The Very Best Men

The Daring Early Years of the CIA

Evan Thomas

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439127759
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Very Best Men is the story of the CIA's early days as told through the careers of four glamorous, daring, and idealistic men who ran covert operations for the government from the end of World War II to Vietnam. Evan Thomas re-creates the personal dramas and sometimes tragic lives of Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald, who risked everything to contain the Soviet threat. Within the inner circles of Washington, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war—by stealth and "political action" and to do by cunning and sleight of hand what great armies could not, must not be allowed to do. In the end, they were too idealistic and too honorable, and were unsuited for the dark, duplicitous life of spying. Their hubris and naïveté led them astray, producing both sensational coups and spectacular blunders like the Bay of Pigs and the failed assassination attempts on foreign leaders in the early 1960s. Thomas draws on the CIA's own secret histories, to which he has had exclusive access, as well as extensive interviews, to bring to life a crucial piece of American history.

Chapter One

CRUSADER

“Fair play? That’s out.”

IN THE FALL of 1948, Frank Wisner, the newly appointed director of the Office of Policy Coordination, was looking for the very best men. He needed to find them quickly, to staff his new outfit, a top-secret organization created to run covert actions in the Cold War.

Wisner wanted amateurs, not ex-FBI agents, former cops, bureaucrats, or, as he called them, “whiskey colonels” who couldn’t wait to get to the Officers Club in the evening. Wisner spoke of the “added dimension” that he couldn’t find among the paper pushers and timeservers working in the federal buildings along the Mall. He wanted men who would show initiative, who would be innovative, a little quirky if necessary, but bold. They needed to be fluent in foreign languages, and they needed grace and confidence under pressure. The place to find these men, he believed, was on Wall Street, among the bankers and lawyers who had joined the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency, and then drifted back to their peacetime jobs; and from among the graduating classes at their old schools, which generally meant Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.¹

The code name for the CIA’s connection to the Ivy League was “the P Source” (not hard to crack; “P” stood for professor). For some years in the 1950s, the CIA recruiter at Princeton was the dean of students, William Lippincott. “How would you like to serve your country in a different way?” he would ask promising young men. Another recruiter in the early years was the Yale crew coach, Skip Walz. He would work the boathouse and the field house, Mory’s and fraternity row, looking for strong young shoulders and quick minds. When the Korean War called for some beef, he broadened his recruiting ground to the National Football League, producing twenty-five former players who would be trained, he was told, for parachuting behind enemy lines. Once every three weeks Walz would meet with his agency contact at the Reflecting Pool in Washington. Walz would pass on his names; he “did not know, or wish to know,” Robin Winks writes in Cloak and Gown, which ones actually signed on—or what became of them. (He had heard that his first two recruits died in the field.)²

In 1950, Walz took a job with a company that manufactured precision gunsights, and he shifted his recruiting territory to the club car between Greenwich and New York. One can imagine what it was like, in this era of the Man in the Gray Flannel suit, for that restless young lawyer riding the 6:43. Perhaps he is bored by probating wills or flyspecking debenture statements. Perhaps, if he is a veteran, he feels a nostalgic longing for the danger and camaraderie of the war. Along comes Skip Walz to chat about the Harvard-Yale boat race—and, by the way, something else. . . .

Many Yale (and Harvard and Princeton) men felt a longing to escape. Their lives were so prescribed, beginning with their college “careers.” This romantic urge to get off the safe treadmill is captured by the “Whiffenpoof” song, the sweet, sad ballad (lifted from a drinking song by Rudyard Kipling) that Yalemen link arms to sing:

We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,

Baa! Baa! Baa!

Little black sheep who have gone astray

Baa! Baa! Baa!

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree

Damned from here to Eternity

Lord have mercy on such as we

Baa! Baa! Baa!³

Frank Wisner’s OPC offered young men a chance to serve their country, in Dean Lippincott’s carefully chosen phrase, “in a different way.” Bill Colby, a Princetonian and OSSer who signed on (and later became the director of Central Intelligence), credited Wisner with creating “the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templars, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness. . . . ” Joining the OPC was “a rather glamorous and fashionable and certainly a most patriotic thing to do,” writes Colby in his memoirs, Honorable Men.⁴

World War II had ended American squeamishness about spying. In 1929, Henry Stimson had abolished the Black Chamber, a code-breaking outfit, under the quaint notion that “gentlemen do not open other gentlemen’s mail.” Hitler, and now Stalin, clearly did not qualify. In 1947, American moviegoers watched the hero of Cloak and Dagger, played by Gary Cooper, listening to his OSS instructor, played by Jimmy Cagney, lecture on the reality of secret war: “The average American is a good sport, plays by the rules. But this war is no game, and no secret agent is a good sport—no living agent . . . Fair play? That’s out.”⁵

Spying, covert action, and psychological warfare were in. To work for Frank Wisner was romantic and dashing. Over time the amateurs would become cynics, and intelligence would become a cult. But in 1948 it was still a crusade.

