Frank Gardiner Wisner (June 23, 1909 – October 29, 1965) was head of
Office of Strategic ServicesThe Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency .-Origins and activities:...
operations in
southeastern EuropeThe Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
at the end of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the
Central Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government.It is an independent agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior United States policymakers....
during the 1950s.
Education
He was educated at
Woodberry Forest SchoolWoodberry Forest School is a private, all-male boarding school located in Woodberry Forest, Madison County, Virginia, in the United States. Woodberry's current enrollment is 398. Students come from 31 U.S...
in
Orange County, VirginiaOrange County is a county located in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2000 census, the population was 25,881. Its county seat is Orange.-History:...
, and the
University of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
, where he received both
B.A.Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
and LL.B. degrees.. He was also tapped for the
Seven SocietyThe Seven Society is the most secretive of the University of Virginia's secret societies. Members are only revealed after their death, when a wreath of black magnolias in the shape of a "7" is placed at the gravesite, the bell tower of the University Chapel chimes at seven-second intervals on the...
.
OSS
After graduating, Wisner worked as a
Wall StreetWall Street is a street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. It runs east from Broadway to South Street on the East River, through the historical center of the Financial District. It is the first permanent home of the New York Stock Exchange; over time Wall Street became the...
lawyerA lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person licensed to practice law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain stability, and deliver...
. In 1941, 6 months before the
attack on Pearl HarborThe attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Japanese navy against the United States' naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941 , later resulting in the United...
, he enlisted in the
United States NavyThe United States Navy is the sea branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. As of 31 December 2008, the U.S. Navy had about 331,682 personnel on active duty and 124,000 in the Navy Reserve. It operates 283 ships in active service and more than...
. He worked in the Navy's censor's office until he was able to get a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He was stationed first in
TurkeyTurkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey
, is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe...
, and then in
RomaniaRomania is a country located in Southeastern and Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory...
, where he became head of OSS operations in southeastern Europe. This happened just prior to the Romanian royal coup of August 23, 1944. At Wisner's behest, King
Michael I of RomaniaMichael reigned as King of the Romanians from 20 July 1927 to 8 June 1930, and again from 6 September 1940, until forced to abdicate by the communists backed up by orders of Stalin to the Soviet armies of occupation on 30 December 1947...
permitted the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to fly out
AlliedThe Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . The involvement of the Allies in World War II was either natural and inevitable they were invaded or under the direct threat of invasion by the Axis or compelled by concerns that the Axis powers...
prisoners of warA prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a combatant who is held in continuing custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
. On August 29, some 1,350 American airmen who had been held prisoners in Romania were rescued by an U.S. Air Crew Rescue Unit, with
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
troops only days away from entering
BucharestBucharest is the capital city, industrial and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmboviţa River....
. Despite continuing fighting between Romanian and
Red ArmyThe Red Army The Red Army The Red Army was the Soviet government’s revolutionary militia beginning in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the USSR. Since 1946, after the Second World War, it was called the Soviet Army.The 'Red...
forces, and the presence of the
WehrmachtWehrmacht was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe ....
and
LuftwaffeLuftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1933 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956.Schweizer Luftwaffe is also the name of the Swiss Air...
in the immediate Bucharest area, the rescue team used the
Popeşti-LeordeniPopeşti-Leordeni is a town in Ilfov County, Romania, 9 km south of Bucharest, although from the northern edge of the town to the southern edge of Bucharest the distance is less than 100 m. The town's population is 15,115 inhabitants...
Airfield. Twelve
B-17 Flying FortressThe Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is a four-engine heavy bomber aircraft developed for the United States Army Air Corps , introduced in the 1930s. Competing against Douglas and Martin for a contract to build 200 bombers, the Boeing entry outperformed both competitors and more than met the Air Corps'...
flew out the prisoners in hourly shifts. In all, some 1,700 American POWs were rescued with the help of the Romanians.
Later, Wisner's main task was to spy on the activities of the Soviet Union. Wisner's agents managed to penetrate the
Romanian Communist PartyThe Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
and the
Red ArmyThe Red Army The Red Army The Red Army was the Soviet government’s revolutionary militia beginning in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the USSR. Since 1946, after the Second World War, it was called the Soviet Army.The 'Red...
's headquarters in Bucharest. He learned that the Soviet Union planned to take over all of
Eastern EuropeEastern Europe is a region lying in the Eastern part of Europe. The term is highly context-dependent and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
, and was disappointed at the U.S. failure to move to prevent it. He advised the Romanian royal family to go into exile.
In March 1945, Wisner was transferred to
WiesbadenWiesbaden is a city in southwestern Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
, where he served as OSS liaison to the Gehlen Organisation. In 1946, he returned to law practice, joining the
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
law firm of
Carter LedyardCarter Ledyard & Milburn LLP is a New York City law firm. It has 97 attorneys with offices in New York and Washington, D.C..The firm was founded in 1854 by Henry Scudder and James C. Carter. The firm remained small well into the 1900s. It long represented American Tobacco and Standard Oil in early...
.
