Spooks intervened in this electoral drive, the first initiative of the CIA’s Special Procedures Group. Some had worked with OSS in Italy and were reactivating old ties, others were neophytes, like F. Mark Wyatt, who had lived in Italy before the war. The country fascinated him. The CIA threw him right into the breach. The agency approached de Gasperi with offers of cash, but the Italian insisted the Americans work with non-Communist parties across the board—including the socialists—not just his own people. Wyatt and others delivered suitcases of money at Rome hotels, supposedly chance encounters on the road, anywhere they could. Funds went to anti-Communist labor unions, corporations, religious movements, the right-wing Catholic Action, and more. The CIA financed campaign posters, ads, leaflets, media plants, and rallies. Results exceeded expectations—de Gasperi obtained an overwhelming majority in parliament, gaining against both left and right. Italy would be safe. Success also confirmed the utility of CIA covert operations.

  George Kennan continued to press for a “special studies group,” under State Department control, for things like the Italian operation. Admiral Hillenkoetter now advised the White House that the CIA could carry out covert activities with no change in the NSC-4/A directive. When State refused to go along with “this political warfare thing in any sane or sound manner,” the CIA director threw up his hands—early in June 1948 Hillenkoetter told a Truman aide that Kennan could have it all: let State run the apparatus and let it have no connection whatever with the CIA. History might have been very different had that happened.

  Instead President Truman, impressed by CIA’s accomplishments in Italy, expanded not only the functions of the agency but those of the State and Defense departments plus the National Security Council. His policy directive, drafted primarily by Kennan, included both psychological warfare and paramilitary programs, here acknowledged for the first time. Truman signed the new directive, NSC-10/2, on June 18. Both kinds of missions would be carried out by a new organization taking operational orders from the CIA and its policy direction from a secret committee chaired by the director of central intelligence. Composed of representatives of the secretaries of state and defense along with the CIA’s director, the secret committee became a unit of the National Security Council and worked directly for the president. Under this “10/2 Panel,” soon also called the “Special Group,” funds for the new organization would be included in the CIA budget while its director would be named by the secretary of state and approved by the NSC. According to the 10/2 directive, “the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations.”

  Three features of the NSC-10/2 directive are crucial to the evolution of American covert operations. For the first time a presidential document specified a mechanism to approve and manage secret operations, making it responsible to the chief executive. Second, also for the first time, there appeared a definition of the genus. Finally, the CIA was again given the primary role, confirming the arrangement begun with NSC-4/A.

  The covert missions were to involve more than psychological warfare, more even than secret wars. The new definition specified that covert operations included all activities sponsored or conducted by the United States either in support of friendly governments or against hostile ones, with the stipulation that they be “so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” The core of the 10/2 definition explained that

  such operations shall include any covert activities related to: 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.

  Virtually the only thing left out is espionage. As far as intelligence is concerned, the scale ran to just short of “armed conflict by recognized military forces.”

  The definition of covert operations contained in NSC-10/2 endured for more than three decades. An Office of Special Projects, the new organization created to carry them out, later merged into the CIA, but the mechanism for presidential control prescribed by NSC-10/2 endures to this day.

  George Kennan, who would later sour on this entire enterprise, remained an enthusiastic supporter of covert operations at their inception. It was Kennan whom the secretary of state placed on the 10/2 panel as the first representative of his department, and Kennan again who assembled the short list of nominees from whom the director was selected. At the head of that list Kennan put Frank G. Wisner, whom he did not know but who came highly recommended by Chip Bohlen (the State Department’s other chief authority on the Soviet Union) and, reportedly, George C. Marshall. Frank Wisner, OSS veteran, was a man who favored aiding the “captive nations,” and that included partisans like the Ukrainian People’s Army. By some accounts Wisner had been a prominent advocate of creating the new covert action unit, though it remains a mystery how this could be true without his knowing Kennan. In any case, Wisner got the job and accepted it with alacrity. He met George Kennan soon enough. They spoke on the phone about whether balloons could be used to deliver propaganda leaflets over Eastern Europe. On August 6, 1948, they joined others to talk about making the NSC-10/2 mandate a reality. America’s secret war had begun.