FRANK GARDINER WISNER had grown up in a world that was, like the one the CIA would help create, secretive, insular, elitist, and secure in the rectitude of its purpose.⁶

Wisner’s family built nearly all of the town of Laurel, Mississippi—the schools, the churches, the museum, the bank, the parks, the golf course, the cemetery. All the land and many of the buildings were donated by the Gardiner and Wisner clans, paid for with the money made cutting and sawing logs at the local mill, which they also built. The company headquarters, erected in 1910, the year Wisner was born, looks incongruous today, backing on a shopping mall. The building is an exact copy of the sixteenth-century casino of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Caprarola, Italy.

In later years, Wisner was regarded, even by intimates, as a remote figure; capable of charm and warmth, yet somehow not quite all there. Certainly his upbringing set him apart, in ways that at once elevated and burdened him. The Wisners and Gardiners believed in moral uplift. The Eastman/Gardiner Company did not exploit its workers like some other southern lumber companies; it went to a ten-hour day before the law required and built sanitary housing in the lumber camps out of old railway cars.⁷ “My family believed it was from Mississippi, but not Mississippian,” said a Gardiner descendant, Charles Reeder. By that he meant that his family had no plantation roots and was decent to blacks, which took some courage in a state where night riders planted burning crosses on the lawns of “nigger lovers.” “We believed every person was a child of God,” said Jean Lindsey, whose mother, Frank Wisner’s sister Elizabeth, discovered and promoted the black opera singer Leontyne Price. (“Leontyne used to call herself our chocolate sister,” said Lindsey.) Wisner and Gardiner children were expected to “go forth and do good,” said Jean Lindsey. “We were told that to whom much is given, much is expected. It was all very Victorian: never complain, never explain.”

It was also privileged and self-contained. As a little boy, Wisner did not dress himself; he merely lay on his bed and raised his arms and legs for his maid. His playmates were almost invariably his cousins. “The only people he saw were his own family,” said Lindsey. “We had a kind of enclave,” said Admiral Fred Reeder, who married a Gardiner after the First World War. “You didn’t need any outside contact. You had all you needed right here.”

Wisner was an intense child. His cousin Gardiner Green recalled that he never walked anywhere; he always ran. Somewhat small and sickly, he built himself up by lifting weights (like his hero, Teddy Roosevelt). His father tried to build his spirit by enrolling him in the St. Andrew’s Society, under the mentoring of a World War I pilot-turned-Episcopal priest who taught the boys to be “young Galahads,” said Charles Reeder. “You pledge to spend time in service to your fellow man, to be a straight shooter, and to pray a lot.” The praying part did not take; when he got older, Wisner infuriated his father by refusing to go to church.

Wisner’s moral training was matched by a love of games. Beneath a fey manner, his mother was highly competitive, and Wisner learned to compete fiercely at everything from football to parlor games like mah-jongg. Wisner’s aristocratic sensibility, as well as his insularity, was further refined at Woodberry Forest School, in Orange, Virginia. Founded by a Confederate captain after the Civil War, Woodberry preached chivalry. “Give me clean hands, clean words, and clean thoughts,” begins the school prayer. “Help me stand for the hard right against the easy wrong.” The school was run under an honor code. There were no locks or keys; boys left a white handkerchief on the door if they did not wish to be disturbed.⁸

The University of Virginia, where Wisner went to both college and law school, was more like a private school than “State U.” in the 1930s. The young gentlemen at Mr. Jefferson’s university wore coats and ties and stood up when a teacher entered the room. They also wildly drank grain alcohol punches at their fraternities on the weekend. The great honor was to be tapped by the Sevens, a society so ostentatiously secret that the names of its members were not revealed until death.

Compact and restless, with a gap-tooth grin and bright eyes, Wisner was a great sprinter and hurdler at U.Va., good enough to be asked to the Olympic trials in 1936. His father said no; it would be more character-building to work the summer in a Coca-Cola bottling plant. He had a somewhat ornate sense of humor, which he showed by telling elaborate tall tales and drawing cartoons. In bankruptcy class one day Wisner handed his seatmate, Arthur Jacobs, a drawing of “the courts squeezing debtors, with the creditors lined up with their tongues sticking out to get the droppings.” Still, Wisner was regarded as more serious and mature than the hell-raisers in the DKE house. He could drink beer on fraternity row, but he was more apt to be found at a professor’s for dinner. He was, inevitably, tapped for the Seven Society.⁹

This combination of high moral purpose and gamesmanship, acted out on a self-consciously higher plane, stayed with Wisner all his life. Years later his nephew Charles Reeder lived for a time with the Wisners in London, where Frank was the CIA chief of station. “Somewhere deep in him,” said Reeder, “you knew it was the evil empire versus the good guys. You knew it was part of him. And that it was a great game, to be played with great ferocity.” The problem, Wisner discovered after he got to Washington, was that the moral issues were not always so black and white, and the victories against more ruthless opponents, like the Soviet Union, were rare.

