Enthralled by covert action, Allen Dulles ceased to focus on his core mission of providing intelligence to the president.
He handled most of the CIA's analysts and much of their work with studied contempt. Dulles would keep them waiting for hours when they came to prep him for the next morning's meeting at the White House. As afternoon turned to evening, he would burst out his door and blow past them, rushing to keep a dinner date.
He had fallen into "the habit of assessing briefings by weight," said Dick Lehman, a senior CIA analyst for three decades and latterly the man who prepared the president's daily briefing. "He would heft them and decide, without reading them, whether or not to accept them."
An analyst admitted to the inner sanctum in midafternoon to advise Dulles on the crisis of the moment might find the director watching a Washington Senators baseball game on the television in his office. Lounging in a reclining chair, his feet up on an ottoman, Dulles followed the game while the hapless aide faced him from the back of the TV set. As the briefer reached his crucial points, Dulles would analyze the ball game.
He became inattentive to the life-and-death questions at hand.
"INDICT THE WHOLE SOVIET SYSTEM"
Dulles and Wisner together had launched more than two hundred major covert actions overseas over the course of five years, pouring American fortunes into the politics of France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The agency had overthrown nations. It could make or break presidents and prime ministers. But it could not get a handle on the enemy.
At the end of 1955, President Eisenhower changed the CIA's marching orders. Recognizing that covert action could not undermine the Kremlin, he revised the rules written at the start of the cold war. The new order, labeled NSC 5412/2 and dated December 28, 1955, remained in effect for fifteen years. The new goals were to "create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism," to "counter any threat of a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control," and to "strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the people of the free world"--great ambitions, but more modest and nuanced than what Dulles and Wisner tried to achieve.
A few weeks later, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, created more trouble for international communism than the CIA dreamed possible. In his February 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he denounced Stalin, dead less than three years, as "a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anybody for the sake of his own power and glory." The CIA picked up rumors about the speech in March. My kingdom for a copy, Allen Dulles told his men. Could the agency finally obtain some intelligence from inside the Politburo?
Then as now, the CIA relied heavily on foreign intelligence services, paying for secrets it could not uncover on its own. In April 1956, Israel's spies delivered the text to James Angleton, who became the CIA's one-man liaison with the Jewish state. The channel produced much of the agency's intelligence on the Arab world, but at a cost--a growing American dependence on Israel to explain events in the Middle East. The Israeli perspective colored American perceptions for decades to come.
In May, after George Kennan and others judged the text as the genuine article, a great debate arose inside the CIA.
Both Wisner and Angleton wanted to keep it secret from the free world, but leak it selectively abroad, to sow discord among the world's communist parties. Angleton thought by tweaking the text with propaganda, "he could have used it to such advantage that he would have discombobulated the Russians and their security services and perhaps used some of these emigre groups that we still at that time hoped to activate, and liberate the Ukraine or something," said Ray Cline, one of Dulles's most trusted intelligence analysts at that time.
But above all, they wanted it cut for bait to lure Soviet spies, in order to salvage one of Wisner's longest-running, least effective operations--Red Cap.
A worldwide program that began in 1952, taking its name from the railroad porters who helped baggage-laden travelers, Red Cap aimed to induce Soviets to defect from their country and work for the CIA. Ideally, they would serve as "defectors in place"--remaining in their government posts while spying for America. Failing that, they would flee to the West and reveal their knowledge of the Soviet system. But the number of important Soviet sources developed under Red Cap was zero at the time. The Soviet division of the CIA's clandestine service was run by a narrow-minded Harvard man named Dana Durand, who held his position through a combination of accident, default, and alliance with Angleton. The division was dysfunctional, according to an inspector general's report issued in June 1956 and declassified in 2004. The Soviet division could not produce "an authoritative statement of its missions and functions," much less grasp what was going on inside the Soviet Union. The report contained a list of the CIA's twenty "controlled agents" in Russia in 1956. One was a low-ranking naval engineering officer. Another was the wife of a guided missile research scientist. The others were listed as laborer, telephone repairman, garage manager, veterinarian, high school teacher, locksmith, restaurant worker, and unemployed. None of them could have had any idea what made the Kremlin tick.