  3

  The Secret Warriors

  IN AMERICA TODAY, when lawyers are so often disparaged as purveyors of litigation, the connection between law firms and spycraft is often overlooked. For the CIA in its formative years the existence of certain law firms held a key importance for the future of the agency. The only one of these entities to reach popular awareness is the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Established in 1879, its founders were no longer around by the mid-twentieth century, but the firm comfortably retained William Nelson Cromwell’s instinct for the jugular and his talent for attracting powerful clients, who in turn gave the firm’s lawyers seats at some key passages of history. Cromwell, for example, represented the corporation that successfully arranged for the United States to take over and develop the Panama Canal. John Foster Dulles, another of the firm’s lawyers, played a role at the Versailles peace conference at the end of World War I. His brother, Allen W. Dulles, who also had a bit part at Versailles, joined Sullivan & Cromwell in 1926, with Nazi German companies among his clients. During World War II, Allen went to Switzerland for the OSS and worked his German contacts to benefit U.S. intelligence. Foster’s representation of the United Fruit Company later impacted directly upon CIA operations. These brothers presently became respectively director of central intelligence and secretary of state for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  By no means was Sullivan & Cromwell the sole exemplar of this phenomenon. The other clear example is Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lumbard, formed in 1929 by William J. Donovan, “Wild Bill” himself, executor of private missions on behalf of President Franklin Roosevelt and founder of the first U.S. intelligence agencies, the Coordinator of Information, then the Office of Strategic Services. After the war Donovan returned to his firm but continued to agitate for creation of the peacetime intelligence agency, and remained a strong supporter of the nascent CIA. The Donovan firm employed a number of former OSS people, some of whom went on to the Central Intelligence Agency. The most notable, OSS veteran William E. Colby, whom Donovan hired out of law school, would one day head the CIA.

  Frank Gardiner Wisner had his own law firm connection. That came easily to Wisner, scion of the alliance between the two most patrician families of Laurel, Mississippi, holders of lumber interests that controlled that town. It was old money by the time Wisner became a teenager in the “Roaring Twenties.” Despite the venturesome age, though Wisner left Mississippi he could not bring himself to leave the South. He put down roots in Virginia at private school and returned to attend the University of Virginia. Wisner excelled at track and field, at one time indulging Olympic ambitions as a runner. Virginia’s genteel style suited Wisner so much that he went on to law school there, cultivating a haughty manner softened by a Mississippi twang that fit the bourbon he favored. He graduated third in his class, bringing an immediate offer from a Wall Street firm. The family money embarrassed Wisner, who could hardly summon the words to say “rich people” and would later put his government paychecks into a drawer, uncashed.

  Wisner joined the firm of Carter, Ledyard, Milburn in 1934. Located three floors above the Donovan firm in the same building at 2 Wall Street in New York City, Carter, Ledyard did essentially the same work. Even older than Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm had been founded in 1854 by lawyers from New York City and Buffalo. James C. Carter, the Buffalo counsel, left after a few years to be replaced by John G. Milburn. The firm steadily expanded its general practice, perhaps its most notable account being American Express and its greatest claim to fame that in 1905 it had hired the young Franklin D. Roosevelt as an unpaid clerk. At Carter, Ledyard, Frank Wisner labored for seven years, eventually becoming a partner. There he met other associates and junior lawyers, including friends William H. Jackson and Gordon Gray, plus Tracy Barnes. Jackson, having just attained the exalted status of partner himself, had actually hired Wisner, the fledgling lawyer. With war clearly approaching in mid-1941, before Pearl Harbor, Wisner volunteered for the naval reserve. Gray metamorphosed into a psychological warfare expert; Jackson became a senior officer with army intelligence (G-2); Tracy Barnes served with the army air force and the OSS, later following Wisner into the CIA. Bill Jackson would conduct an outside review of their work and become a CIA boss when appointed deputy director of central intelligence. Gordon Gray would have his own piece to play as well.

  Commissioned a naval reserve officer, Wisner’s international legal experience quickly led to his being reassigned to the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS sent him to Cairo, then to Turkey, where in 1944 he opened an OSS station. As Nazi Germany retreated from its conquests and the Allies advanced, Wisner did too. He moved to Bucharest and from September 1944 ran the small CIA station there. Among other feats, Wisner organized the evacuation of American airmen held prisoner in Romania. The Soviet takeover of this country in January 1945 greatly affected him, for until then he had enthusiastically thrown himself into palace intrigues. That spring, as the Nazis collapsed, a German intelligence unit led by Reinhard Gehlen volunteered to spy for the Americans. Wisner now led the OSS detachment in Wiesbaden, Germany, that initially dealt with Gehlen. He then chaired the OSS committee that recommended the United States arrange to exploit Gehlen. In this last assignment Wisner came under the command of Allen Dulles, up from Berne to supervise all OSS activity in Germany. The Washington desk officer responsible for their area, Richard M. Helms, also played a key role in what transpired.

  Frank Wisner threw up his hands with army intelligence when superiors blocked his efforts to obtain bicycles for agents in the Soviet occupation zone. He returned to the law, but for this intense man, emotionally involved with this work, Wall Street seemed tame after OSS derring-do. Wisner occasionally lunched with Allen Dulles, himself back at Sullivan & Cromwell. Dulles, like Wild Bill Donovan, became a public figure agitating for the establishment of an intelligence agency. Wisner admired that and himself spoke out in favor of creating a mechanism for political warfare. In 1946 he took a considerable pay cut—not that it mattered to him—to return to government as deputy assistant secretary of state for the occupied territories. Early on he made a tour of the Displaced Persons camps in Germany. The post at State was one in which Wisner could exercise his expertise on Eastern Europe. Not coincidentally, his immediate boss had been a Carter, Ledyard client. Wisner and his wife Polly moved to Georgetown.

