Organizing resistance in the denied areas initially seemed a simple matter of making contact with the right people. The captive nations, disaffected minorities, and groups of disillusioned social democrats and Communists provided fertile recruiting grounds, indeed irresistible ones, for Western intelligence officers as the Cold War intensified and the CIA received orders to begin a secret war against Soviet communism.

  At an early meeting of the 10/2 panel on August 12, 1948, an NSC representative made clear that the Office of Policy Coordination should be controlled by the State Department during peacetime and the Pentagon in war. That disturbed Frank Wisner, the CIA member of the panel in whose office the group often met. The first representative for the secretary of defense, army Col. Ivan D. Yeaton, said little. In his turn, George Kennan demanded the State Department be given detailed information about objectives and methods to be employed in every proposed project involving a political decision. Instead Wisner effectively manipulated the system. The director of central intelligence had been vested with formal authority for OPC operations by the 10/2 directive. When he needed to, Wisner went to Admiral Hillenkoetter. The DCI, under pressure to produce action against the Russians, opposed little that OPC wished to do. Kennan soon left the panel, replaced by Robert Joyce, an advocate of increased covert action. After that, if there was a problem, Wisner could go to him. If stymied from both directions, Wisner would resort to the Pentagon, starved for intelligence on Russia and likely to support OPC initiatives.

  The blockade of Berlin began only days after approval of NSC-10/2. The State Department, impressed with the results of CIA’s impromptu intervention in the Italian general elections, and the CIA, then being criticized for failing to warn of a coup that had occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, were not inclined to challenge Wisner’s maneuvers.

  Much like the companion espionage staff in CIA’s Office of Special Operations, OPC was divided into regional “divisions” and functional “staffs.” The Eastern Europe Division handled operations in the denied areas of the Soviet bloc. Within the divisions were “branches,” each responsible for a country or group, or for special applications. There were functional staffs for political action and psychological warfare. This has remained the pattern of organization at the CIA throughout its history.

  Wisner had instructions not to poach on OSO territory. Since personnel from the espionage outfit were off limits to OPC recruiting, he turned instead to OSS veterans and the fresh crop of Ivy League college graduates just returned from the war—men whom Wisner’s journalist friend Stewart Alsop called “the bold Easterners.”

  For his secret propaganda programs, Wisner’s Wurlitzer included, at that stage, a shortwave radio transmitter acquired from the army, the first of a fleet of balloons used to carry leaflets over the denied areas, and a psychological warfare staff—a collection of practical jokers, creative misfits, and talented writers who blew off steam shooting BB guns at balloons in the office. At least one suffered a breakdown and was hauled off to St. Elizabeth’s, a Washington mental hospital. The staff kept hatching plots to demoralize the Russians, everything from dropping superior Western trade goods over the Soviet Union, cueing unfortunate Soviet citizens to the shoddiness of Russian products; to huge-sized condoms (marked “Made in U.S.A.” and “Medium”) to engender penis envy. These proposals grew so outlandish that the CIA director threatened to close the shop down if Wisner brought him one more project involving balloons with payloads to drop.

  The more serious schemes involved massive propaganda campaigns and radio broadcasting. To conceal CIA’s hand in these efforts the OPC created visible public groups to whom the activities could be attributed. This was contemplated from the program’s inception. Allen Dulles, who continued his lunches with Wisner and was soon asked by President Truman to participate in an outside review of U.S. intelligence for the National Security Council, talked with Wall Street colleagues and other acquaintances about forming such public groups. George Kennan made a similar proposal within the State Department, where Secretary Dean Acheson informally discussed the topic with several former American diplomats in late 1948 and early 1949. Among them was retired ambassador Joseph Grew, who in turn contacted Dewitt C. Poole, an OSS veteran and the senior American diplomat in Moscow at the time of the Russian civil war. In June 1949 Grew and Poole set up the National Committee for a Free Europe. Allen Dulles became its chairman of the executive committee. Such figures as the former high commissioner in Germany, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, joined Free Europe’s board of directors.