On the first Saturday morning of June 1956, Dulles called Ray Cline into the director's office. "Wisner says you think we ought to release the secret Khrushchev speech," Dulles said.
Cline stated his case: it was a fantastic revelation of "the true feelings of all these guys who had to work under that old bastard Stalin for many years.
"For God's sake," he told Dulles, "let's get it out."
Dulles held his copy in trembling fingers gnarled with arthritis and gout. The old man put his carpet slippers up on the desk, leaned back, pushed his glasses up on his head, and said, "By golly, I think I'll make a policy decision!" Cline recalled. He buzzed Wisner on his intercom, "and kind of coyly talked Frank into a position where Frank could not disagree with releasing it, and using the same kind of arguments that I had, that it was a great historical chance to, as I think I told him to say, 'indict the whole Soviet system.'"
Dulles then picked up the phone and called his brother. The text was leaked through the State Department and ran three days later in The New York Times. The decision set events in motion that the CIA had never imagined.
"CIA REPRESENTED GREAT POWER"
For months thereafter, the secret speech was beamed behind the iron curtain by Radio Free Europe, the CIA's $100 million media machine. More than three thousand emigre broadcasters, writers, and engineers and their American overseers put the radios on the air in eight languages, filling the airwaves up to nineteen hours a day. In theory, they were supposed to play their news and propaganda straight. But Wisner wanted to use words as weapons. His interference created a split signal at Radio Free Europe.
The on-air emigres at the radios had been begging their American bosses to give them a clear message to deliver. Here it was: the speech was recited over the air night and day.
The consequences were immediate. The CIA's best analysts had concluded a few months before that no popular uprising was likely in Eastern Europe during the 1950s. On June 28, after the speech was broadcast, Polish workers began to rise up against their communist rulers. They rioted against a reduction in wages and destroyed the beacons that jammed Radio Free Europe's transmissions. But the CIA could do nothing but feed their rage--not when a Soviet field marshal ran Poland's army and Soviet intelligence officers oversaw the secret police, who killed fifty-three Poles and imprisoned hundreds.
The Polish struggle led the National Security Council to search for a crack in the architecture of Soviet control. Vice President Nixon argued that it would serve American interests if the Soviets pounded another upstart satellite state, such as Hungary, into submission, providing a source for global anticommunist propaganda. Picking up that theme, Foster Dulles won presidential approval for new efforts to promote "spontaneous manifestations of discontent" in the captive nations. Allen Dulles promised to pump up a Radio Free Europe program that floated balloons east over the iron curtain, carrying leaflets and "Freedom Medals"--aluminum badges bearing slogans and an imprint of the Liberty Bell.
Then Dulles took off on a fifty-seven-day world tour, circling the earth in a zippered flight suit aboard a specially configured four-engine DC-6. He dropped in on the CIA stations in London and Paris, Frankfurt and Vienna, Rome and Athens, Istanbul and Tehran, Dhahran and Delhi, Bangkok and Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul, Manila and Saigon. The journey was an open secret: Dulles was received as a head of state, and he reveled in the limelight. The trip was "one of the most highly publicized clandestine tours ever made," said Ray Cline, who accompanied the director. Cloaked yet flamboyant--that was the CIA under Allen Dulles. It was a place where "truly clandestine practices were compromised" while "analysis was clothed in an atmosphere of secrecy that was unnecessary, frequently counterproductive, and in the long run damaging," Cline thought. Watching foreign leaders fawn over Dulles at state dinners, he learned another lesson: "CIA represented great power. It was a little frightening."
