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.

This Day in CIA History (U.S. Misses Out on Chance to Eliminate bin Laden)

December 20, 1998—In the second of three documented chances from May 1998 to February 1999, U.S. intelligence reported that it had positively identified the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and that the terrorist mastermind could be killed if authorities acted quickly. President Bill Clinton, however, decided to pass, fearful of “collateral damage” – i.e., the number of innocent bystanders who might be killed or wounded--to a nearby mosque.

Following 9/11, the question of responsibility for the disaster became a political football. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted to be tagged as the party responsible for the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the suicide attacks.

But, as Noel Sheppard has noted in the blog “American Thinker”, the 9/11 Commission produced “a purely political report that tap-danced around specifics to protect both presidential Administrations involved from embarrassment. As a result, we ended up with more questions than answers, wasting a lot of time and taxpayer money in the process.”

The Bush administration has rightly come in for criticism for failing to pursue the threat posed by al Qaeda both in the nine months leading up to 9/11 and especially in the 30 last urgent days before the attacks. Hillary Clinton noted that if her husband had received a classified report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” he would have paid it far more urgent attention than the Bush administration did.

One problem, though: Bill Clinton had received an urgent warning in his Presidential Daily Brief on December 4, 1998, entitled: “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” That report, as well as the Aug. 7, 1998 al Qaeda truck bombings against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 247 people and wounded 5,000 more, formed the backdrop to the events of December 20.

One of the principals involved in the planning of the December 20 operation on bin Laden was Michael Scheuer, a 22-year-veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who headed up the bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999. As soon as he received the report that bin Laden would be spending the night at the Haji Habash House, part of the governor’s residence in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he relayed the message to CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy, John Gordon.

A teleconference was immediately arranged to consider the feasibility of a cruise missile strike to take out bin Laden. The principal question that came before the principals in the teleconference was the potential for collateral damage.

A sharp division of opinion developed over this. General Anthony Zinni, who had been busy that month organizing air strikes against Iraq to degrade its weapons of mass destruction program, insisted that collateral damage could amount to more than 200 people, as well as the mosque.

A senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the mosque wouldn’t be touched and that collateral damage would amount to no more than 100 people. By the end of the meeting, the parties involved agreed to recommend to President Clinton that he not order a strike on this occasion.

Conservative critics of Clinton have seized on the results of this meeting to claim that the President missed a golden opportunity to take out bin Laden. They found some support in Scheuer himself (who, it happens, is a stringent critic of George W. Bush as well as Bill Clinton), who claimed afterward that he could not sleep after the decision.

I don’t think that claim is quite the “slam-dunk” it appears. With the hindsight of 20/20, it may seem obvious that we shouldn’t have passed up the chance to seize the terrorist who was fast becoming a mortal enemy of the U.S. But seven years after the U.S. struck back against the Taliban in Afghanistan, collateral damage remains a controversial issue in the country. General Zinni was rightly worried about the disastrous effect this could have on public opinion in that country.

Passing up three occasions to strike against bin Laden in a nine-month period, however, is excessive. It is, in fact, illustrative of a larger pattern of the past 40 years.

As I argued in a prior post, American authorities had been blind for more than 30 years, dating back to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, to the grave threat to America posed by Islamic extremism. With each passing year, that threat came closer and closer.

Both parties were distracted in fighting it, their minds consumed by more immediate threats (in the Reagan years, as suicide bombing manifested itself as a serious threat in Lebanon, the Republicans were obsessed by Soviet relations; in December 1998, Clinton and the Democrats were not only juggling bin Laden and the attacks on Iraq, but the impeachment of Clinton—the President had declared his intention to fight his ouster only the day before the urgent teleconference on bin Laden).