Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,991
By This is the grave of Frank Wisner.
Born in Laurel, Mississippi in 1909, Wisner grew up wealthy. His father was a timber company executive. He attended the University of Virginia for college, that school for the southern elite. He stayed on there for a law degree, which he received in 1934. He took a job on Wall Street as a corporate lawyer. But he wasn’t satisfied. In early 1941, he enlisted in the Navy. Sure, this was about preparedness, but it was long before anyone really needed to enlist. He was placed in intelligence. First, he worked in the censor’s office and then in 1943, was placed in the Office of Strategic Services.
Wisner rose fast. He was first stationed in Cairo and then Istanbul, but then he was the head of OSS in Romania by August 1944, running intelligence operations there working with anti-fascist groups that had just moved the nation to declare war on the Axis. He was in charge of getting back a whole bunch of imprisoned American airmen who were shot down while on their raids but had survived. He then worked to uncover German records and also managed to figure out a lot about a Soviet intelligence operation there. In short, he was a successful spy. He also very quickly realized that the Soviets were going to be the enemy after the war and did a lot of alerting of his friends in Washington about what was coming. In fact, Wisner urged the nation go to war with the Soviets in order to defend freedom in eastern Europe and was disgusted that Washington demurred from such a radical action. He believed eastern Europeans would never trust in Americans again. Interesting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later claimed that he returned to the OSS after briefly leaving in order to resist Wisner trying to start World War III by fighting the Soviets.
By this time, Wisner was not only a good lawyer and successful spy but a socialite. He and his wife were friends with the Grahams who ran the Washington Post, for example. He went back to the law firm after the war, but then Dean Acheson personally asked him to join the State Department in 1947 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas. The next year, the National Security Council created of the Office of Special Projects, which worked between State and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was placed in charge of it. This was gross stuff. It was full on sabotage of leftist governments. It included sabotage, propaganda, terrorism, all the stuff that would make the U.S. a rightfully hated nation in much of the developing world during the Cold War.
The thing was not that everyone in these nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia were communists or anything like that–far from it. No, the real problem was that the U.S. interpreted anything not going precisely according to its agenda as communism, so people such as Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala or Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran who were nothing more than nationalists were defined as commies who needed to be eliminated. Any kind of democracy that would threaten U.S. economic interests–which meant the interests of American or allied corporations such as United Fruit or British Petroleum–had to be part of the plot controlled by the Soviets. It’s gross and disgusting, one of many parts of this nation’s horrifyingly awful history.
In 1951, with Allen Dulles rising to become Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, the CIA tapped Wisner to become Deputy Director of Plans. Wisner and Richard Helms worked together to overthrow Arbenz and Mossadegh. He also was in charge of bringing lots of Nazis into the United States, particularly from the Belarus Brigade, which had been incorporated into the SS. I mean, sure these guys had slaughtered Jews and Roma and others and committed genocide. But what if we could use their murderous skills to kill commies? All good! So Wisner made sure a bunch of these guys got visas. The project didn’t go anywhere, but the CIA protected their Nazi pasts from the general public for decades.
For all of this, Wisner did have one good side–he did not take the idea of communism in the U.S. seriously at all. He thought Joseph McCarthy was a clown. He defended agents targeted by the anti-communist hysteria. In fact, he himself was surveilled by the FBI, largely because there was fear he was compromised by an affair he had in Romania with a princess in that nation while stationed there.
Later, Wisner was involved in the U-2 spy plane project. But his career would be short. See, among other things, he suffered from extreme depression. I’d like to say that it was guilt over being one of the worst people in the world, bringing in Nazis, overthrowing democratically elected governments around the world, all that stuff. But it doesn’t seem to be true. In 1958, he had a total mental breakdown. It was 1958, so of course electroshock therapy was the “treatment.” Over time, he was carefully brought back into the fold, being named chief of the CIA’s London station and then sent to British Guiana to do some ratfucking there. Some wondered if Wisner’s breakdown had to do with the fact that the CIA and American government had done nothing to help the Hungarians resist the Soviets in the 1956 uprising. This seems unlikely and of course mental illness was not so well understood in this era, so people would frequently blame it on some external factor instead of seeing it as an illness. I suppose people do that today sometimes too.
But Wisner couldn’t really go on and retired from the CIA in 1962. He never could recover from his mental illness and he committed suicide in 1965. He was 56 years old. His son Frank became a major diplomat who was a serious player in Egypt and was even Acting Secretary of State on the first day of Bill Clinton’s administration before Warren Christopher was confirmed.
Frank Wisner is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
If would you like this series to visit other CIA leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Raborn is in Annapolis, Maryland and John McCone is in Seattle. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.