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Evan Thomas is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers JOHN PAUL JONES, SEA OF THUNDER, and FIRST: SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. He appears regularly on many TV and radio talk shows. Thomas has taught at Harvard and Princeton.

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The Very Best Men

Simon & Schuster

Chapter One

CRUSADER

"Fair play? That's out. "

In the fall of 1948, Frank Wisner, the newly appointed directorof the Office of Policy Coordination, was looking for the very bestmen. He needed to find them quickly, to staff his new outfit, atop-secret organization created to run covert actions in the ColdWar.

Wisner wanted amateurs, not EX-FBI agents, former cops, bureaucrats,or, as he called them, "whiskey colonels" who couldn'twait to get to the Officers Club in the evening. Wisner spoke of the"added dimension" that he couldn't find among the paper pushersand 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 fluentin foreign languages, and they needed grace and confidence underpressure. The place to find these men, he believed, was on WallStreet, among the bankers and lawyers who had joined the OSS,the wartime intelligence agency, and then drifted back to theirpeacetime jobs; and from among the graduating classes at their oldschools, which generally meant Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The code name for the CIA's connection to the Ivy League was"the P Source" (not hard to crack; "P" stood for professor). Forsome years in the 1950s, the CIA recruiter at Princeton was thedean of students, William Lippincott. "How would you like to serveyour country in a different way?" he would ask promising youngmen. 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 andquick minds. When the Korean War called for some beef, he broadenedhis recruiting ground to the National Football League, producingtwenty-five former players who would be trained, he wastold, for parachuting behind enemy lines. Once every three weeksWalz would meet with his agency contact at the Reflecting Pool inWashington. Walz would pass on his names; he "did not know, orwish to know," Robin Winks writes in Cloak and Gown, whichones actually signed on--or what became of them. (He had heardthat his first two recruits died in the field.

In 1950, Walz took a job with a company that manufacturedprecision gunsights, and he shifted his recruiting territory to theclub car between Greenwich and New York. One can imagine whatit was like, in this era of the Man in the Gray Flannel suit, for thatrestless young lawyer riding the 6:43. Perhaps he is bored byprobating wills or flyspecking debenture statements. Perhaps, ifhe is a veteran, he feels a nostalgic longing for the danger andcamaraderie of the war. Along comes Skip Walz to chat about theHarvard-Yale boat race--and, by the way, something else....

Many Yale (and Harvard and Princeton) men felt a longing toescape. Their lives were so prescribed, beginning with their college"careers." This romantic urge to get off the safe treadmill iscaptured by the "Whiffenpoof" song, the sweet, sad ballad (liftedfrom a drinking song by Rudyard Kipling) that Yalemen link armsto 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!'

Frank Wisner's OPC offered young men a chance to serve theircountry, in Dean Lippincott's carefully chosen phrase, "in a differentway." Bill Colby, a Princetonian and OSSer who signed on (andlater became the director of Central Intelligence), credited Wisnerwith creating "the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templars, tosave Western freedom from Communist darkness...." Joiningthe OPC was "a rather glamorous and fashionable and certainly amost patriotic thing to do," writes Colby in his memoirs, HonorableMen.

World War II had ended American squeamishness about spying.In 1929, Henry Stimson had abolished the Black Chamber, a code-breakingoutfit, under the quaint notion that "gentlemen do notopen other gentlemen's mail." Hitler, and now Stalin, clearly didnot qualify. In 1947, American moviegoers watched the hero ofCloak and Dagger, played by Gary Cooper, listening to his OSSinstructor, played by Jimmy Cagney, lecture on the reality of secretwar: "The average American is a good sport, plays by therules. But this war is no game, and no secret agent is a goodsport--no living agent... Fair play? That's out."

Spying, covert action, and psychological warfare were in. Towork for Frank Wisner was romantic and dashing. Over time theamateurs would become cynics, and intelligence would become acult. But in 1948 it was still a crusade.