"WISHFUL BLINDNESS"
On October 22, 1956, shortly after Dulles returned to Washington, a deeply weary Frank Wisner flicked out the lights in his office, walked down the corridors of decaying linoleum and peeling walls in Temporary Building L, went home to his elegant house in Georgetown, and packed for his own tour of the CIA's biggest stations in Europe.
Neither he nor his boss had a clue about the two greatest events going on in the world. War plans were afoot in London and Paris, while a popular revolution was at hand in Hungary. In the course of a crucial fortnight, Dulles would misinterpret or misrepresent every aspect of these crises in his reports to the president.
Wisner sailed out over the Atlantic in darkness. After his overnight flight to London, his first order of business was a long-scheduled dinner date with Sir Patrick Dean, a senior British intelligence officer. They were to discuss their plans to topple the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power three years earlier in a military coup. The issue had been brewing for months. Sir Patrick had been in Washington a few weeks before, and the two had agreed that one way or another, their objectives required Nasser's removal from power.
The CIA had supported Nasser at first, handing him millions, building him a powerful state radio station, and promising him American military and economic aid. Yet the agency was taken by surprise by events in Egypt, despite the fact that CIA officers outnumbered State Department officials by about four to one in the American embassy in Cairo. The biggest surprise was that Nasser did not stay bought: he used part of the $3 million in bribes that the CIA had slipped him to build a minaret in Cairo on an island in front of the Nile Hilton. It was known as el wa'ef rusfel--Roosevelt's erection. Because Roosevelt and the CIA could not come through on their promises of American military aid, Nasser agreed to sell Egyptian cotton to the Soviet Union in exchange for arms. Then, in July 1956, Nasser challenged the legacies of colonialism by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, the corporation created by the British and the French to run the Middle East's man-made maritime trade route. London and Paris roared with outrage.
The British proposed to assassinate Nasser and contemplated diverting the Nile River to destroy Egypt's bid for economic self-rule. Eisenhower said it would be "dead wrong" to use lethal force. The CIA favored a long, slow campaign of subversion against Egypt.
That was the issue that Wisner had to work out with Sir Patrick Dean. He was first perplexed and then furious when Sir Patrick failed to appear at their long-scheduled meeting. The British spy had another engagement: he was in a villa outside Paris, putting the final touches on a coordinated military attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. They aimed to destroy Nasser's government and take the Suez back by force. First Israel would attack Egypt, and then Britain and France would strike, posing as peacekeepers while seizing the canal.
The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA's chief intelligence analyst and the American military attache in Tel Aviv, both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt. Nor did he listen to an old friend, Douglas Dillon, the American ambassador in Paris, who called to warn that France was in on the plot. The director instead chose to listen to Jim Angleton and his Israeli contacts. Having won their undying gratitude for coming up with a copy of Khrushchev's secret speech, the Israelis dazzled Dulles and Angleton with disinformation, warning that there would be trouble elsewhere in the Middle East. On October 26, the director conveyed their falsehoods to the president at the National Security Council meeting: The king of Jordan has been assassinated! Egypt would soon attack Iraq!
The president pushed those headlines to the side. He declared that "the compelling news continued to be Hungary."
A great crowd had gathered at the Parliament in Budapest two days before, led by student demonstrators rising up against the communist government. The hated state security police confronted a second crowd at the government radio station, where a party functionary was denouncing the protests. Some of the students were armed. A shot rang out from the radio building, the security police opened fire, and the protestors fought the secret police all night. At the Budapest City Park, a third crowd tore a statue of Stalin from its pedestal, dragged it to the front of the National Theater, and smashed it into shards. Red Army troops and tanks entered Budapest the next morning, and the demonstrators persuaded at least a handful of the young Soviet soldiers to join their cause. Rebels rode toward the Parliament on Soviet tanks flying the Hungarian flag. Russian commanders panicked, and in a terrible moment at Kossuth Square a blinding crossfire erupted. At least a hundred people died.
Inside the White House, Allen Dulles tried to tell the president the meaning of the Hungarian uprising. "Khrushchev's days may well be numbered," he said. He was off by seven years.
Dulles contacted Wisner in London the next day, October 27. The chief of covert action wanted to do everything he could to help the uprising. He had been praying for a moment like this for eight years.
The National Security Council had commanded him to keep hope alive in Hungary. "To do less," his orders said, "would be to sacrifice the moral basis for U.S. leadership of free peoples." He had told the White House he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare through the Roman Catholic Church, peasant collectives, recruited agents, and exile groups. He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The men he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.
There was no CIA station in Hungary in October 1956. There was no Hungarian operations section in the clandestine service at headquarters, and almost no one who spoke the language. Wisner had one man in Budapest when the uprising began: Geza Katona, a Hungarian American who spent 95 percent of his time doing his official work as a low-level State Department clerk, mailing letters, buying stamps and stationery, filing papers. When the uprising came, he was the only reliable set of eyes and ears the CIA had in Budapest.
During the two-week life of the Hungarian revolution, the agency knew no more than what it read in the newspapers. It had no idea that the uprising would happen, or how it flourished, or that the Soviets would crush it. Had the White House agreed to send weapons, the agency would have had no clue where to send them. A secret CIA history of the Hungarian uprising said the clandestine service was in a state of "wishful blindness."
"At no time," it said, "did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation."
"THE FEVER OF THE TIMES"
On October 28, Wisner flew to Paris and convened a few trusted members of an American delegation attending a NATO conference on the question of Eastern Europe. Its members included Bill Griffith, the senior policy adviser at Radio Free Europe's Munich headquarters. Wisner, exultant at a real revolt against communism in the making, pushed Griffith to pump up the propaganda. His exhortations produced a memo from Radio Free Europe's director in New York to the Hungarian staff in Munich: "All restraints have gone off," it read. "No holds barred. Repeat: no holds barred." Beginning that evening, Radio Free Europe urged the citizens of Hungary to sabotage railroads, tear down telephone lines, arm the partisans, blow up tanks, and fight the Soviets to the death. "This is RFE, the Voice of Free Hungary," the radio announced. "In the case of a tank attack, all the light weapons should open fire at the gun sights." Listeners were advised to throw "a Molotov cocktail...a wine bottle of one liter filled with gasoline...on the grated ventilation slit over the engine." The sign-off was "Freedom or Death!"
That night, Imre Nagy, a former prime minister who had been expelled from the Communist Party by hardliners, went on the state radio station to denounce the "terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years." He said that Russian troops would leave Budapest, that the old state security forces would be dissolved, and that a "new government, relying on the people's power," would fight for democratic self-rule. In seventy-two hours, Nagy would form a working coalition government, abolish one-party rule, break with Moscow, declare Hungary a neutral country, and turn to the United Nations and the United States for help. But as Nagy took power and sought to dismantle Soviet control over Hungary, Allen Dulles deemed him a failure. He told the president that the Vatican's man in Hungary, Cardinal Mindszenty, newly released from house arrest, could and should lead the nation. That became the party line on Radio Free Europe: "A reborn Hungary, and the appointed leader sent by God, have met each other in these hours."
The CIA's radios falsely accused Nagy of inviting Soviet troops into Budapest. They attacked him as a traitor, a liar, a murderer. He once had been a communist and so he was forever damned. Three new CIA frequencies were on the air at this hour. From Frankfurt, exiled Russian Solidarists said an army of freedom fighters was heading for the Hungarian border. From Vienna, the CIA amplified the low-wattage broadcasts of Hungarian partisans and beamed them back to Budapest. From Athens, the CIA's psychological warriors suggested that the Russians be sent to the gallows.
The director was ecstatic when he briefed Eisenhower on the situation in Budapest at the next National Security Council meeting on November 1. "What had occurred there was a miracle," Dulles told the president. "Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms."
