Frank Wisner


 * For his son, the diplomat, see Frank G. Wisner.

Frank Gardiner Wisner (June 23, 1909 – October 29, 1965) was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s.

Education
He was educated at Woodberry Forest School in Orange County, Virginia, and the University of Virginia, where he received both B.A. and LL.B. degrees. He was also tapped for the Seven Society.

OSS
After graduating, Wisner worked as a Wall Street lawyer. In 1941, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the United States Navy. He worked in the Navy's censor's office until he was able to get a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He was stationed first in Turkey, and then in Romania, where he became head of OSS operations in southeastern Europe. This happened just prior to the Romanian royal coup of August 23, 1944. At Wisner's behest, King Michael I of Romania permitted the United States to fly out Allied prisoners of war. On August 29, some 1,350 American airmen who had been held prisoners in Romania were rescued by an U.S. Air Crew Rescue Unit, with Soviet troops only days away from entering Bucharest. Despite continuing fighting between Romanian and Red Army forces, and the presence of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in the immediate Bucharest area, the rescue team used the Popeşti-Leordeni Airfield. Twelve B-17 Flying Fortress flew out the prisoners in hourly shifts. In all, some 1,700 American POWs were rescued with the help of the Romanians.

Later, Wisner's main task was to spy on the activities of the Soviet Union. Wisner's agents managed to penetrate the Romanian Communist Party and the Red Army's headquarters in Bucharest. He learned that the Soviet Union planned to take over all of Eastern Europe, and was disappointed at the U.S. failure to move to prevent it. He advised the Romanian royal family to go into exile.

In March 1945, Wisner was transferred to Wiesbaden, where he served as OSS liaison to the Gehlen Organisation. In 1946, he returned to law practice, joining the New York City law firm of Carter Ledyard.

CIA
Wisner was recruited in 1947 by Dean Acheson to join the State Department's Office of Occupied Territories. In 1948, the CIA created a covert action division, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Frank Wisner was put in charge of the operation and recruited many of his old friends from Carter Ledyard. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

In 1947 Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media. In 1952, he became head of the Directorate of Plans, with Richard Helms as his chief of operations. This office had control of 75% of the CIA budget. In this position, he was instrumental in supporting pro-American forces that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala following the Alfhem affair.

The FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Senator Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.

Hoover and Senator McCarthy succeeded in forcing CIA director Allen W. Dulles to dismiss one of his key staff members, Carmel Offie in 1953 over Wisner's objections.

Wisner worked closely with Kim Philby, the British agent who was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy.

He was also deeply involved in establishing the Lockheed U-2 spy plane program run by Richard M. Bissell, Jr.

Wisner was devastated when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As OPC director, he believed that an important opportunity for "rollback" was forfeited in October–November 1956, when Hungarian reformist leader Imre Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and when he and Hungarian insurgents called on the West for help against invading Soviet troops. President Eisenhower, however, deemed it too risky to intervene militarily in a landlocked country such as Hungary, and he feared it might trigger a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Moreover, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mistakenly believed that Nagy sided with the Soviet Union. On October 25, 1956, Dulles sent a telegram to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade expressing his fears that the Imre Nagy–János Kádár government might take "reprisals" against the Hungarian "freedom fighters". By the next day, October 26, State Department officials in Washington assumed the worse about Nagy, asserting in a top secret memorandum: "Nagy's appeal for Soviet troops indicates, at least superficially, that there are not any open differences between the Soviet and Hungarian governments." While some inflammatory broadcasts by the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe by themselves certainly neither caused the Hungarian Revolution nor the subsequent Soviet crackdown, the Kremlin leaders exploited the foreign radio broadcasts as an ex post facto excuse. But Wisner took this in stride. "[T]hey do this because... they can’t stand the truth; they can’t stand the thing being understood throughout the world or within the Soviet Union as a genuine revolt."

Soon after the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian revolution, Wisner suffered a breakdown, and was diagnosed as a manic depressive. He underwent psychoanalysis and was subjected to electroshock therapy. After spending 6 months at The Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, he was released in 1958. CIA Director Allen Dulles named Wisner Chief of the CIA's London Station, but he was still suffering from mental illness. In 1962, he was recalled to Washington, D.C., and agreed to retire from the CIA.

Personal life
Wisner was born in Laurel, Mississippi to parents Frank George Wisner, a lumberman (March 5, 1873 in Clinton, Iowa – died April 24, 1938), and Mary Jeannette Gardiner (August 21, 1875 in Clinton, Iowa – died October 13, 1959). They were married on September 28, 1897 in Lyons, Iowa. He married Mary Ellis Knowles (June 28, 1912 in Pensacola, Florida – July 9, 2002; remarried in 1975 to newspaperman Clayton Fritchey). They had four children: Frank G. Wisner, Ellis Wisner, Graham Wisner, and Elizabeth "Wendy" Hazard.

Frank Wisner committed suicide using one of his son's shotguns. His funeral service was held at the Bethlehem Chapel in the Washington National Cathedral. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery as a naval commander, his wartime rank.