  The committee created a broadcasting subsidiary called Radio Free Europe (RFE) with corporate offices in New York. Internal RFE documents make out Kennan as the father of the enterprise. In its studios in Munich, the RFE employed Eastern European emigrés as broadcasters. RFE was secretly given Wisner’s radio transmitter. A search began for more powerful equipment. The OPC kept in close touch, assigning a couple of officers to the Radio Free Europe staff in addition to Wisner’s direct contact with many of its board members. Former OSS radio experts Peter Mero and Robert E. Lang helped select a transmission site near Frankfurt. The first RFE broadcast was a half-hour program beamed into Czechoslovakia on July 4, 1950. From that December RFE existed as a legal corporation. This and other broadcast units that followed became known to the CIA as “the Radios.”

  Russian adversaries were instantly alert to the dangers of the broadcasts and began to jam the radio frequencies that RFE used, as for two years they had already jammed the overt propaganda broadcast by the Voice of America. Truman’s National Security Council contemplated a ring of transmitters surrounding Russia to alleviate the Voice of America problem, while the RFE solution became “saturation broadcasting,” in which a series of increasingly powerful radio transmitters in different locations beamed the same programs to Eastern Europe simultaneously on varied frequencies. It took time to create a transmission array of that caliber, however. By 1952, when nine new transmitters went on-line, including one in Portugal, RFE approached critical mass. Saturation broadcasting began in earnest with Stalin’s death in 1953 when RFE pulled out every stop to get the news to Eastern Europe. By then its Munich headquarters, at the edge of the Englischer Garten, contained almost two dozen studios. More than a hundred Americans and almost five hundred exiles worked there alongside a thousand local employees.

  Wisner’s Wurlitzer wanted a capability for beaming propaganda into Russia to match its RFE wing and proceeded in identical fashion. An American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism (Amcomlib) started up in 1950 and was incorporated the following year. Franklin Lindsay put together its board of directors. Robert H. Dreher, who joined the CIA in 1951—as a naval reserve lieutenant he had been expelled from Russia on bogus spy charges three years before, but now made the allegation true—held up the agency’s side in the creation of Radio Liberty. It first broadcast on March 1, 1953. This “Radio” had the same problems with the different Russian emigré groups that had bedeviled Wisner’s secret warriors. The effort to impose some discipline upon the emigrés eventually led to the ending of CIA subsidies to the groups.

  The Radios became important resources in the secret war against Russia. There was also the balloon program, which distributed printed materials. The first balloon was launched by an RFE crew from a German farm field in August 1951, the beginning of a stream that would deliver 400 tons—up to 300 million leaflets—over the denied areas. The balloon launch was attended, as if it were a ceremonial occasion, by RFE president C. D. Jackson, politician Harold Stassen, journalist Drew Pearson, representatives of the Radios, and emigré officials.

  Creation of a capability for paramilitary operations became a key facet of Frank Wisner’s OPC endeavor. Paramilitary efforts offered the most direct avenue to challenging Soviet power in the occupied territories and indeed in Russia itself. The paramilitary option had a defensive function as well. In the event of a Russian invasion that led to the conquest of Western Europe, the United States wanted to have stay-behind networks, similar to the European resistance in World War II, that would fight the Russians. If there was no invasion, the Americans still wanted to conduct paramilitary operations on the Russians’ own ground of the denied areas.

  The fledgling Central Intelligence Agency could not carry out these missions by itself and went to the Pentagon for assistance. A relationship with the Defense Department evolved despite some opposition. The secretary of the army initially prohibited assignment of army officers to the CIA on the grounds that he wanted his service to have nothing to do with covert operations. But in August 1948 the Joint Chiefs went on record declaring not only that guerrilla warfare be supported, under the direction of the NSC, but that the armed services form no special warfare units of their own, leaving the field by default to the newly created Office of Policy Coordination. Individual military men could be given special training, but OPC would be the only organization with a comprehensive capability to plan and conduct such missions. The military’s interest became Frank Wisner’s entrée for outflanking the 10/2 Panel when he encountered obstacles from CIA or State Department bosses.

