This Day in CIA History (Frank Wisner, Former Ops Head, Kills Self)

Oct. 29, 1965— Frank Wisner, a workaholic former operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency who directed multiple controversial covert activities in the early era of the Cold War, committed suicide at age 56 on the family farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The death was the third in two decades of important figures who had shocked Washington by taking their own lives. In 1949, after being asked to resign as Defense Secretary by President Harry Truman, James Forrestal (whom I profiled in this prior post) had leaped from a window while under psychiatric care in Walter Reed Hospital. Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, killed himself with a shotgun in 1963.

All three men suffered from severe depression, with Wisner and Graham now formally diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and Forrestal exhibiting behavior that has led to more recent diagnoses of delusional disorder or schizophrenia. 

The stress of being in a position of significant responsibility—and, sometimes, not measuring up to it—can result in feelings of worthlessness that lead to self-destructive behavior. Though, unlike Forrestal or Graham, he was little known to the general public, Wisner, by virtue of his leadership in the nuclear age, was as important a figure as either.

Mental illness was not the only tie among these three men. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence organization to which Wisner had belonged, was disbanded, Forrestal supported his lobbying effort for a replacement agency. Moreover, when Wisner, as head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) authorized Operation Mockingbird in an alleged attempt to influence American and foreign media, he selected Graham to run the project.

These contacts with Forrestal and Graham were only a couple of examples of how Wisner organized a network of mentors, friends, and proteges to further his intelligence activities.

I first became aware of these “global salvationists” intent on countering international Communist influence in Burton Hersh’s 1992 account, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, which examined him in relation to Eisenhower cold warriors John Foster Dulles and younger brother Allen; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner.

Later, in the 1990s, Evan Thomas, in The Very Best Men, changed the focus to how Wisner interacted with colleagues Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald in the CIA's formative period up to the Vietnam War.

These and other government officials, politicians, and journalists formed part of an elite “Georgetown social set” that, according to Thomas, “shared the same social background, the same ideals, and the same confidence in America’s role in the world.” Perhaps none embodied its aggressiveness and risk-taking quite like Wisner.

The key event in his career occurred towards the end of World War II, when, while stationed in Bucharest in the fall of 1944, he warned his OSS superiors that the Soviets were taking over Romania. 

Haunted by his failure to prevent this early maneuver in the campaign to pull Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence, Wisner was determined to combat the regime’s infiltration at every turn, there and elsewhere around the world, a far-flung set of espionage and psychological warfare operations that became known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.”

With little to no American experience with spycraft before WWII, Presidents of both parties had no record for assessing what worked and what wouldn’t. Two of the more audacious CIA activities sanctioned by Wisner—coups against elected leaders orchestrated in Iran and Guatemala—were initially deemed successful in that they toppled regimes deemed friendly to the Soviets.

Within a quarter century, however, policymakers were grappling with the consequences of the coups: mistrust about American motives throughout Latin America, and in Iran, a revolution that put in power the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hostile theocratic regime.

In Eastern Europe, Wisner was willing to accept ex-Nazis if they would help strike back against the USSR. CIA backing of dissidents within the Eastern bloc could not dislodge the Soviets, however, and the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution only fed Wisner’s frustration and guilt over encouraging it with propaganda without US military backing.

In December 1956, Wisner suffered a nervous breakdown that several friends attributed to the failed uprising. Psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive treatment were not enough to alleviate his condition.

With access to Wisner’s medical records provided by his children, Douglas Waller contends in the biography The Determined Spy that the spymaster’s mental illness predated any malaise he may have felt about being transferred from Langley to a less consequential London posting. That’s surely true, but the ambitious Wisner’s sense that he was being placed on the shelf surely didn’t help his frame of mind.

Wisner retired in 1962 from the agency to which he had brought his unflagging energy and willingness to push against legal and ethical norms to bring down the Soviets. A lucrative consulting business over the next three years did little to assuage his growing anguish, until he borrowed a shotgun from one of his sons and killed himself.