WISNER WITNESSED the greatest moral outrage of his life, the Soviet takeover of Romania, as a spy during World War II. Bored as a Wall Street lawyer, he had enlisted in the Navy six months before Pearl Harbor. But he was relegated to shuffling paper in the Navy censor’s office and yearned to see action. (He had been mortified, shortly after America entered the war, when passengers on a subway stood and applauded him as he entered, wearing a naval uniform, hobbling on crutches. His “war wound” was an ankle twisted in a weekend touch football game.) In July 1943, Wisner arranged a transfer to the OSS through Robert Gooch, an old professor from U.Va., a former Rhodes scholar who had an interest in espionage.

Wisner’s early experiences at spying ranged from marginally useful to comical. After an uneventful tour in Cairo, he landed in June 1944 in Istanbul, where he worked for a man named Lanning “Packy” MacFarland. Ordered to meet MacFarland at a nightclub there, Wisner tried to be inconspicuous, to preserve his cover as a consular clerk. But when MacFarland made his entrance the music stopped, a spotlight picked him out on the steps leading to the dance floor, and the orchestra struck up a song called “Boop, Boop, Baby, I’m a Spy!” MacFarland, who had two girlfriends, one working for the Soviets, the other for the Germans, later went AWOL.¹⁰

Wisner’s war didn’t really begin until he arrived in Bucharest, Romania, just as the Germans were pulling out in August 1944. His first assignment was to organize the return of 1,800 American fliers shot down over the Ploe

ti oil fields (a success: Wisner commandeered every bus in the city), but his real job soon became keeping an eye on the Russians.

Within a month Wisner was reporting “from a dependable industrial source” that “the Soviet Union is attempting to subvert the position of the government and the King.” Not only that, but “Russian sources” were telling Wisner of the Kremlin’s goal of “political and economic domination of Southeast Europe, including Turkey.” Headquarters in Washington wasn’t quite ready to hear that its wartime ally was turning into the Red Menace. General William Donovan, the head of OSS, cautioned Wisner in October “against speech or action” that might show “antagonism to Russia.” Wisner responded defensively that he was “at all time exercising the utmost care” not to appear to be siding with the Romanian government against the communists.¹¹

In fact, he was deeply involved in palace intrigue in Bucharest, a city that fancied itself as the Paris of the Balkans. Wisner had requisitioned the thirty-room mansion of Romania’s largest brewer, Mita Bragadiru, along with his Cadillac Eldorado. He befriended the brewer’s wife, Tanda Caradja, a twenty-four-year-old Romanian princess (descendant of Vlad the Impaler) with a wide sensuous mouth and close ties to the royal family. “I became his hostess,” she said. “He wanted to meet everyone right away in court society,” which she was able to arrange because, she explained with a smile, “when you’re rich and above all a good-looking girl, you know a lot of people.” She threw elaborate parties for King Michael’s advisers (so young they were known as “the Nursery”) and invited the Russians as well, advising Wisner to coat his stomach with olive oil for the vodka toasts.

Wisner naturally gravitated to the local elite. He soon became close to King Michael and the Queen Mother, who invited him to her castle and found him well-mannered and self-assured. “Il est tellement calme et tranquille dans ces propos,” she told Caradja in her court French. Wisner became an informal adviser to the royal family and, according to Caradja, the life of the party. “He loved dancing and entertainment. He did magic tricks and charades and played backgammon.” A photo in a Wisner family album shows Wisner, in the uniform of an American naval commander, squinting at a makeup mirror as he tries to fire a shotgun backwards over his shoulder.¹²

Some of Wisner’s staff were put off. A member of Wisner’s group recorded, “After about two months, the American Military Unit decided to move away from the Bragadiru residence on the Alea Modrogan. Eating, working, sleeping, drinking, and loving other men’s wives all under one roof while husbands and enlisted men were around was just a bit too much for some of us.” Beverly Bowie, a staffer assigned to Bucharest, later lampooned Wisner in the novel Operation Bughouse as Commander Downe, a manic OSS operative who sets up headquarters in the large house of Madama Nitti and immediately implores Washington to declare war on the Soviet Union.¹³

Wisner actually did use the names of germs for his codes (his own was Typhoid), but he was not being paranoid about the Russians. On January 6, 1945, Stalin ordered the Red Army to round up all m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Crusader
• Chapter Two: Rollback
• Chapter Three: The Cavalier
• Chapter Four: Empire Building
• Chapter Five: The War Lover
• Chapter Six: A Mind of His Own
• Chapter Seven: Running the World
• Chapter Eight: Coup
• Chapter Nine: The Spy War
• Chapter Ten: Collapse
• Chapter Eleven: Brother’s Keeper
• Chapter Twelve: High Flier
• Chapter Thirteen: A Clandestine World
• Chapter Fourteen: Plots
• Chapter Fifteen: Shoot-Down
• Chapter Sixteen: Plausible Deniability
• Chapter Seventeen: Invasion
• Chapter Eighteen: Fiasco
• Chapter Nineteen: Secret Armies
• Chapter Twenty: Hard Target
• Chapter Twenty-One: Blowback
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Casualties of War
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Photographs
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright