Starred review from March 1, 2025
In this sweeping, immersive, and full-bodied study, journalist Waller, who authored a 2011 biography of OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan, turns to another central figure in American spycraft, Frank Wisner, who died in February at the age of 86. As head of the CIA's opaquely named Office of Policy Coordination during the 1950s, Wisner created many of the country's most notable covert operations, from the overthrow of Iran's Mohammad Mossadegh and Guatemala's Jacobo �rbenz to efforts to push back Communism in Albania, Korea, Hungary, Suez, and points beyond. Waller is especially sensitive to the circumstances surrounding the controversial decisions Wisner was required to make during that most critical decade and to the many personal and professional relationships he had to skillfully navigate in postwar DC, from Wild Bill Donovan to Allen and John Foster Dulles, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Phil and Katherine Graham, J. Edgar Hoover, future CIA directors Richard Helms and Richard Colby, and three presidents--Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower--all of whom required both accountability and enough distance from Wisner's covert work to claim plausible deniability. Waller's fine volume ultimately asks and goes a long way in answering the question to what end, and at what cost?
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March 15, 2025
Comprehensive life of a troubled--and often troubling--founder of the CIA. Espionage writer Waller's long narrative begins at the beginning of Frank Wisner's end: a nervous breakdown culminating in an intervention by three friends in the national security game and a hospitalization for "a complete rest." Wisner would never quite recover, and he ended his own life after leaving the CIA under duress. Interestingly, Waller notes, the CIA all but expected its field agents to crack up, drink heavily, and require therapy, so it came as no surprise that the agency's "clandestine service chief was seriously ill." Wisner had the kind of imagination necessary for his job: He helped set up MKUltra, part of a program comprising scores of top-secret projects, this one involving dosing human subjects with LSD. Recruited into military intelligence during World War II, he saw the work of Soviet intelligence agents up close, which converted him to an implacable anti-communist, fully committed to the Western cause in the Cold War. This commitment played out in part by Wisner's insistence on hiring former Nazis to spy in the Soviet occupation zone, even as Wisner himself spied on French and British allies, discovering, among other things, that the French were also putting Nazi intelligence veterans to work. After the war Wisner recruited news agencies and film studios to such projects as a conspicuously anti-Stalinist animated version of George Orwell'sAnimal Farm. Students of modern intelligence and its political discontents will find an odd continuity in the CIA's being the target of a jealous J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, focused especially on rooting out gay agents, while Wisner fell afoul of Joseph McCarthy, even as he was spending his hours organizing such things as an "assassination capability" and executing mischief all over the world. A revealing look at the early history of a spy agency with a decidedly checkered past.
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March 21, 2025
Bestselling Waller (Lincoln's Spies) offers an intimate biography of early CIA leader Frank Wisner. Behind the scenes, Wisner planned some of the most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War. Waller also explores Wisner's bipolar disorder and its effect on his work and life. Prepub Alert.
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