Frank Gardiner Wisner had grown up in a world that was, likethe one the CIA would help create, secretive, insular, elitist, andsecure in the rectitude of its purpose.

Wisner's family built nearly all of the town of Laurel, Mississippi-theschools, the churches, the museum, the bank, the parks,the golf course, the cemetery. All the land and many of the buildingswere donated by the Gardiner and Wisner clans, paid for withthe money made cutting and sawing logs at the local mill, whichthey also built. The company headquarters, erected in 1910, theyear Wisner was born, looks incongruous today, backing on a shoppingmall. The building is an exact copy of the sixteenth-centurycasino of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Caprarola, Italy.

In later years, Wisner was regarded, even by intimates, as aremote figure; capable of charm and warmth, yet somehow notquite all there. Certainly his upbringing set him apart, in waysthat at once elevated and burdened him. The Wisners and Gardinersbelieved in moral uplift. The Eastman/Gardiner Company didnot exploit its workers like some other southern lumber companies;it went to a ten-hour day before the law required and builtsanitary housing in the lumber camps out of old railway cars. "Myfamily believed it was from Mississippi, but not Mississippian,"said a Gardiner descendant, Charles Reeder. By that he meantthat his family had no plantation roots and was decent to blacks,which took some courage in a state where night riders plantedburning crosses on the lawns of "nigger lovers." "We believedevery person was a child of God," said Jean Lindsey, whosemother, Frank Wisner's sister Elizabeth, discovered and promotedthe black opera singer Leontyne Price. ("Leontyne used to callherself our chocolate sister," said Lindsey.) Wisner and Gardinerchildren 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, Wisnerdid not dress himself; he merely lay on his bed and raised his armsand legs for his maid. His playmates were almost invariably hiscousins. "The only people he saw were his own family," said Lindsey."We had a kind of enclave," said Admiral Fred Reeder, whomarried a Gardiner after the First World War. "You didn't needany outside contact. You had all you needed right here."

Wisner was an intense child. His cousin Gardiner Green recalledthat he never walked anywhere; he always ran. Somewhat smalland sickly, he built himself up by lifting weights (like his hero,Teddy Roosevelt). His father tried to build his spirit by enrollinghim in the St. Andrew's Society, under the mentoring of a WorldWar I pilot-turned-Episcopal priest who taught the boys to be"young Galahads," said Charles Reeder. "You pledge to spendtime in service to your fellow man, to be a straight shooter, and topray 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. Beneatha fey manner, his mother was highly competitive, and Wisnerlearned to compete fiercely at everything from football to parlorgames like mah-jongg. Wisner's aristocratic sensibility, as well ashis insularity, was further refined at Woodberry Forest School, inOrange, Virginia. Founded by a Confederate captain after theCivil War, Woodberry preached chivalry. "Give me clean hands,clean words, and clean thoughts," begins the school prayer. "Helpme stand for the hard right against the easy wrong." The schoolwas run under an honor code. There were no locks or keys; boysleft a white handkerchief on the door if they did not wish to bedisturbed.

The University of Virginia, where Wisner went to both collegeand law school, was more like a private school than "State U." inthe 1930s. The young gentlemen at Mr. Jefferson's university worecoats and ties and stood up when a teacher entered the room. Theyalso wildly drank grain alcohol punches at their fraternities on t@eweekend. The great honor was to be tapped by the Sevens, asociety so ostentatiously secret that the names of its memberswere 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 tobe asked to the Olympic trials in 1936. His father said no; it wouldbe more character-building to work the summer in a Coca-Colabottling plant. He had a somewhat ornate sense of humor, whichhe showed by telling elaborate tall tales and drawing cartoons. Inbankruptcy class one day Wisner handed his seatmate, ArthurJacobs, a drawing of "the courts squeezing debtors, with the creditorslined up with their tongues sticking out to get the droppings."Still, Wisner was regarded as more serious and mature than thehell-raisers in the DKE house. He could drink beer on fraternityrow, but he was more apt to be found at a professor's for dinner.He was, inevitably, tapped for the Seven Society.

This combination of high moral purpose and gamesmanship,acted out on a self-consciously higher plane, stayed with Wisner allhis life. Years later his nephew Charles Reeder lived for a timewith the Wisners in London, where Frank was the CIA chief ofstation. "Somewhere deep in him," said Reeder, "you knew it wasthe 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, wasthat the moral issues were not always so black and white, and thevictories against more ruthless opponents, like the Soviet Union,were rare.

Wisner witnessed the greatest moral outrage of his life, the Soviettakeover of Romania, as a spy during World War II. Bored as aWall Street lawyer, he had enlisted in the Navy six months beforePearl Harbor. But he was relegated to shuffling paper in the Navycensor's office and yearned to see action. (He had been mortified,shortly after America entered the war, when passengers on a subwaystood and applauded him as he entered, wearing a naval uniform,hobbling on crutches. His "war wound" was an ankle twistedin a weekend touch football game.) In July 1943, Wisner arrangeda transfer to the OSS through Robert Gooch, an old professor fromU.Va., a former Rhodes scholar who had an interest in espionage.

Wisner's early experiences at spying ranged from marginallyuseful to comical. After an uneventful tour in Cairo, he landed inJune 1944 in Istanbul, where he worked for a man named Lanning"Packy" MacFarland. Ordered to meet MacFarland at a nightclubthere, Wisner tried to be inconspicuous, to preserve his cover as aconsular clerk. But when MacFarland made his entrance the musicstopped, a spotlight picked him out on the steps leading to thedance floor, and the orchestra struck up a song called "Boop, Boop,Baby, I'm a Spy!" MacFarland, who had two girlfriends, one workingfor the Soviets, the other for the Germans, later wentAWOL.

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 Americanfliers shot down over the Ploessti oil fields (a success: Wisner commandeeredevery bus in the city), but his real job soon becamekeeping an eye on the Russians.

Within a month Wisner was reporting "from a dependable industrialsource" that "the Soviet Union is attempting to subvertthe 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, includingTurkey." Headquarters in Washington wasn't quite ready to hearthat its wartime ally was turning into the Red Menace. GeneralWilliam Donovan, the head of OSS, cautioned Wisner in Octoberagainst speech or action" that might show "antagonism to Russia."Wisner responded defensively that he was "at aR time exercisingthe utmost care" not to appear to be siding with theRomanian government against the communists.

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

Wisner naturally gravitated to the local elite. He soon becameclose to King Michael and the Queen Mother, who invited him toher castle and found him well-mannered and self-assured. "Il esttellement calme et tranquille dans ces propos," she told Caradja inher court French. Wisner became an informal adviser to the royalfamily and, according to Caradja, the life of the party. "He loveddancing and entertainment. He did magic tricks and charades andplayed backgammon." A photo in a Wisner family album showsWisner, in the uniform of an American naval commander, squintingat a makeup mirror as he tries to fire a shotgun backwards overhis shoulder.

Some of Wisner's staff were put off. A member of Wisner'sgroup recorded, "After about two months, the American MilitaryUnit decided to move away from the Bragadiru residence on theAlea Modrogan. Eating, working, sleeping, drinking, and lovingother men's wives all under one roof while husbands and enlistedmen were around was just a bit too much for some of us." BeverlyBowie, a staffer assigned to Bucharest, later lampooned Wisner inthe novel Operation Bughouse as Commander Downe, a manicOSS operative who sets up headquarters in the large house ofMadama Nitti and immediately implores Washington to declarewar on the Soviet Union.

Wisner actually did use the names of germs for his codes (hisown was Typhoid), but he was not being paranoid about the Russians.On January 6, 1945, Stalin ordered the Red Army to roundup all men aged seventeen to forty-five and all women eighteen tothirty who could be determined to be "of German ethnic origin,regardless of citizenship." They were to be deported to the SovietUnion and "mobilized for work." In Bucharest, this caused an appallingscene: Russian troops hauled Transylvanians whose familieshad been long settled in Romania out of their homes and putthem on boxcars for Stalin's work camps. Wisner knew many ofthese Volksdeutsche from Princess Caradja's soirees. The desperatewife of her architect called him in the middle of the night. Theywere taking away her husband. Wasn't there anything the Americanscould do? Wisner tried. He drove around the city in his jeep,personally trying to stop Russian soldiers from pulling Romaniansfrom their beds. He had some success; the Russian soldiers did notwant to make a scene with their wartime ally. But Wisner wasunable to save the architect; by the time Wisner arrived at thetrain station, the man had already vanished, like thousands ofothers. Wisner could only watch as the Romanians, weeping andbegging for help, were herded onto boxcars.

Wisner's wife and children later said that this experience ofwatching the Russians round up innocents and take them off tomisery or death had the most profound influence on his life. Wisnerhimself talked about his Romanian episode so much and so vividlythat Frank Wisner Jr. was startled to learn, when he got older,that his father had spent less than six months in the country.

Throughout the fall and early winter, Wisner had been readingcables from Moscow as they circulated through the Romanian CommunistParty, which his agents had penetrated. It was clear to himthat the Kremlin meant to take over all of Eastern Europe or, asStalin's orders to Red Army commanders put it, impose a "broaddemocratic basis" on the region. Wisner could see as well that theRussians understood who their future foe would be. In late Decemberhe warned Washington that the Russians had permittedtwo trapped Nazi divisions to escape in order to attack Americanunits fighting in the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge.

Wisner's cables stirred great interest in Washington, as theywere among the first clear warnings of what was to come. But inWisner's view Washington wasn't doing enough to stop communismfrom coming to Romania. "He was disgusted," said Caradja.On March 1 the Russians took over the newspapers, the policeheadquarters, and the palace. A new government under a fellowtraveler was set up, and King Michael was driven into exile. Manyof the Romanian friends whom Wisner had made in Bucharestwere rounded up and simply disappeared.

By then, Wisner was gone, pulled back to Washington at his ownrequest, for reassignment. He was sent to Germany, to work outof the OSS station in Wiesbaden. Postwar Germany held no allurefor Wisner. "It is not the same as Bucharest," he wrote Caradja onAugust 17. "There are no nice people--no opportunities for anypleasure or relaxation from the long hours I put in at my desk. Ithink often of Romania. It was one of the most interesting andpleasant experiences, and it was you who were responsible for somuch of that..." In Germany, Wisner could already see thesparks of the next war in the embers of the last. His cables back toheadquarters reported on Russian mischief. One told of a socialistleader in the Russian zone who "expressed in rather strong termshis opposition to the Communist Party"--and promptly disappearedin the company of several Russian officers." Another describedan anti-American "whispering campaign" fomented byRussian propaganda specialists to spread rumors around Berlinthat American soldiers were robbing elderly, well-dressed Germanwomen.

Policymakers did not want to hear what Wisner was tellingthem. Having fought and won a war, almost no one in Washingtonwanted to think about another. The Russians were communistsand not trustworthy, but they had been allies, and official Washingtonstill wanted to find a way to make common cause in thepostwar world. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an OSS sergeant in Wiesbaden,found Wisner obsessed with Russia. "He was already mobilizingfor the cold war," Schlesinger told Burton Hersh for hisbook The Old Boys. "I myself was no great admirer of the SovietUnion, and I certainly had no expectation of harmonious relationsafter the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me."

As Wisner was gearing up for a spy war, Washington was gearingdown. Ever eager to protect his own turf, the FBI's J. EdgarHoover had, through a campaign of leaks and innuendo, convincedHarry Truman that the OSS in peacetime would be an "AmericanGestapo." In September 1945, Truman folded up the OSS, leavinga vestigial intelligence organization, the Strategic Services Unit(SSU), languishing in the War Department. Wisner rushed back toWashington to argue for more resources. When Colonel WilliamQuinn, the head of the SSU, turned down Wisner's request for twohundred bicycles, to be given Germans so they could ride throughthe Russian zone of Berlin and record Soviet troop movements,Wisner quit. As he turned in his commission, he told ColonelQuinn, "You're cutting our throat."

Grudgingly, Wisner went back to his Wall Street law firm, CarterLedyard, in the winter of 1946. In Germany, he had worked underAllen Dulles, the OSS's top spymaster in Europe. Dulles, likeWisner, had returned to Wall Street to his own law firm after thewar. The two men began having lunch together to talk about oldtimes and to discuss the need to build a strong peacetime intelligenceservice. Peter Sichel, who worked with both men in Germany,went to one of those lunches, at the Down Town Association:"They were pining to get back. They were boy scouts who werebored in their law jobs. They were like fighter pilots in Englandafter the Battle of Britain. They couldn't adjust. They were bothgreat romantics who saw themselves as the saviors of the world."

As it became clear that the country was beginning a Cold Waragainst the Soviet Union, Wisner increasingly began to ponderways to join in. He toyed with the idea of going to Washington andjoining up with the remnant of the wartime OSS, the SSU, but heconsidered the organization to be weak and badly run. (There issome evidence as well that the SSU was not eager to have him; theArmy colonels who dominated the intelligence agency at the timewere wary of Wisner as "another [`Wild Bill'] Donovan who'll runaway with the ball," according to author William Corson.)

By the spring of 1947, Wisner was unable to stay away anylonger. In Europe, the winter had been the worst in memory, andEngland, France, Italy, and especially Germany were threatenedby famine and unrest. Washington was rising out of its postwartorpor: at the State Department, Dean Acheson could see that thetime had come for the United States to take over Britain's imperialrole. The Truman Doctrine, declared in March, promised thatAmerica would aid "free peoples" everywhere in the fight againstcommunism.

In 1947, in the opening days of the Cold War, the State Departmentwas the place to be for an ambitious Cold Warrior likeWisner; the best men with the best minds were there--undersecretaryDean Acheson, Soviet experts George Kennan and ChipBohlen. That summer Wisner took a job, at Acheson's urging, asthe number-two man in the State Department's Office of OccupiedTerritories. His boss, Charles Saltzman, was a former head of theNew York Stock Exchange and a Carter Ledyard client.

Wisner was also State's representative on the State-Army-Navy-AirForce Coordinating Committee, an interagency groupthat was supposed to study "psychological warfare" to counterSoviet ambitions. The threat had been vividly described in Kennan'sfamous "Long Telegram," the Russian expert's warning ofSoviet global ambitions that had been received from Moscow andpassed around by anxious officials in Washington. Stalin was implementingTrotsky's strategy of "neither war nor peace" by acampaign of subversion, propaganda, and intimidation. Washingtondid not at the time fear a Soviet invasion of the West, butrather a slow rotting from within, fomented by communist agentsbribing politicians, taking over labor unions, infiltrating the armyand the police. The feeling was that the Kremlin had plenty ofexperience in this area; the West almost none.

How to fight back? In the summer of 1947, Wisner traveled tohis new State Department domain, the occupied territory of Germany.While he was there he visited the "displaced persons" (DP)camps set up to handle the flood of East Europeans who had fledbefore the Red Army as it drove west in 1944-45. There were700,000 people in these camps, almost all of whom hated communism.There were Ukrainians, and Czechs, and Poles, and Hungarianswho had fought against the Russians; perhaps they couldbe persuaded to fight again. Here, Wisner realized, was an entirearmy--a potential secret army that could be recruited and trainedto infiltrate the lands they had lost. True, many of its would-berecruits had worn Nazi uniforms during the war. Some of thempresumably had committed acts that would be regarded as warcrimes. But that had been a matter of expediency in wartime. Inany case, the common enemy was clear.

Back in Washington, Wisner set up a study group looking into"Utilization of Refugees from U.S.S.R. in U.S. National Interests."By May 1948, it had cranked out a proposal for a major effortto use "native anti-communist elements ... which have shownextreme fortitude in the face of Communist menace." Wisner wasfascinated by the communists' ability to use innocuous-seemingcivic organizations--student groups, farmers' collectives, laborunions, study groups--as tools of propaganda and subversion. Ifthe communists could use these techniques, he reasoned, the Westcould, too. And who better to fight back than the victims of Sovietoppression, the thousands of refugees who had fled Stalin's boot?While other government officials saw the displaced persons campsas a burden, squalid bogs of hunger and want, Wisner saw them asrecruiting grounds for a force that could fight fire with fire. Inlanguage that would prove overly optimistic, the interagency committeedocument praised the emigres' "`know how' to counter communistpropaganda," their knowledge of "techniques to obtaincontrol of mass movements." The emigres, Wisner believed, couldape the communists' ability to manipulate "Socialist, trade union,intellectual, moderate right wing groups and others." The program,code-named Bloodstone, called for $5 million, appropriatelylaundered for "secret disbursement."

It was an ambitious plan, but as Wisner was well aware, therewas no one to carry it out. The State-Army-Navy-Air Force CoordinatingCommittee was a talk shop. It had no capacity to conductoperations. What was needed, Wisner urged his fellowplanners at State and the Pentagon, was "an entirely new propagandaagency within this Government."

When Wisner moved to Washington, he bought a farm on theEastern Shore of Maryland and rented a house in Georgetown. Heimmediately fell in with a crowd that was unusually lively andself-confident. At the center were two rising Soviet experts fromthe State Department, Charles "Chip" Bohlen and George Kennan.Bohlen was especially charming and gregarious. He loved toargue with his college clubmates Joseph Alsop, a well-connectednewspaper columnist, and Paul Nitze, another young comer at theState Department. Kennan, while admired for his intellect, wasless socially at ease; he was prone to periods of brooding.

The young couples, lawyers down from New York, diplomatsreturned from abroad, bought or rented small eighteenth- andnineteenth-century row houses in Georgetown. The New Deal andwartime had transformed the neighborhood from a backwater, inhabitedlargely by lower-middle-class blacks. The new crowd felt asense of arrival and belonging. They were not stuffy, like theold-time "cave dwellers" of Washington society, yet they wereconfident of their place in a new order that placed the UnitedStates on top. Susan Mary Patten, the daughter and wife of diplomats(and later Joe Alsop's wife), felt the euphoria on a trip homefrom Paris as she walked down the streets of Georgetown, past"the black maids sweeping the steps of the little brick houses andsaying their beaming `Good morning, how are you?' ... Washingtonis the coziest capital in the world and it's nice to feel theoptimism and the sense of controlled power," she wrote her friendMarietta Tree. "Life is much less luxurious than when we weregirls, but people give delightful little dinner parties with next to nohelp in the kitchen...."

Along with America's rise in the world came the rise of theWashington political dinner party," said Townsend Hoopes, ayoung Yale graduate who had taken a job in the Pentagon afterserving in the Marines. Tables of twelve would gather and argueover how best to fight communism. "There was a great intensity,"said Hoopes. "It had to affect policy. Dinner parties were an extensionof the working day." For all its global reach, Washingtonwas still small. There was in 1948 none of the vast modern apparatusof foreign policy making, no national security staff or thinktanks, but rather a fairly informal circle of friends who had knownone another through their schools, banks, and law firms beforecoming to Washington. "You'd go to the F Street Club for lunchand there'd be [Undersecretary of State] Bob Lovett in one cornerand [Secretary of Defense] James Forrestal in the other," saidHoopes.

The Wisners and their friends were determined, in a relaxedway, to have fun while doing good. The style showed itself in aninstitution known as the Sunday Night Supper. "We'd get boredwith our children on Sundays and abandon them and have dinnerwith each other," said Tish Alsop, wife of Stewart Alsop, Joe'sbrother and fellow columnist. What began as maid's night out, justa few couples having potluck, became, without anyone quite realizingit, a much-sought-after invitation in the insular world of postwarWashington. There was the night that Averell Harrimanturned off his hearing aid and stared straight ahead rather thantalk to Richard Nixon (who had been invited as a last-minuteguest); and there was the night that Chip Bohlen, forgetting wherehe was in the heat of debate, tried to throw Joe Alsop out of hisown house. The idea was to leave by 11 P.M. "But I remember Stewpushing Chip [Bohlen] out the door at 4:30 A.M.--`Goddamn Chip!I've got to get some sleep,'" recalled Tish Alsop. The survivors ofthese dinners marvel at the stamina it took to keep pace. "Chip, ofcourse, trained in Russia," said Mrs. Alsop. "You either droppeddead or learned how to deal with it."

The Wisners were often the last to leave the party after midnight.There was always time for one more drink, one more pointto make. "Frank loved to tie one on and dance all night in thosedays," said Ella Burling, a Georgetown hostess. "He used to do adance called the crab walk. He loved parties; he was exotic andinteresting." He could also seem, at times, a little self-satisfied. Atone party he grabbed Elizabeth Graham. "Have you ever seensuch a collection of beautiful women?" he asked. "It made me alittle mad," said Graham. "It was: `We have the best, the bestwives, the best everything.'" At other times he was funny andlight, spinning ornate southern tales.

At the Sunday Night Suppers, Wisner, Kennan, Bohlen, theAlsop brothers, and the various movers and shakers who wereinvited to join them engaged in ferocious debates. The argumentmost often focused on what to do about the Soviet Union. Thedebate had moved beyond ends--whether or not to stand up to theKremlin--to the question of means. Another war was out of thequestion. The economic aid generated by the Marshall Plan wasthe best bet, perhaps, but there was no assurance in the winterand summer of 1948 that Congress would foot the entire bill, orthat the aid would not be somehow blocked or subverted by theactive communist insurgencies in Western Europe, especiallyFrance and Italy. It seemed possible that the governments of thesecountries would go communist, or at least be paralyzed by socialchaos. There needed to be some way, Frank Wisner argued, ofbeating the Soviets at their own game.

All through history national leaders have felt the need to takeactions for which they do not wish to be held accountable--spying;sabotage; blackmail; bribery; subversion; disinformation; in extremis,assassination. At least since King Henry II cast about forsomeone to "rid" him of a troublesome priest, Thomas a Beckett,some eight centuries ago, national leaders have from time to timeconfronted a quandary: how to make others do their dirty workwithout blame attaching to the sovereign? In modern times theanswer has been called the doctrine of "plausible deniability."

Wisner believed, as did many of his friends and colleagues,that the United States needed the capacity--an "entirely newagency"--that could carry out acts that could be plausibly denied.

Actually, in 1948 there already existed an organization that couldbe used for this purpose. Though weak, the postwar vestige of theOSS had survived through bureaucratic shuffles and a successionof new acronyms. In 1946 the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) hadbeen partly reincarnated as the Office of Special Operations (OSO)and placed under an umbrella organization, the Central IntelligenceGroup, rechristened, in 1947, as the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA). The CIA was essentially a shell in its early days,and its operations arm, the OSO, was supposed to engage in espionage,not political action; it was set up to gather and analyzeinformation, not to take "active measures" like propaganda.

Still, the OSO had been used successfully that spring of 1948 inthe Italian elections. The situation had been deemed an emergency.The communists appeared very strong in Italy, and Washingtonfeared that if the Kremlin's campaign of subversion wasallowed to proceed unchecked, Moscow would be able to makeItaly go communist one day just by "picking up the phone." Tofight back, the OSO adopted Russian tactics: bribes had been paid,newspaper editors suborned, labor unions co-opted. Paying for theoperation had been touch-and-go; at one point, old intelligencehands like Allen Dulles had literally passed the hat in their NewYork clubs, the Brook and the Links, to raise cash to buy right-thinkingpoliticians. But Italy had not gone communist.

Having created an organization capable of effective covert action,the top officials in Washington decided not to use it. Thesecretary of state, General George C. Marshall, wanted the UnitedStates to have a covert action capacity, but he did not want it inthe State Department. Diplomacy, he believed, would be undermined.Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was a strong advocateof covert action, but not in the Pentagon, at least in peacetime.Neither Marshall nor Forrestal--nor, for that matter, any othermajor policymaker--wanted to have his fingerprints on anythingthat might smack of a "dirty trick." Even the CIA, they believed,was too accountable. Under the 1947 National Security Act, itreported to the newly created National Security Council of thepresident's top advisers. None of the members of that august groupwanted to be held responsible for a program of covert action.

Frank Wisner had the solution, the "entirely new agency" hebegan lobbying for in the spring of 1948. Wisner was a formidablepleader. He had an urgency of manner, he was well-spoken, iforotund when he got wound up, and he knew everyone. He foundan ally and sponsor in Defense Secretary Forrestal, who shared hisanticommunist passion and interest in propaganda and "psychologicalwarfare." Wisner's friend George Kennan, the State Departmentseer who had most articulately warned of the Soviet threat inhis cables home from Moscow in 1946, also strongly believed in theneed for a covert action capacity. The White House, under politicalpressure to do something to counter Russian adventurism, signedon. Under national security memorandum NSC 10/2, drafted byKennan and dated June 18, 1948, a new organization was created,named with intentional vagueness the Office of Special Projects,then quickly renamed, even more innocuously, the Office of PolicyCoordination (OPC).

The language of its secret charter was more vivid: the organization'spurpose would be to counter "the vicious covert activitiesof the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discreditthe aims and activities of the U. S. and other Western powers."OPC's covert operations were to include all the tools theRussians had perfected: "propaganda, economic warfare; preventivedirect action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition andevacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, includingassistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenousanti-communist elements in threatened countries of thefree world." These efforts were supposed to be "so planned andconducted" that if they ever surfaced publicly, the U.S. governmentcould "plausibly disclaim any responsibility."

Having helped to create the secret new organization, Wisnerwas now asked to run it. The new chief of the Office of PolicyCoordination kept a copy of NSC 10/2 in a safe in his office. Anyonewho wanted to see the directive had to sign a special request. Oneof Wisner's assistants later told author Thomas Powers that hecouldn't quite understand the aura of mystery Wisner attached tothe document: "All it said was, they do it, and therefore we haveto do it, too."

To Wisner, it was a broad license. OPC was attached to the CIA,but only for "quarters and provisions"--essentially for housing andsalaries. The CIA director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, exercisedalmost no control over Wisner. Nor did anyone else in government.Nominally, Wisner reported to Kennan, the head of theState Department Policy Planning Staff, as well as to a pair ofgenerals in the Pentagon who had their own unrealistic demandsfor behind-the-lines guerrilla warfare. Kennan, once enthusiasticin his support for covert action, was experiencing second thoughtsby the winter of 1949. He felt the reaction to his warnings aboutSoviet aggression had been overwrought, its message distorted byminds less supple than his own.

At the time Kennan did not resist Wisner's ambitions. Moodyand insecure, Kennan simply withdrew to his private study at theLibrary of Congress. Wisner was left to deal with Bob Joyce on thePolicy Planning Staff. Since Joyce was an old OSS friend who knewWisner from Romania days, he did not exercise much restraint.

Wisner had, at last, the job he really wanted. But when WilliamHarding Jackson, one of Wisner's partners at Carter Ledyard,heard about Wisner's new job, he was troubled. Jackson was aperceptive man, known by his law partners for his uncanny intuition.During the war he had served in the OSS and become anexpert on the British intelligence services, which had long experiencein the spy trade. Jackson knew both Wisner and the job hewas getting into. Wisner would be crazy to take it, he told one ofhis partners, Edward Clark. "It will kill him," Jackson said.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Very Best Menby Evan Thomas Copyright ©2006 by Evan Thomas. Excerpted by permission.
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