CIA
Wisner was recruited in 1947 by
Dean AchesonDean Gooderham Acheson was an American statesman and lawyer; as United States Secretary of State in the administration of President Harry S. Truman during 1949–1953, he played a central role in defining American foreign policy during the Cold War...
to join the State Department's Office of Occupied Territories. In 1948, the
CIAThe Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government.It is an independent agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior United States policymakers....
created a covert action division, the
Office of Policy CoordinationThe Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Originally an independent office, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
(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."
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
In 1947 Wisner established
Operation MockingbirdOperation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book,...
, a program to influence the domestic and foreign
mediaThe news media refers to the section of the mass media that focuses on presenting current news to the public.These include print media ; broadcast media , and increasingly Internet-based media .The term news trade refers to the concept of the news media as a business...
. In 1952, he became head of the Directorate of Plans, with
Richard HelmsRichard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended two-year prison...
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 MossadeghMohammad Mosaddeq was the Prime Minister of Iranfrom 1951 to 1953 when he was removed from power by a coup d'état....
in
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
and
Jacobo Arbenz GuzmánColonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Guatemalan military officer and politician. He served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944 - 1951. He served as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. He was ousted in a coup d'état in which the U.S. Government was complicit and was replaced by a...
in
GuatemalaGuatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. Its size is just under 110,000 km² with an estimated population...
following the Alfhem affair.
The
FBIThe Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency. The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
Director,
J. Edgar HooverJohn Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation — predecessor to the FBI — in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
, 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
Joseph McCarthyJoseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Wisner had with Princess
CaradjaPrincess Catherine Olympia Caradja was a celebrated Romanian aristocrat and philanthropist. Born in Bucharest, she grew up in England and France, and lived in Romania from 1908 to 1952, when she escaped from the communist regime on a Danube boat...
in
RomaniaRomania is a country located in Southeastern and Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory...
during the war; Hoover claimed that Caradja was a
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
agent.
Wisner worked closely with
Kim PhilbyHarold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby , was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
, the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
agent who was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy.
He was also deeply involved in establishing the
Lockheed U-2The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is a single-engine, very high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency. It provides day and night, very high-altitude , all-weather surveillance...
spy planeSurveillance aircraft are military aircraft used for monitoring enemy activity, usually carrying no armament. This article concentrates on military aircraft used in this role, though a major civilian aviation activity is reconnaissance and ground surveillance for mapping, traffic monitoring,...
program run by
Richard M. Bissell, Jr.Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr. was an American CIA officer responsible for major projects such as the U-2 'spy plane' and the Bay of Pigs Invasion.-Early years:...
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. "[T]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
psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it also can be applied to societies.
...
and was subjected to electroshock therapy. After spending 6 months at the
The Sheppard and Enoch Pratt HospitalThe Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, known to many simply as Sheppard Pratt, is a psychiatric hospital located in Towson, a northern suburb of Baltimore, Maryland...
, he was released in 1958.
CIA DirectorDirector of the Central Intelligence Agency serves as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is part of the United States Intelligence Community. The Director reports to the Director of National Intelligence . The Director is assisted by the Deputy Director of the Central...
Allen Dulles named Wisner Chief of the CIA's
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
Station, but he was still suffering from mental illness. In 1962, he was recalled to
Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790...
, and agreed to retire from the CIA.
Personal life
Wisner was born in
Laurel, MississippiLaurel is a city located in Jones County in Mississippi, a state of the United States of America. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 18,393 although a significant population increase has been reported following Hurricane Katrina. Located in southeast Mississippi, southeast of...
to parents Frank George Wisner, a lumberman, (March 5, 1873 in
Clinton, IowaClinton is a city in and the county seat of Clinton County, Iowa, United States. The population was 27,772 at the 2000 census. Along with DeWitt, Iowa - which is also located within Clinton County, the city was named in honor of the seventh governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton...
– ?) and Mary Jeanette Gardiner (August 21, 1875 in Clinton, Iowa – ?). They were married on October 28, 1897 in Lyons, Iowa. He married Mary Knowles Fritchey (June 28, 1912 in
Pensacola, FloridaPensacola is the westernmost city in the Florida Panhandle and the county seat of Escambia County. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 56,255 and as of 2007, the estimated population was 54,283....
– July 9, 2002). They had four children:
Frank G. WisnerFrank George Wisner II is an American businessman and former diplomat. He is the son of Frank Wisner.Wisner is currently Vice Chairman of American International Group. He retired from this post as of February 13, 2009, according to an internal AIG memo issued by Edward Liddy, CEO.Wisner was born...
, Ellis Wisner, Graham Wisner and Elizabeth 'Wendy' Hazard.
Frank Wisner committed
suicideSuicide is the intentional killing of one's self. Many dictionaries also note the metaphorical sense of "willful destruction of one's self-interest"...
using one of his son's shotguns. His funeral service was held at the Bethlehem Chapel in the
Washington National CathedralWashington National Cathedral, whose official name is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is a cathedral of the Episcopal Church....
. He was buried at
Arlington National CemeteryArlington National Cemetery, in Arlington County, Virginia is a military cemetery in the United States, established during the American Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, formerly the estate of the family of Robert E. Lee's wife Mary Anna Lee, a descendant of Martha Washington. The...
as a naval commander, his wartime rank.