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides. It was waiting to see which way the wind from Moscow blew. The Soviets were sending more than 200,000 troops and some 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles into the battle for Hungary.
On the morning of the Soviet invasion, Radio Free Europe's Hungarian announcer, Zoltan Thury, told his listeners that "the pressure upon the government of the U.S. to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistible." As tens of thousands of frantic, furious refugees poured over the border into Austria over the next few weeks, many spoke of this broadcast as "the promise that help would come." None came. Allen Dulles insisted that the CIA's radios had done nothing to encourage the Hungarians. The president believed him. It would be forty years before transcripts of the broadcasts were unearthed.
In four brutal days, Soviet troops crushed the partisans of Budapest, killing tens of thousands and hauling thousands more away to die in Siberian prison camps.
The Soviet onslaught began on November 4. That night, Hungary's refugees began besieging the American embassy in Vienna, begging America to do something. They had barbed questions, said the CIA station chief, Peer de Silva: "Why hadn't we helped? Didn't we know the Hungarians had counted on us for assistance?" He had no answers.
He was bombarded by commands from headquarters to round up nonexistent legions of Soviet soldiers who were throwing down their weapons and heading for the Austrian border. Dulles told the president about these mass defections. They were a delusion. De Silva could only guess that "headquarters was caught up in the fever of the times."
"STRANGE THINGS ARE APT TO DEVELOP"
On November 5, Wisner arrived at the CIA station in Frankfurt, commanded by Tracy Barnes, so distraught he could barely speak. As Russian tanks slaughtered teenage boys in Budapest, Wisner spent a sleepless night at the Barnes residence playing with toy trains. He took no joy in Eisenhower's re-election the following day. Nor did the president appreciate awakening to a fresh but false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets were ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal from the British and French. Nor was he happy at the CIA's inability to report on the actual Soviet attack in Hungary.
On November 7, Wisner flew to the Vienna station, thirty miles from the Hungarian border. He watched helplessly as the Hungarian partisans sent their final messages to the free world over the wires of the Associated Press: "WE ARE UNDER HEAVY MACHINE GUN FIRE...GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS."
He fled Vienna and flew to Rome. That night he dined with the American spies of the CIA's Rome station, among them William Colby, the future director of central intelligence. Wisner raged that people were dying as the agency dithered. He wanted "to come to the aid of the freedom fighters," Colby recorded. "This was exactly the end for which the agency's paramilitary capability was designed. And a case can be made that they could have done so without involving the United States in a world war with the Soviet Union." But Wisner could not make a coherent case. "It was clear that he was near a nervous breakdown," Colby recorded.
Wisner went on to Athens, where the CIA station chief, John Richardson, saw him "revved up to an extreme velocity and intensity." He soothed his nerves with cigarettes and alcohol. He drank whisky by the bottle, in a swoon of misery and rage.
On December 14, he was back at headquarters, listening to Allen Dulles assess the CIA's chances for urban warfare in Hungary. "We are well-equipped for guerrilla fighting in the woods," Dulles said, but "there is a serious lack of arms for street and close-in fighting and, in particular, anti-tank devices." He wanted Wisner to tell him what were "the best weapons to put into the hands of the Hungarians" and "freedom fighters of other iron curtain countries who might revolt against the Communists." Wisner gave a grandiose answer. "The wounds to the communists in Russia brought about by recent world developments are considerable and some of them are very deep," he said. "The United States and the free world seem to be pretty much out of the woods." Some of his fellow officers saw a case of battle fatigue. Those closest to Wisner saw something worse. On December 20, he lay in a hospital bed, delirious, his underlying disease misdiagnosed by his doctors.
That same day, at the White House, President Eisenhower received a formal report of a secret investigation into the clandestine service of the CIA. If it had ever become public, it would have destroyed the agency.
