because “there is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.” That seed would flower into the hiring of hundreds of Eastern European scholars to help America collect and analyze intelligence about the Soviet Union.
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The State Department considered the 1946 Long Telegram so important that it shared the cable with every high-placed bureaucrat in Washington who could read. Secretary of State George C. Marshall offered Kennan the job of directing State’s new and powerful Policy Planning Staff. The PPS mandate was to think long-term, paint large canvases, and write top-secret policy papers for consideration by the National Security Council (NSC) and ultimately by the president.
How could Kennan say no?
“Over the next two years,” Kennan’s official biographer John Lewis Gaddis observed, “the PPS became the principal source of ideas for the NSC.” Papers prepared by PPS were routinely relabeled as NSC documents with few changes. If approved by President Truman—as they were in most cases—they became national policy.
Recognizing that it needed someone with espionage experience to help develop PPS intelligence-related policy papers, the State Department hired Frank Wisner as deputy assistant secretary for occupied countries. Wisner was an interesting choice for the job. Unlike Kennan, he was neither a deep thinker nor a brilliant analyst. During the war, he had gotten his feet wet as an OSS covert operative in Cairo and Amman. From the Middle East, OSS sent him to Bucharest, where he set up a network of spies, code name Hammerhead, that included Nazi collaborator Nicolae Malaxa and other Romanian Iron Guard war criminals.
History is ambivalent about Wisner. To some, he was an espionage rogue elephant; to others, a sincere, dedicated, competent spy, and a good administrator. To still others, he was a gullible dreamer full of contradictions. Charming, warm, funny, and gregarious, he loved to dance, sing, and drink into the wee hours. At the same time he was as secretive and illusive as the spy world he lived in.
As enigmatic as Wisner was, however, friends and critics alike agreed on one thing—his burning intensity and hatred of communism bordered on clinically obsessive. And without doubt, he was one of the most important of the Cold War strategists responsible for opening the U.S. door to former Nazi war criminals.
Frank Gardiner Wisner was born into privilege in Laurel, Mississippi, a town his family owned, from the local bank to the sawmill that made the Wisners rich. He grew up in a world that was, as one writer put it, “secretive, insular, elitist, and secure in the rectitude of its purposes.” Maids dressed him. He had little contact with the outside world. His only playmates were his cousins. He was driven and competitive, traits he learned from playing parlor games with his mother, a woman who hated to lose, even to her son. Sickly as a child, Wisner built up muscles by pumping iron. He never walked. He ran.
Unlike so many of the Cold War warriors and armchair generals he would later hire, Wisner did not attend an Ivy League school. He went to the University of Virginia, which was at the time more like a private institution than a public university. Besides being a driven student, he was such a good athlete that the U.S. Olympic Committee invited him to attend the 1936 Olympic trials as a sprinter and hurdler. His father said no.
After college and law school, Wisner ended up at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. Life as a corporate attorney was so boring that he joined the navy six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The navy assigned him to a desk shuffling papers. With the help of a former UVa law professor who had contacts in Washington, Wisner got himself transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, which would soon become his home.
With the code name Typhus, Wisner arrived in Soviet-occupied Bucharest in August 1944. Besides spying on the Romanian Communist Party, his job as OSS station chief in the Romanian capital was to negotiate the safe return of eighteen hundred American fliers shot down over that nation’s oil fields, which he did to the complete satisfaction of Washington.
In Bucharest Wisner rented a mansion, threw lavish parties for the Romanian elite, and became an informal advisor to King Michael and the queen mother. All the while he fed Washington a steady stream of accurate information, filled with dire warnings about an impending communist takeover. Washington read his communiques with interest, but did nothing. In January 1945, Wisner watched helplessly as the Soviets rounded up eighty thousand ethnic German men (
Unable to watch Romania turn into another communist satellite, Wisner quit OSS in late 1946 in complete disgust and returned to Wall Street. But baptized in the blood of Bucharest, he had become a born-again crusader with a mission to fight the evils of communism. How could he sit in a law office writing briefs while the Soviets were taking over the world?
In the summer of 1947, a year after he returned to Wall Street, Wisner went to work at the State Department. A former client of his law firm got him the job and became his boss. One of the first things Wisner did as deputy assistant secretary was to tour the displaced persons camps in Western Europe. Most DP camp visitors saw a mob of poor, frightened, squalid, and disoriented refugees. Wisner saw seven hundred thousand potential Cold War recruits. As soon as he returned to Washington, he established a study group at the State Department to prepare a policy paper on why and how to mine the mother lode of Eastern European refugees, thousands of whom had military training and experience in guerilla units, Vlasov’s army, and Waffen SS battalions.
Between 1947 and 1950, the newly created National Security Council formulated America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals based, for the most part, on secret and top-secret policy papers prepared by George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff and by the NSC’s interim advisory group—the State–Army–Navy–Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC). The chairman of SANACC was the State Department’s committee member.
As a first step in America’s psych warfare effort, SANACC recommended that the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force should each be authorized to bring into the United States, with visa status, “fifty aliens… [and that] the Department of State should be authorized to bring in one hundred.” Fifty of State’s one hundred were to be deployed at the Voice of America (VOA), which had been transferred to State Department jurisdiction in 1946. SANACC chose “Bloodstone” as a code name for the covert warfare program and recommended that “the word itself be handled as Top Secret.”
Significantly, the NSC included the following in its definition of espionage: covert propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion against hostile states, and assistance to underground resistance movements and anticommunist guerilla and liberation groups.
Also in its June 1948 policy paper, the NSC authorized the CIA to develop clandestine programs in partnership with the military so as to be ready in the event of war with the Soviet Union. To avoid overlap in
