The Determined Spy: Frank Wisner, the CIA and a covert career cut short

The Guardian

12-04-2025

Frank Wisner was a leading light of the early CIA, a director of clandestine operations who came of age in the second world war then fought the cold war by fair means or foul, from funding American cultural outreach to orchestrating coups in Iran and Guatemala.
Before becoming a biographer, Douglas Waller reported for Newsweek and Time. His new book, The Determined Spy, is about Wisner, a man who lived an extraordinary life but came to be buried at Arlington national cemetery, under a simple headstone, identified merely as a commander in the US naval reserve.
'I've always gravitated toward controversial characters,' Waller said. 'People who had loyal followings and charisma, and just as many people who hated them, who even considered them evil.'
'The first was 'Wild Bill' Donovan, who headed up Franklin Roosevelt's spy service, the Office of Strategic Services. He was charismatic, his agents revered him, but there were people in the Pentagon and even the state department who thought he was as evil as Hitler. I recall during that time running across Wisner among hundreds of OSS officers and thinking: 'Gee, this is kind of an interesting guy.' What little I had on him, I put in my stories file, and thought: 'Well, I'll get back to him.'
'The next book I wrote was Disciples, an ensemble biography of [CIA leaders] Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Bill Colby and Bill Casey. And again, I ran across Wisner, particularly when he was working for Dulles in Germany after the war, in charge of 200 operatives. And I talked at that point to Wisner's oldest son, Frank Wisner II.'
Wisner II, who died in February, aged 86, did not just look like his father. He also carved out a high-level government career, as ambassador to Zambia, the Philippines, Egypt and India, and US envoy to Kosovo.
'This is the first time the family opened up,' Waller said. 'They made all the material available. Wisner's personal papers are at the University of Virginia. His middle son, Ellis Wisner, provided a lot, particularly medical material, stuff that hadn't been released.
'Frank Wisner II had gotten declassified material from the CIA that he turned over to me, which was a big help. With the three sons – Graham Wisner is unfortunately deceased too – I spent probably 50 hours on interviews about their father. There were some very painful sessions. His death was quite a blow.'
Wisner was 56 when, in October 1965, he killed himself. It was the awful culmination of a long struggle that saw Wisner committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1958. He experienced bipolar disorder, little understood in his time.
Psychiatrists gave Waller 'a whole stack of reading to do, to get a sense of how bipolar disorder can evolve, and a lot of the myths behind it'. Waller 'tried to accurately portray the shock Wisner's suicide was for everybody.
'Ellis Wisner told me he thought that maybe his father, at the very end, was debating whether or not to kill himself, by the fact that he went to the family farm [in Maryland], he got his work clothes on.
'But when you read the scientific literature, you find that this is a normal way that suicide can play out, that the disease can be so unrelenting, so oppressive, that suicide seems the only option, and the person about to commit it becomes almost at peace with himself, with how his life is going to end. That's what you saw with Wisner … the symptoms for this disease, if untreated, can be so relentless.'
So could Wisner, in work, family life and intense socializing with the Georgetown set, a hard-drinking group of government officials and journalists, among them Phil Graham, a publisher of the Washington Post
'People confused that side of Wisner with the manic depression,' Waller said. 'A world war two buddy wondered whether Wisner's deep hatred of the Russians was part of his disease. But the Russians gave him a lot to hate in their takeover of eastern Europe. He was ahead of the US government when he was posted in Romania [during the second world war], in terms of warning that the next enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which at that time was an ally.
'There's parts in the book where you see even Donovan worried about Wisner having to dial it back. He wasn't a religious man but he took his own role in history very, very seriously. And eventually, I think you see the country coming up to where his view is, and viewing the Russians as an existential threat. You have to see yourself in that period, in 1950 or so, when Americans firmly believe the Russians are bent on world domination. The Pentagon even picked out a day they thought the Soviets might invade western Europe: 1 July 1952. Nothing happened, but the paranoia which Wisner felt, at the tip of the spear? It existed.'
Turned inward, that paranoia fueled the red scare, anti-communist witch-hunts led by Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican senator now on many minds as Donald Trump purges the federal government.
'Wisner had a view on the red scare,' Waller said. 'He saw a huge threat of communism, but it was outside communism, Russian communism, not the Communist party in the US. He didn't think much of that. He thought guys like McCarthy were really barking up the wrong tree.'
Wisner was surveilled himself, by J Edgar Hoover's FBI. Suspicions largely arose from a wartime affair with a Romanian princess, one of many parts of Wisner's story that seem stranger than fiction, or at least evoke novels by Graham Greene or Ian Fleming, who was Wisner's friend in London.
Waller notes the immense human cost of Wisner's efforts to topple elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala, in 1953 and 1954. He also describes CIA failures, many in eastern Europe and notably in Hungary in 1956, when Russia crushed an uprising.
Few think Wisner broke down due to guilt over Iran and Guatemala. Some think Hungary broke him. Waller does not. Wisner's illness was powerful enough on its own.
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By the time of the Bay of Pigs, the fiasco in Cuba under John F Kennedy in 1961, Wisner was out of hospital but also out of the mainstream, in a softer role in London. Waller said Wisner's work before his breakdown should all be seen in context:
'The popular view is that the CIA are rogue actors, hatching these coups in the dark without anybody in the US government really knowing about it – which is a bunch of baloney. [Harry] Truman knew full well about what [under Wisner] was blandly called the office of policy coordination, which eventually became 6,000 men and women involved in clandestine operations worldwide. [Dwight] Eisenhower … was more than eager to point the CIA and Wisner's forces toward third-world targets. The Eisenhower view was you're either for the US or against it. What was happening was exactly what the White House wanted.'
Sometimes, the White House wanted even shadier work. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers were recruited to the anti-communist cause.
Waller said: 'The whole issue of working with Nazis wasn't as bad as has been portrayed, and it wasn't as good as has been portrayed. There were a handful of Nazis they brought in to the US. They worked with a lot more overseas. But Wisner was always a diehard anti-Nazi.'
Waller keeps an eye on current events. As the war in Ukraine drags on, Trump not having delivered peace as promised, the US president's attitudes toward Russia and Vladimir Putin are in perpetual question.
'We are now in the middle of the second cold war against the Russians,' Waller said. 'Wisner was there at the beginning of the first, 70 years ago. And I think there's lessons to be learned from that. You're seeing history repeat itself, in some respects. Not sure we're winning at this point, but we're in, definitely in a second cold war.
'Another question I get asked is: 'How do you compare the quality of Wisner's CIA with the CIA now? And the answer is, it's vastly superior today.'
In 2022, US intelligence predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine with striking accuracy. Failures, particularly over whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, also dot the record.
The Determined Spy is a serious book, a study of American covert power and its lasting effects on those who attempted to wield it, as well as on the world at large. But though Frank Wisner was a powerful man, Waller focuses on his human side, his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Some episodes from Wisner's career, particularly from the early stages, as the CIA was born, produce a kind of comedy of trial and error.
In Turkey during the second world war, Waller said, a 'former savings and loan business executive from Illinois, Lanning 'Packy' MacFarland, just made a complete mess of the Istanbul station.
'Frank Wisner II said his dad told him about his first meeting with MacFarland in Istanbul. Wisner went to a nightclub, hoping to see him there, kind of incognito. And the lights to the stage turn on, and there's Packy MacFarland with a line of chorus girls, dressed in drag, singing, 'Boo Boo, baby, I'm a spy.' That was a favorite song among a lot of other spies there. Packy wasn't the only one with poor operational security.'
The Determined Spy is published in the US by Dutton
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [e-mail] or [e-mail]. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org