  In early August 1949 Wisner asked the army for extensive assistance, including the designation of an army officer to serve as chief of the OPC Guerrilla Warfare Group and the use of army facilities for CIA training. While the request for a detailee was later withdrawn, in mid-November OPC and army representatives agreed to use Fort Benning, Georgia, for CIA training. One of the OPC men at the conference was in fact on detached service from the army. He was Col. Richard G. Stilwell, who had served in Europe with the Ninetieth Infantry Division. As a military officer Stilwell played a major role in the CIA-army relationship.

  There were also certain army assets in the field, especially in Germany, that would be useful to OPC. The main one was G-2’s Counter Intelligence Corps, with its Sixty-sixth CIC Detachment at Stuttgart from September 1949. The Sixty-sixth CIC had the responsibility for screening Displaced Persons who would be the main source of OPC agent recruits. Some 42,000 people were screened by the Sixty-sixth during 1949 alone. As late as 1951, 500 defectors a month were coming from behind the Iron Curtain. The Sixty-sixth CIC also carried out “positive intelligence” missions in the Soviet zone, 2,211 of them in 1949, providing information useful to OPC in its preparation of secret missions.

  Probably the most important resource that Frank Wisner pried from the army was an entire intelligence agency, a German one. This story stretches back to 1945, or October 1944 if counted from when the Germans began planning for their nation’s collapse. Germany had had a military intelligence unit called Foreign Armies East that handled Soviet intelligence. As the end neared, the unit evacuated southwest toward the American armies. The director of Foreign Armies East, Reinhard Gehlen, ordered his files buried. He approached British intelligence about collaboration but they turned him down, though the British pumped those from Gehlen’s unit whom they captured. The general then contrived to have himself taken by the Americans. Gehlen offered to tell them everything he knew about Russia and bring together a cadre of his former top people to add to that intelligence. He also peddled those wartime files.

  Gehlen, handled at first by the Counter Intelligence Corps in what was called Operation Rusty, became a case for the army’s European intelligence chief, Brig. Gen. Edwin L. Sibert. Inexperienced with Russians, Sibert’s G-2 interrogators found Gehlen’s knowledge impressive. Transported to Washington in August 1945, the German went to Fort Hunt, near Mount Vernon, used throughout the war to house high-value prisoners. Extensive debriefings with G-2 and OSS took place there with Frank Wisner one of the inquisitors. There Gehlen began an alliance with the United States that ultimately took him back to Germany to create an intelligence unit working for G-2 and CIC. With the OSS abolished, central intelligence initially was not in on this play.

  Creating an American relationship with Reinhard Gehlen provided an early illustration of a recurring theme in U.S. intelligence practice—making deals with the bad guys. With President Roosevelt having made World War II a struggle of democracy against dictatorship, victory over Germany entailed so-called denazification, the process of destroying the Nazi ideology not only by prosecuting top Nazis at war crimes trials but by prohibiting former Nazi officials from participating in the postwar political life of their country. So the question in 1945 became, how much of a Nazi was Reinhard Gehlen? The evidence on that issue is mixed. The German army did not equate to the Nazis or their party military and intelligence entities, and Gehlen is not known to have been a party member, but there was no doubt he protected staff who were, which under occupation rules disqualified him from service.

  Gehlen is merely the exemplar. A long list of former Nazis, people like Josef Mengele, Klaus Barbie, Emil Augsburg, Gustav Hilger, Hans Herwarth, and many more, all formidable Nazis, evaded prosecution, were sometimes helped to escape on “rat line” routes kept open by U.S. intelligence, or even ended up working with the Americans. The CIA developed an entire operation called Project Bloodstone to exploit these Germans. The executive agent for Bloodstone was Wisner’s man Carmel Offie. In each case authorities rationalized decisions with variations on the argument that a pact with the devil is good if it may help save heaven. That argument bears a cost for the United States when the need arises to demonstrate that professed democratic values truly drive U.S. policies. In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. decisions were consistently in favor of pacts with assorted devils. There were at least three major instances: Bloodstone, in which more than $5 million was directly spent to employ known Nazis on U.S. security projects; Operation Paperclip, in which former Nazi scientists were brought to the United States to continue developing technologies under American auspices; and Operation Rusty, the Gehlen organization. In each case Nazi connections of individuals were minimized and on occasion covered up. A number of those actions later backfired.

