform initiatives, Hobbing had heard enough from Diaz. “Wait a minute, Colonel,” Hobbing interrupted. “Let me explain something to you. You made a big mistake when you took over the government. Colonel, you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.” Diaz was perplexed: “I talked to your ambassador. He gave me his approval.” Hobbing replied: “Well, Colonel, there is diplomacy and then there is reality. Our ambassador represents diplomacy. I represent reality. And the reality is that we don’t want you.”

When Armas eventually took power 11 days later, the CIA distributed firecrackers to the large crowd that greeted him in Guatemala City. Despite what the press knew, they obfuscated the U.S. role: “The United States, aside from whatever gumshoe work the Central Intelligence Agency may or may not have been busy with, had kept strictly hands off,” Newsweek reported. The New Republic was similarly cryptic: “It was just our luck that Castillo Armas did come by some second-hand lethal weapons from Heaven knows where.”

Nearly all of the CIA personnel involved received commendations for their role in the overthrow. “I felt a great sense of personal satisfaction over the outcome and the role I had played,” Hunt later wrote. Wisner cabled to his team that the coup “surpassed even our greatest expectations.” Then DCI Walter Bedell Smith later joined United Fruit Company’s board of directors, a biography unambiguously recounting it as “a reward for engineering the Arbenz overthrow.”

Guatemala later descended into chaos, with military and paramilitary groups causing 50,000 violent deaths from 1966 to 1976. “What we’d give to have an Arbenz now,” a U.S. State Department official lamented in 1981. “We are going to have to invent one, but all the candidates are dead.”

Following his retirement from the CIA, Wisner spoke with journalist David Wise at his law office and at a nearby fancy M Street restaurant for lunch. Wise described him as a “husky, bald, tough-looking man, well over six feet.” In their encounter, Wisner bragged about “how he had, almost single-handedly, overthrown the government of Guatemala.” He also described arranging for the appointment of the American ambassador for the country, so they would they would have the proper diplomat in place for the coup. Wise described the former CIA operative as “Not your average, everyday luncheon partner. Wisner, in fact, bore roughly the same paternal relationship to Cold War covert operations that Edward Teller does to the hydrogen bomb.”

Wise later co-authored a book entitled The Invisible Government, an exposé which marked the beginning of the end of the Agency’s ability to control its reputation. The CIA planned to buy up all copies of the book, which revealed its secret operations and failures, but the publisher told the Agency privately it would simply print more if that were to occur. Despite having learned much about the Agency’s operations from Wisner and others at the CIA, the journalist later found out, long after publication, there a terrible secret Wisner did not want anyone to discover.