  At home and at the office Wisner developed fresh connections with Washington movers—people like the State Department’s Chip Bohlen, and Paul Nitze, just finished working on a massive study of aerial bombing—who had fingers in many policy pies. In any case, Wisner jumped at the opportunity to take charge of a new Cold War action group and soon found himself ensconced at CIA headquarters. Wisner glowed, hustling about the office and organizing impromptu races at Paul Nitze’s lawn parties in which he would handicap himself by running backward.

  The National Security Council approved Wisner’s appointment on August 19, 1948. A week later, issuing the directive formally creating Wisner’s organization, Admiral Hillenkoetter adopted the new name Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The OPC went to war. Before year’s end, Frank Wisner had already obtained a budget of $4.7 million, and he controlled seven overseas posts—or “stations” in the parlance of spies—with 302 persons on staff. The OPC had access to another fund more than twice as big from unused currency stabilization accounts at the Treasury Department, under agreements Wisner soon worked out within the government.

  From “L” Building at headquarters, Wisner’s web began to encircle the world. He knew well enough that time was needed to get up and running, but he simultaneously exhibited an impatience for action by his people in the field. The result became haphazard management, akin to a law firm, where the number of people on a case simply meant more billings. Wisner thought nothing of assigning the same task to several officers, then watching to see who came back with results. Meanwhile the OPC boss himself tore around tossing off more ideas for operations, which meant assignments. Hundreds of projects flowed from the OPC shop. Wisner needed people to carry them out. Within a year OPC had expanded to a staff of five hundred; by mid-1950 there would be another thousand on top of that.

  George Kennan, who fancied the political warfare directorate as a tool in the containment kit, to be taken out only as required, reacted with horror as the OPC transformed itself into an active mechanism for foreign intervention. Kennan came to see the Office of Policy Coordination as a sort of Frankenstein monster and regretted his role in its creation.

  By October 1948 Wisner had developed a general scheme for action. He envisioned more than a dozen different types of covert operations in four major categories: psychological warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, and what Wisner termed “preventive direct action.” The gamut included everything from poison pen letters (under psychological warfare) to support of DPs and refugees, to preclusive commodities purchases and market manipulation, to support of resistance and guerrilla movements. The net effect would be to involve the Office of Policy Coordination in every imaginable sort of clandestine activity.

  Proud of OPC’s capabilities, particularly those for spreading propaganda and misinformation, Wisner began calling his network the “Wurlitzer,” like the jukeboxes that carried many tunes. “Wisner’s Wurlitzer” stuck as an identifier for the OPC propaganda apparatus and for his office as a whole. A number of other sobriquets also were soon applied around L Building, among the staff if not the spy-masters. The OPC expanded steadily and soon had outposts in several of the other buildings, I, J, and K. The place became known as Cockroach Alley. Wisner would be recognized for his ability to make things happen and called “Wiz.” His deputy became the “Ozzard of Wiz.” There would be a psychological warfare staff under Joe Bryan, a Virginian after Wisner’s own heart, who would be called the “Duke of Richmond.” A romantic might have thought of it as Robin Hood and the Merry Men off to fight the despotic king, in this case Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

  Stalin had mobilized the Soviet Union for World War II by fanning the flames of nationalism in his country. The theme of the invaded motherland became so prominent that World War II is still called the Great Patriotic War in Russia. But nationalism in service of the state, plus Soviet ideology, did not bridge the deep ethnic and cultural differences among the Russian peoples. The Soviet Union comprised a kaleidoscope of peoples and cultures governed from the center. The party papered over the differences in cultures, ranging from Muslim to Eastern Orthodox, and peoples, ranging from Ukrainians to Uzbeks and Asians. Stalin himself, a Georgian, came from the mountainous Caucasus region. The motherland theme in propaganda cloaked a “nationality problem” that predated Soviet rule to the beginning of Russian expansion under the tsars.

  Minorities had resisted right along, notably Cossacks and Ukrainians. Many from these ethnic groups had fought with the Whites against the Communists during the Russian civil war. Ukrainian forces also allied with the Poles during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. Ukrainians then fought the Russians as German auxiliary troops in the Great Patriotic War itself. While the war as a whole might have ended in 1945, the Ukrainian guerrilla armies continued to fight. The Ukrainians discovered by the American CIC near Passau in 1947 were part of these forces. Another migration began with the Soviet victory in 1945, joining the waves of Displaced Persons: Russian deserters, defectors, former prisoners of war evading repatriation, and forced laborers, refilling the ranks of Russian emigré groups.

  Beyond Soviet borders were the “satellite” states of Eastern Europe. These peoples too were not about to accept Soviet domination. In a military sense the Eastern European states were indeed “captive nations.” Due to the stringent political and security controls the Soviets maintained in both Russia and Eastern Europe, the CIA quickly dubbed them “denied areas,” places where intelligence operations could be conducted only with great difficulty and peril.