‘The Determined Spy’ Review: The Cold War Was His Playground
Frank Wisner’s career in espionage began in World War II, but his legacy was the creation of a CIA department that aimed to remake nations around the world.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency—its evolution from the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) through its midcentury berth in downtown Washington—makes for more interesting reading than the latest from its present suburban redoubt, where a massive bureaucracy awaits the inevitable knock on the door from Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency visitors.
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The Determined Spy: The Turbulent Life and Times of CIA Pioneer Frank Wisner
Romantic memory recalls the agency’s ex-ROTC officers, recruited at Yale in the 1940s and ’50sand presided over by the mustachioed Allen Dulles, their internecine turf wars and clandestine battles fought by the seat of their pleated trousers, and all without spilling their martinis—dashing and impressive and, to borrow an intelligence term, the stuff of legends.
Was the earlier, swashbuckling CIA a more successful enterprise than its present, decidedly less picturesque incarnation?
In “The Determined Spy” Douglas Waller, a historian and journalist, investigates that question by chronicling, in considerable detail, the “turbulent” life of Frank Gardiner Wisner (1909-65), a recognizable product of the early CIA who, in the dozen years after World War II, masterminded many of the agency’s most famous foreign adventures—some successful, some not. As head of the shadowy Office of Policy Coordination (OPC, later the Directorate of Plans), Wisner invented and perfected many of the techniques, objectives and protocols of Cold War propaganda, political sabotage, economic warfare and assistance to resistance armies and guerrilla movements. His legacy lives on, partly in folklore, but it’s a complicated legacy.
Wisner was a prototypical CIA pioneer. Born and raised in Laurel, Miss., the son of an Iowa-born lumber baron who had migrated to Laurel’s piney woods, Frank attended the University of Virginia, where he excelled and earned a law degree. Bored by his apprenticeship in Franklin Roosevelt’s old Manhattan law firm, Wisner was commissioned in the Navy five months before Pearl Harbor and, bored yet again, transferred to the OSS in 1943.
He had found his vocation. Wisner was a charming workaholic with an adventurous streak, highly intelligent, with a gift for organization and management. This was precisely the sort of capable gentleman-spy most appealing to the OSS’s founder-mastermind, William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, and Wisner quickly rose through the ranks. He spent much of the war as the OSS chief in Bucharest, briefly served in the occupation of Germany, then returned to New York and the practice of law.
Not for long, however. The CIA was born in 1947; that year Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson recruited Wisner as deputy assistant secretary for occupied areas. This led to the creation, in 1948, of the OPC, which put Wisner at the crossroads of his country’s fledgling attempts to duplicate the work of the British intelligence services and, once and for all, break the longstanding American resistance to a permanent spy apparatus.
By most measures, Wisner was a success. Always full of ideas and energy, he coordinated the 1953 Anglo-American project to subvert Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s mercurial left-wing prime minister, exploiting domestic discontent to restore the power of the more amenable Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. And it was Wisner who, the following year, organized the slow-motion overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s hapless and communist-friendly president.
But there were failures as well, not least a protracted attempt to undermine Enver Hoxha’s surreal communist regime in Albania, which consumed a number of lives, mostly Albanian, and ultimately helped persuade the Eisenhower administration to redirect the CIA away from regime change and toward intelligence-gathering. This coincided with Ike’s angry disapproval in October 1956 of the British-French-Israeli plan to wrest the newly nationalized Suez Canal from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his reluctance the same month to risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union by intervening on behalf of the Hungarian revolt against Moscow.
Wisner was discouraged by these shifts that led in short order to a loss of Dulles’s influence at the White House and much soul-searching at the CIA. Whether coincidentally or not, it was also at about this time that Wisner began to show distressing symptoms of the manic depression (now called bipolar disorder) that, in 1958, led to a full breakdown requiring a prolonged hospitalization.
Wisner’s treatment seemed to be successful. By the time he returned to his duties, however, his authority had largely dissipated. Dulles generously transferred him to London as station chief, a prestigious but largely diplomatic assignment. Any chances Wisner might have had to become CIA director were effectively gone and, inevitably, his cyclical illness recurred. He retired from the CIA in 1962, found lucrative work as a consultant and rejoined the Georgetown social set he and his wife had adorned. In October 1965, Wisner shot himself at his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
For decades Wisner’s many friends and admirers wondered whether his breakdown had been caused by his chronic habits of overwork or by his loss of power and influence, and whether his depression had been exacerbated by disappointment at the outcome of the Suez and Hungarian crises.
Mr. Waller tends to reject these explanations, and persuasively: Wisner died of the effects of a disease that, in his day, was frequently lethal. He was not the first public official in history to succumb to mental illness. Still, readers may wonder about Wisner’s long tenure at a famously secretive agency that claims to closely monitor human behavior.
Mr. Terzian is the author of “Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.”
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Appeared in the April 5, 2025, print edition as 'The War Was His Playground'.