A Spy for All Reasons

The CIA’s Frank Wisner was a master of the dark arts—until he became a burnt out case, an intriguing new biography shows

As a national security reporter for Newsweek in the 1990’s, Doug Waller figured he was perfectly positioned to cultivate a top CIA official who had just left the agency. His quarry was John Waller, who had spent years in the agency’s clandestine service specializing in Middle East affairs and later served as the CIA’s inspector general. Doug Waller was convinced the two were distantly related and that the presumed family connection just might help him unlock a goldmine of intelligence secrets. 

“Hey cousin,” he told John Waller after tracking him down in retirement. “Can we talk?” The CIA man was polite but wise to Doug’s gambit. “That’s not going to work,” he told him in so many words. True to his agency heritage, he gave up nothing.

The reporter, though, was undeterred and continued to pore through agency archives and memoirs to learn more about the covert machinations of his namesake. This month, it paid off—big time —with the release of his new book, The Determined Spy, a massive 645-page biography of Frank Wisner, the legendary CIA pioneer who oversaw secret operations in the heady days of the Cold War.

It’s an illuminating, action-packed account that chronicles multiple CIA adventures—and misadventures—around the globe, most notably the agency-instigated 1953 coup in Iran that toppled the democratically elected government of the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and solidified the shah’s autocratic hold on power, an act that continues to reverberate throughout the region to this day. 

And it turns out that, while Wisner was the executive producer of TPAJAX, the codename for this brazen intervention in the domestic affairs of another country, it was John Waller—chief of the covert ops Iran desk—who literally wrote the script,  micromanaging events on the ground and firing off memos to agency operatives led by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore, about who to bribe, who to intimidate, who to manipulate and who to smear.  

Doug Waller never did find out if he was actually related to John Waller. But his exhaustive research established this much: While Wisner, CIA director Allen Dulles  and Roosevelt got the internal praise (and later public blame) for the overthrow of Mossadegh, John Waller “was the intellectual brainchild behind the operation, putting together the scope, the strategic effort and everything,” Doug Waller tells me on the SpyTalk podcast, available Friday. 

Deep Dive

There is today much debate among historians about what happened in Iran, with some arguing that the CIA’s role was relatively secondary given that Mossadegh (who had nationalized the oil industry and was proclaimed “Man of the Year” by Time magazine in 1951) had by the time of the coup alienated the army and was rapidly losing support. If events had been allowed to take their course, it has been argued, it is possible that Mossadegh—who, although a proud nationalist, was hardly a Soviet agent—might have been pushed from  power anyway. But as Waller’s account shows, that’s not how the CIA or its overseers at the White House saw it at the time or how leftist critics see it now. Mossadegh needed a push.

John Waller’s game plan, under Frank Wisner’s direction, called for staging street demonstrations where rented rioters shouted “Death to Mossadegh.” Street thugs were hired to attack religious clerics—a ploy aimed at making it look like they were Mossadegh supporters as opposed to paid operatives of American intelligence. Bribes “were being passed out like candy,” writes Waller, including to local journalists who penned CIA-planted stories portraying Mossadegh as a closeted Jewish communist. When Mossadegh finally stepped down and fled—escaping over a back garden wall while his house was ransacked and set on fire—CIA officers back in Washington rejoiced, rushing through the hallways clutching updates from news agencies in the Mideast. 

“Never had a day carried so much excitement, satisfaction and jubilation for Wisner and his men,” Waller writes. “They did not want it to end.”

From today’s perspective, of course, the Iran coup looks very different— a case of retrograde Western imperialism: Urged on by the U.K.’s Anglo-Iranian oil company, Britain’s MI6 partnered with the CIA in the operation, which was seen as a success—up to a point. The shah was pro-western, instituted some liberal reforms, especially for women, and opened the door to foreign  business, including large purchases from U.S. arms makers. But as  Waller notes, over time, the coup had “disastrous”  consequences for millions of Iranians: decades of corrupt, autocratic rule by the shah—enforced by his SAVAK secret police—followed by a 1979 revolution by Islamic fundamentalists that has turned the country into a “base camp for terrorism abroad.” 

Lips Sealed

Just as stunning, at least to this journalist, was the extraordinary secrecy that surrounded the whole thing. No congressional committees were briefed on what the CIA had done. Not a word about the agency’s role appeared in the press,  even though some journalists, like the prominent Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, knew about it. President Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, Mandate for Change, 10 years after he left office, briefly writes about the overthrow of Iran’s government but never even mentions the CIA’s role (which, in broad strokes, he had authorized). 

As for John Waller, the “brains” of the operation, he went on to write a number of history books, including about Britain’s war in Afghanistan in the 19th century, before his death in 2004. His obituary in the Washington Post said not a word about the overthrow of Mossadegh. “It doesn’t even qualify for a conspiracy of silence because there were so many people that basically kept quiet about it,” said Doug Waller. 

(The first public accounts of the Iran coup didn’t appear until October 1979, when Kim Roosevelt authored Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran—which was quickly withdrawn the following month after the U.S. Embassy takeover. John Waller himself gave a classified internal interview to a CIA historian where he did talk about his role,  arguing that what happened wasn’t a “coup” per se; it was, as Roosevelt argued, a “countercoup” against Mossadegh for taking over Anglo-Iranian Oil and trying to muscle out the shah. But the interview in redacted form wasn’t released until 2014, one year after the CIA finally formally acknowledged its role in what happened in Iran.)

Hand in Gloves 

Doug Waller tells the story of the Iran coup in the context of the colorful career of Wisner, a brilliant, if troubled man, who had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, organizing resistance to the Nazis in Romania (where he also had an affair with a gorgeous princess who, unbeknownst to him, turned out to be a Communist spy). A protege of sorts of fellow OSS veteran and future CIA Director Allen Dulles, Wisner was  later tapped to run  something with the bland name of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) which, during the Truman administration, ginned up covert operations across the globe to counter what was widely perceived to be an ever more menacing Soviet threat. By virtue of the job, his connections, and his bureaucratic clout, Waller writes,  Wisner was becoming “one of the most powerful men in Washington,” even though members of the public had no idea who he was. (He and his wife Polly, a charming socialite, were charter members of “the Georgetown set,” a group of high level diplomats, spies and plugged-in journalists who would regularly gather for alcohol-infused dinners and debates about world affairs.)

Author Doug Waller (FaceBook)

In 1950, the OPC was folded into the CIA and Wisner took over the secret ops brief. Overseeing an army of covert warriors, informally known as “Wisner’s weirdos,” he launched  failed raids of exiles into Albania, created  CIA-funded front groups to promulgate agency propaganda (the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” he joyously called it) and started  HTLingual, a controversial and illegal program to open the mail of Americans writing and receiving letters to individuals in Soviet Russia. (Another Wisner project: MKUltra, codename for the CIA’s efforts to develop mind-altering drugs like LSD that could be used to disorient targets, induce trances or drive them crazy. ) And after the Iran coup, there was yet another overthrow engineered by Wisner, this one in Guatemala, whose consequences were just as disastrous, resulting in years of harsh military rule and civil war. 

This was not exactly a record to be proud of, and by the mid-1950’s Wisner was in the midst of a mental crackup, growing increasingly paranoid and short-tempered, given to bizarre and irrational outbursts. He was committed to a mental institution in Maryland where he received electric shock therapy. 

In the wake of that a board of consultants tapped by Eisenhower to review intelligence activities “told Ike bluntly that it was dangerous entrusting so much power over American foreign policy to a man now found to be insane,” writes Waller. After his treatment, the CIA eased him out of his high pressure job and gave him another, cushier one as London chief of station. In 1965, while at a farm he owned in Maryland, he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head with a shotgun.  

Tapestry

Parts of Wisner’s story have been told before, most notably by Hugh Wilford in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, and Evan Thomas in The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA. But Waller has done impressive research to fill out a fuller, richer portrait, including spending up to 50 hours with Wisner’s family, one of whom, Frank Wisner II, was a veteran State Department diplomat who served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to India (and who died just a few weeks before the book came out.)  And while some of the pedestrian details about Wisner’s early career could have been cut, making the book less of a doorstop, Waller has masterly invoked the sense of the apocalyptic doom and gloom that drove the Cold War in both Moscow and Washington and was the menacing backdrop to all of Wisner’s operations. 

Pentagon planners were so convinced the Soviets would attack western Europe, for example, they even put a precise date on when it would take place: July 1, 1952. Wisner drew up his own war plan with a “secret army to retard the Soviet advance.” It was in this context that he also set up Program Branch 7 to explore “assassination capability.” Among the ideas it examined: poisoning Chinese leader Zhou Enlai, Mao’s number two, when he attended a conference in Indonesia, and planting a bomb under Stalin’s limousine if he showed up for a planned meeting in Paris. The CIA’s plans to terminate foreign leaders “with extreme prejudice” were nixed at the time  by then-director Walter “Beetle” Smith, only to be revived some years later by Dulles when, with Eisenhower’s tacit green light, it launched new efforts to assassinate several foreign leaders, in one instance recruiting Mafia figures to try to bump off the pesky new dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro.  

For years, the popular account of Wisner’s psychological breakdown is that he was driven mad by the covert ops he led. Waller challenges that widely held view, writing that Wisner clinically suffered from a bipolar disorder, a disease for which, at the time, there was little effective treatment. 

Maybe so. But as the newspaper editor told the Jimmy Stewart character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” On this one, I prefer the legend. If  Wisner wasn’t pushed over the edge into madness from his many years overthrowing governments and  directing sabotage, subterfuge, and propaganda operations against a resourceful and relentless Soviet enemy, maybe he should have been. 

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