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Frank G. Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer and friend of William J Donovan, head of OSS, who recruited him for espionage work in World War II. John Toulmin, a deputy chief of OSS, appointed him station director in Istanbul in early 1944, where he quickly established a reliable espionage organization whose tentacles curled into Nazi-occupied countries of south eastern Europe. Through Wisner's spy network, he was able to provide invaluable information to the U.S. Air Force regarding the Ploesti oil fields in Rumania, which were successfully destroyed in a later bombing campaign.
When the OSS was disbanded , Wisner remained in intelligence and after the CIA was established in 1947, became the Assistant Director of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) with the specific mission of combating covert activities of the NKVD. As head of Special CIA operations, Wisner initiated the Berlin Tunnel operation, later blown by the British traitor, George Blake. He was also responsible for obtaining the 1956 secret speech Premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev gave in the Kremlin in which he denounced Joseph Stalin. Wisner was one of the CIA chiefs responsible for the successful coup in Guatemala and the failed coup in Indonesia.
From 1953 to 1959, Wisner was Deputy Director for Plans at the CIA, handling all covert operations and dirty tricks. He worked closely with the CIA's infamous consultant Dr. Sidney Gottlieb who concocted bizarre schemes to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, such as slipping him poisoned cigars or shooting poison darts into a wet suit Castro was expected to wear when scuba diving. Wisner helped direct radio propaganda into Soviet-occupied Hungary in 1956 encouraging the Hungarians to revolt against the Communist Government and its Soviet allies, with appalling consequences for those involved. Hungarian anti-Communist leaders had been promised that US forces would come to their aid once they revolted.
When this did not happen, the Soviet Army brutally crushed the Hungarian revolution, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Wisner had supposedly expected a widespread anti-Communist revolt that would unseat the Soviets from all or most of the Eastern Bloc countries. When the Hungarians were defeated, he went to pieces, suffering the first of many nervous breakdowns, brought on by a severe attack of hepatitis.
A second possible explanation for Wisner's collapse has always been that the CIA had used the Hungarian patriots to trap the Soviet Union into a brutally repressive reaction that would lose them support throughout both the Communist and non-Communist world. And indeed, fatally undermine the Soviet Union's long-term ability to maintain control of Eastern Europe. This later scenario is, of course, exactly what was to occur.
After returning to work, Wisner became the station chief in London but he suffered several more nervous breakdowns. After long periods in the hospital, he resigned from the CIA in 1962, In 1965, tormented by what was described as "his own inner demons," Wisner , one of the last true Cold War Warriors, killed himself with a shotgun.
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