This remained inadequate. In delineating the CIA’s responsibility to seek project approval, the directive mentioned “need to know”; the agency interpreted this to mean that not all elements of a plan had to be briefed or approved. When CIA insisted it had been completely forthcoming, Eisenhower countered by setting up a panel of designees of the White House, State, and the Pentagon plus the DCI. Ike’s designee was his special assistant for national security affairs. This committee was so high-powered there could be no question of its “need to know.” It became known as the 5412 Group after the directive that established it, NSC-5412/2 of December 28, 1955, or informally as the “Special Group.”

  Any problems with a project went to the president through his special assistant, who spoke with the voice of the boss. Eisenhower preserved “deniability” by not actually participating in the 5412 Group, but he remained in constant contact with each member. The president also held White House postmortems, like those following Iran and Guatemala, along with semi-annual reviews of ongoing and planned projects that the CIA presented to the full NSC.

  Eisenhower’s commitment to the Cold War is clearly demonstrated in NSC-5412/2. The directive provided the secret warriors with the broadest possible charter, the breadth of which is still worth quoting in its entirety:

  3. The NSC has determined that such covert operations shall to the greatest extent practicable, in the light of U.S. and Soviet capabilities and taking into account the risk of war, be designed to:

  a. Create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism, impair relations between the USSR and Communist China and between them and their satellites, complicate control within the USSR, Communist China and their satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc.

  b. Discredit the prestige and ideology of International Communism, and reduce the strength of its parties and other elements.

  c. Counter any threat of a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control to achieve dominant power in a free world country.

  d. Reduce International Communist control over any areas of the world.

  e. Strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the peoples and nations of the free world, accentuate, wherever possible, the identity of interest between such peoples and nations and the United States as well as favoring, where appropriate, those groups genuinely advocating or believing in the advancement of such mutual interests, and increase the capacity and will of such peoples and nations to resist International Communism.

  f. In accordance with established policies and to the extent practicable in areas dominated or threatened by International Communism, develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and ensure availability of those forces in the event of war, including wherever practicable provision of a base upon which the military may expand these forces in time of war within active theaters of operations as well as provide for stay behind assets and escape and evasion facilities.

  This turgid prose encompassed a universe of possibilities. The CIA spent decades exploring them.

  One critical controversy concerned legislative oversight of the intelligence function. The executive branch itself posed the issue in 1955 when another study group under the Hoover Commission, mandated by Eisenhower, looked at the situation. Gen. Mark Clark, an old army colleague of the president’s, led the study and took a jaundiced view. Clark recommended a congressional joint committee on intelligence, similar to the panel that watched over atomic energy. Soon there were a score of bills before Congress proposing to regulate intelligence, including one by Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana with no fewer than thirty-four co-sponsors.

  Although Ike had requested the Hoover Commission’s report, he rejected Clark’s recommendation and moved to head off the Mansfield Bill. His dual response embodied formation of the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA), a citizen consulting group working directly for him, plus supporting supervision by existing secret subcommittees of armed services panels in both houses of Congress. The subcommittees gave form to amorphous arrangements. The Senate defeated the Mansfield Bill by a vote of 59 to 27. More than a dozen co-sponsors turned against their bill on the floor, as well as all the members of the armed services intelligence subcommittee. For years bills similar to Mansfield’s were introduced at every session of Congress but repeatedly tabled or vanquished.

  Despite the more formal structure, this could not be called oversight. Intelligence officers had no duty to cooperate with PBCFIA, strictly a presidential advisory group, or to keep the congressional subcommittees fully and currently informed of their activities. Agency directors appeared with budget requests, and the CIA would answer explicit questions if asked, but no one volunteered anything.

  Contacts on programs, as opposed to briefings on questions of intelligence analysis, were kept to a minimum. According to official records, in 1955 and 1956 the CIA provided just one briefing to the Senate’s armed services subcommittee, with none at all in 1957. The average for the decade from 1955 on works out to fewer than two a year.

  Such encounters as occurred were hampered by CIA’s obsession to protect itself and its “sources and methods” on security grounds. Real reasons could be quite different. On one occasion in the 1950s, when Allen Dulles expected tough inquiries as a result of successful Soviet penetration of a CIA covert operation, the director told his assembled DO division chiefs, “Well, I guess I’ll have to fudge the truth a little.” With a twinkle in his eye, Dulles averred that he would admit the full truth to the subcommittee chairman, “that is, if [he] wants to know.” On another occasion, he commented to his assistants, “I’ll just tell them a few war stories.”

  If anything, the legislators made it easy for the secret warriors. Senior senators and congressmen on these subcommittees appreciated their access to the world of the spooks. Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts once expressed a typical attitude when he commented: “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.”

  As for the President’s Board of Consultants, Eisenhower relied upon the group not so much as the watchdog he alluded to but as collaborators on the stuff of intelligence. The best way to think of the board would be as efficiency experts. Ike underlined this by his selection for PBCFIA’s first chairman, Dr. James R. Killian, then the White House science adviser. The Killian Board, as it was often referred to, included other notable scientists, military men (among them General Doolittle), and a few captains of industry. It stimulated advances in intelligence technology but in these early years had little impact on covert action.

  So the secret warriors marched on, led by their president, insulated from outside inquiry, ordered to stir up trouble for the enemy—a Cold War agency with a mission. There remained questions of capability—an area in which Eisenhower would make extensive use of his private consultants but one where the president himself would have to engage.

  While President Eisenhower struggled to manage covert action, secret wars continued aplenty. The mid-fifties were a high point for secret warriors in Europe, especially in the use of pure psychological warfare to complicate Soviet control of Eastern Europe. The Americans took advantage of spontaneous outbursts of resistance within the Soviet satellites, the closest the Eisenhower administration ever came to fulfilling its commitment to “roll back” the Iron Curtain.

  If some had had their way, more than propaganda would have been involved. The CIA and the British had used Russians and Ukrainians for espionage and liaison behind the Iron Curtain. Eastern Europeans could be found in the army’s Tenth Special Forces, their entry facilitated by the 1950 Lodge Bill and an amendment to the 1951 Mutual Security Act that set aside specific funds for an army unit of Eastern Europeans. But aside from exiles integrated into Special Forces, the army did nothing with the mandate with which it had been saddled. Russian propagandists had a field day accusing the United States of subversion. Frank Wisner told Tracy Barnes in the winter of 1951 that the United States was taking a beating on this question. Congress nevertheless appropriated money in several budgets which the army did not use.

  When Eisenhower became president he tried to persuade the army to cooperate on the Eastern European unit. Instead his army general officer friends told him the many reasons they thought the unit could not function effectively.

  “Fellows, tell me this,” Ike countered, “just how high does a fellow have to go in this outfit before he can call the shots?”

  But army leaders continued to balk at creation of an Eastern European unit. The CIA then took the lead, recruiting what amounted to an American foreign legion. Hundreds of Eastern Europeans, hired, trained, and led by a Yugoslav exile, awaited orders to go home and fight. The code name Red Sox/Red Cap has been linked to this project. According to CIA officer James J. Angleton, the exile force ensured the CIA’s ability to act in an East Berlin–style crisis of Soviet control.

  President Eisenhower prescribed strategy quite strictly through a series of National Security Council directives. For Eastern Europe the governing orders were a general policy series along with the directive, “U.S. Objectives and Actions to Exploit the Unrest in the Satellite States,” adopted in the wake of the East Berlin riots. In February 1955 there followed “Exploitation of Soviet and European Satellite Vulnerabilities.” The administration reviewed progress on achieving the objectives of this latter policy at the end of that year. Thereafter, in July 1956, Ike adopted a revised directive. By then events already in motion triggered a renewed crisis in Eastern Europe.

  The 1956 crisis originated in Moscow, not Washington. In late February Nikita Khrushchev, consolidating his power as Stalin’s successor, criticized the deceased dictator in a secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev laid bare corruption and rigidity in Stalinism to discredit his Politburo rivals. The speech became an important lever in the Cold War. Here the leader of Russia admitted grave flaws in leadership. The speech even discussed Stalin’s personal interventions in the affairs of Hungary and Yugoslavia that led to an open split with the Yugoslavs, at least, who were driven into the hands of Washington. Khrushchev offered a new “socialist legality.” Here was political dynamite.

  Khrushchev’s political maneuver succeeded, but the text of his remarks reached the CIA. It materialized after Allen Dulles ordered a search, which, he writes, “I have always regarded as one of the major coups of my tour of duty.” One copy came from a Polish Communist and another courtesy of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. A further copy seems to have come from contacts on the Italian left. The text sat on Frank Wisner’s desk in the DO lair, I Building, “Quarters Eye,” by April 1956. The CIA undertook careful authentication both internally and with trusted academic Kremlinologists. Ray Cline, then chief of the Office of Current Intelligence, judged the Khrushchev text reliable.

  Use of the Khrushchev speech quickly became a point of contention, however. Cline recommended publishing it as a psychological warfare move. Frank Wisner favored selective secret use to mobilize active East European resistance. The question was decided at a very high level. Ray Cline recalls laboring with Dulles on a talk the DCI would deliver. It was a Saturday, June 2, 1956. Dulles suddenly interrupted this work, swung his chair around, and looked intently at the intelligence analyst.

  “Wisner says you think we ought to release the secret Khrushchev speech.”

  Cline related his reasoning. He writes that “the old man” had a twinkle in his eye when he answered, “By golly, I am going to make a policy decision!”

  Allen Dulles phoned Wisner and told the DDO he had given the matter great thought and had decided the speech should be printed.