  In view of the need to use individuals of ill repute, or defectors who needed to be brought into the country, or to have means to encourage recruitment of foreign nationals, the CIA sought to suspend immigration law in bringing people into the United States. In 1949 Congress modified the CIA portion of the National Security Act to permit the agency to bring up to 120 foreigners a year into the country outside normal immigration channels. Funds assigned the DCI for contingencies were also to be available to pay these people. The action taken with Reinhard Gehlen became an early example of this practice.

  The Gehlen Organization was installed at Pullach, near Munich, in December 1947, at the time still working for the U.S. Army. Gehlen hired his specialists on the Soviets without regard for their pasts; some of his best had been Nazi party activists. Others were from the Nazi security services. No one seemed to bat an eye though the CIC carried out a secret monitoring effort for several years. The army’s Counter Intelligence Corps initially assigned Col. Russell Philp to supervise Operation Rusty. The Central Intelligence Group had its own liaison, Samuel Brossard. The latter surveyed Gehlen’s group, interviewing its deputy director, Eric Waldman, to make a recommendation as to whether CIG—soon CIA—should take over its care and feeding. Central intelligence initially rejected that course. Admiral Hillenkoetter even recommended that the Gehlen unit be abolished.

  Yet by 1948 the Gehlen Organization was fully functional and the Soviet threat had become paramount. By then the army had begun winding down activities in Germany and wished to rid itself of Gehlen. Another policy review, conducted jointly by the army and CIA, became the order of the day. Col. Charles Bromley would be the chief army representative. The man from the CIA—also from the army actually, but in the reserve, having just joined the agency—was James M. Critchfield, a highly decorated wartime commander of an infantry battalion. In the last days of the war Critchfield had actually led his troops right past the mountain where Gehlen hid. Critchfield continued into Austria, where he returned later as a young colonel with the Counter Intelligence Corps. He joined the CIA in the summer of 1948. Richard Helms approved personnel assignments for Germany at the time, and Critchfield’s file went to him. Helms felt he’d made an excellent choice. Critchfield’s original assignment, to create an intelligence activity aimed at the Russians, morphed into the Gehlen review. Critchfield began that September at Pullach with no CIA or army input, no files, nothing. His army colleague soon dropped out. Gehlen and his assistants, Eric Waldman and Heinz Herre, were Critchfield’s main points of contact. The CIA officer found no one among the three hundred in the organization at the time whose names appeared on the occupation authority’s automatic arrest lists. He ended up filing a lengthy cable arguing there was little alternative to adopting the Gehlen Organization, though he cautioned that the CIA should study Gehlen’s setup longer before deciding on closer connections. Frank Wisner volunteered to take up the account. The Office of Policy Coordination, unencumbered by CIA’s fears about Gehlen, picked up where the army left off, and a formal agreement on cooperation went into effect in June 1949.

  Code-named Marshall from his Vienna days, Jim Critchfield became the chief of base at Pullach. His deputy, Peer de Silva, had helped manage security for the atomic bomb project in World War II. Another, Henry Pleasants, had been a noted music critic and served with Critchfield in Vienna. The two once suggested to Critchfield that Gehlen be dumped. The base chief refused. Through Critchfield the CIA provided money, equipment, and advice for the Germans and passed on orders from Washington. The Organization in turn provided intelligence, both analysis and raw reports, from a few networks it imagined had been salvaged from the debris of the war. The “Org,” as it was called—and this would be crucial for the CIA’s secret war—provided training bases which would accommodate a variety of Eastern European and Soviet emigrés and defectors being groomed as agents or infiltrators. The CIA’s secret armies began here.