Ambassador David K. E. Bruce was the report's principal author, and David Bruce was one of Frank Wisner's very best friends in Washington--close enough to run over to Wisner's house for a shower and a shave one morning when the hot water in his magnificent Georgetown mansion ran out. He was an American aristocrat, Wild Bill Donovan's number-two at the OSS in London, Truman's ambassador to France, Walter Bedell Smith's predecessor as undersecretary of state, and a candidate for director of central intelligence in 1950. He knew a great deal about the CIA's operations at home and abroad. Bruce's personal journals show that he met Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner for dozens of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, and discreet chats in Paris and Washington between 1949 and 1956. He recorded his "great admiration and affection" for Dulles, who personally recommended that Bruce serve on the president's new intelligence board of consultants.
Eisenhower had wanted his own set of eyes on the agency. Back in January 1956, following the secret recommendation of the Doolittle report, he had publicly announced his creation of the president's board. He wrote in his diary that he wanted the consultants to report every six months on the value of the CIA's work.
Ambassador Bruce requested and received the president's authorization for a close look at the covert operations of the CIA--the work of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. His personal affection and the professional regard for them added immeasurable weight to his words. His top secret report has never been declassified--and the CIA's own in-house historians have publicly questioned whether it ever existed. But its key findings appeared in a 1961 record created by the intelligence board and obtained by the author. Some of its passages are reproduced here for the first time.
"We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive psychological warfare and paramilitary program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it," the report said. "No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on."
The planning and the approval of exquisitely sensitive and extremely costly covert operations were "becoming more and more exclusively the business of the CIA--underwritten heavily by unvouchered CIA funds.... The CIA, busy, monied and privileged, likes its 'King-making' responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating--considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from successes--no charge is made for 'failures'--and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!)."
The report continued:
[T]here is great concern throughout the State Department over the impacts of CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities on our foreign relations. The State Department people feel that perhaps the greatest contribution this board could make would be to bring to the attention of the President the significant, almost unilateral influences that CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities have on the actual formation of our foreign policies and our relationships with our "friends."...
CIA support and its maneuvering of local news media, labor groups, political figures and parties and other activities which can have, at any one time, the most significant impacts on the responsibilities of the local Ambassador are sometimes completely unknown to or only hazily recognized by him.... Too often differences of opinion regarding the U.S. attitude toward local figures or organizations develop, especially as between the CIA and the State Department.... (At times, the Secretary of State-DCI brother relationship may arbitrarily set "the U.S. position.")...
Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations (often growing out of the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being) today are being conducted on a world-wide basis by a horde of CIA representatives [deleted] many of whom, by the very nature of the personnel situation [deleted] are politically immature. (Out of their "dealings" with shifty, changing characters their applications of "themes" suggested from headquarters or developed by them in the field--sometimes at the suggestion of local opportunists--strange things are apt to, and do, develop.)
The CIA's covert operations were conducted "on an autonomous and freewheeling basis in highly critical areas involving the conduct of foreign relations," said a follow-up report by the president's intelligence board in January 1957. "In some quarters this leads to situations which are almost unbelievable."
For his next four years in office, President Eisenhower tried to change the way the CIA was run. But he said he knew he could not change Allen Dulles. Nor could he think of anyone else to run the agency. It was "one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have," he said, and "it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it."
Allen had accepted no overseers. A silent nod from Foster had sufficed. There had never been a team quite like the Dulles brothers in American government, but age and exhaustion were wearing them down. Foster was seven years older than Allen, and he was dying. He knew he had a fatal cancer, and it killed him slowly over the next two years. He fought bravely, flying all over the world, rattling every saber in the American arsenal. But he dwindled, and that created a disturbing disequilibrium in the director of central intelligence. He lost a vital spark as his brother weakened. His ideas and his sense of order became as evanescent as his pipe smoke.
As Foster began to fail, Allen led the CIA into new battles across Asia and the Middle East. The cold war in Europe might be a stalemate, he told his chieftains, but the struggle had to go on with a new intensity from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.