  This version is suitably romantic, but the fact is that three days earlier, on May 31, Dulles had given a copy of the speech to national security adviser Dillon Anderson asking that secrecy be kept “pending a decision as to what, if any, public use should be made of this document.” It is inconceivable that Anderson did not go to the president on a matter of this importance. If Cline quotes Allen Dulles accurately, the DCI may have amused himself by hoodwinking his own OCI chief about a decision he had not made. This rendition infuriated Jim Angleton, case officer for the Israeli agents who helped with the Khrushchev speech. In retirement Angleton denounced the Cline account. The counterintelligence expert stayed true to form in believing that Frank Wisner’s option of secretly using the speech to foment resistance represented the proper course.

  Meanwhile the Khrushchev speech appeared in the press on June 4, 1956, the result of Eisenhower’s decision. That began a hot summer and fall in Eastern Europe.

  The consequences of the Khrushchev relations played into the CIA’s ongoing propaganda campaign. With saturation broadcasts RFE had moved ahead to specially targeted initiatives. Operation Veto, inaugurated in early 1954, encouraged long-term resistance to the Soviets, especially in Hungary. Operation Focus succeeded Veto. Both urged Hungarians to demand concessions from their Communist government. The CIA “Radio” beamed broadcasts into Hungary for twenty hours each day as the “Voice of Free Hungary,” supplemented by balloon leafleting, which peaked in 1954–1955 and had a major role in Focus. By this time RFE had a substantial capacity to exploit Khrushchev’s words. Surveys later showed that more than 80 percent of Hungarians listened to Radio Free Europe while 20 percent also got information from the balloon leaflets. According to the CIA’s own postmortem, in the four months between publication of the secret speech and the Hungarian revolution, Radio Free Europe exploited it heavily.

  There were also riots in Poznan, Poland, in reaction to the news of Khrushchev’s “destalinization.” With these came the return of the Communist faction of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a leader purged earlier for his belief in the existence of many roads toward socialism. Soviet troops deployed momentarily but Gomulka, threatening an open break with the Warsaw Pact, convinced Khrushchev to back down. Jan Nowak, heading RFE’s Polish broadcasters, kept the reporting low key, avoiding exacerbating the crisis. The Russian leader visited Poland and defused the issue. Khrushchev also went to Yugoslavia, where his talks led to a declaration that there were multiple roads to socialism. This too was featured on RFE. The news electrified Hungary.

  The CIA knew it had a problem. Eisenhower’s directives set a strategy of vigorous challenge to Soviet control. But the agency’s Eastern European exile legions, as Jim Angleton later confirmed, were far from ready. The Gladio arms caches could not be drawn down either—if this crisis brought war they would be needed. And the Radios had no action capability. In short, CIA faced a huge gap between the course it urged on the Eastern Europeans and its ability to offer practical assistance.

  About to embark on an inspection trip to Europe, Frank Wisner had Al Ulmer out to his vacation home on Maryland’s eastern shore. Though Ulmer now worked in the FE Division, he had headed stations in Athens and Vienna and had an idea of the enormity of the situation. The two men could only scratch their heads in frustration. Some sources maintain Wisner mentioned possible arms shipments to Hungarian rebels when he saw Richard Bissell at Quarters Eye after the weekend. Bissell’s own account completely ignores the Hungarian crisis. Others note a private meeting where Foster Dulles overruled his own diplomatic experts and brother Allen, who advised having U.S. forces hold military maneuvers in Austria. White House records show this option never reached the NSC table.

  On October 23 demonstrators swept through Budapest demanding a new government under Imre Nagy, a previously purged Hungarian Communist. Reinstalled as premier, Nagy’s opponents continued to control the party. RFE broadcasts encouraged Hungarians to press the Nagy regime on liberalization. Nagy sponsored reforms but, despite his resistance, party leaders invited Soviet forces to restore order. Agency psywar boss Cord Meyer, who had supervised RFE since 1954, awakened the morning of October 24 to a phone call from Dulles, who ordered him to headquarters immediately.

  “All hell has broken loose in Budapest,” Dulles thundered.

  In Paris by now, Frank Wisner gathered high-powered field officers to brainstorm a plan. They included William Durkee, a deputy to Meyer who had handled RFE almost from its inception; Michael Josselson, a CIA specialist on cultural operations; James MacCargar, with a Free Europe unit; Karl Kalassay, a Hungarian specialist; and William E. Griffith, political director for Radio Free Europe. They produced no fresh ideas. MacCargar brought in a former senior Hungarian politician and sent him to Vienna to contact figures at home, but that resulted in little more than exhortations. Wisner proceeded to Germany. Tracy Barnes found the DO chief so tightly wound he feared a nervous breakdown.

  Arrests by Hungarian secret police triggered widening revolt. Outraged citizens in the village of Magyarovar murdered members of one security detachment. But then ten thousand Russian troops entered Budapest. Within days street fighting engulfed the capital and the provinces. The story in CIA lore is that officers in Budapest scribbled reports lying on the floor of the U.S. embassy with bullets whizzing above their heads. RFE covered the events too, though according to the CIA postmortem, “no RFE broadcast to Hungary before the revolution could be considered as inciting armed revolt,” and none promised U.S. military intervention.