The Determined Spy

From Douglas Waller, New York Times bestselling author of Wild Bill Donovan, an intimate and expertly researched biography of little-known early CIA leader Frank Wisner, whose behind-the-scenes influence on Cold War policy--and hundreds of highly secret anti-Soviet missions--resonates with the international crises we see today.

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it.  Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA’s most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world.
 
Following an early career marked by exciting escapades as a key World War II spy under General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Wisner quickly rose through the postwar intelligence ranks to lead a newly created top-secret unit tasked--under little oversight--with overseeing massive propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla operations all over the world, including such daring initiatives as the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala.
 
But simultaneously, Wisner faced a demon few at the time understood: bipolar disorder. When this debilitating disease resulted in his breakdown and transfer to a mental hospital, the repercussions were felt throughout Washington’s highest levels of power.
 
Waller’s sensitive and exhaustively researched biography is the riveting story of both Frank Wisner as a national figure who inspired a cadre of future CIA secret warriors, and also an intimate and empathetic portrait of a man whose harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder makes his impressive accomplishments on the world stage even more remarkable."The biggest surprise in Waller’s lively biography of Frank Wisner…is how stunningly naïve U.S. covert and martial operations have been at times. As Waller shows, Wisner’s tenure provides one of the harsher lessons of the world of espionage: What appears to be a success at the time may not prove so over the long run." — The New York Times

“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.” —Wall Street Journal

"Frank Wisner... is a slippery target for a biographer. Critics of the agency might describe him as a cold-blooded company man…Others might look to his later years, when he was consumed by bipolar disorder, and draw up grand theories about his mental condition and what it meant for American foreign policy writ large….In “The Determined Spy,” Douglas Waller avoids both traps. Instead, he gives detailed and nuanced treatment to both Wisner’s outsize role in the early CIA and his disease, leaving judgment to the reader.” —Washington Post

"Waller offers us a picture of a postwar America that felt it had the power, and the right, to craft the rest of the world to its liking." —The Nation

“’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.” —The Guardian

“Waller’s research is exceptional… What emerges is a thoughtful, scholarly account of one of America’s most elusive characters… For those who teach or conduct research on intelligence or US foreign relations during the first decade of the cold war, this book should be required reading.”— International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence

"During WWII, Frank Wisner worked for the OSS and stayed in the intelligence community as a founding member of the CIA, where he was the head of the clandestine service... Douglas Waller’s sweeping biography offers rich historical context and a nuanced portrait of the man and the agency." —Arlington Magazine

"The most powerful people in Washington, D.C. are oftentimes not the ones you hear about. In this fascinating and deeply researched biography of the CIA bigwif Frank Wisner, Douglas Waller uncovers a trove of mid-century secrets that help explain the world we’re living in today, and how a man who most people have never known about shaped it. Devour the book and then join us in daydreaming about casting the inevitable biopic." —Town & Country

“Douglas Waller’s ‘The Determined Spy’ is not only an excellent history of the early CIA’s covert action operations but also a human drama of a central figure in that history plagued by a crippling mental disorder… The comprehensive biography of Wisner and history of the OSS and early CIA covert action are woven into a compelling narrative, richly supported by Waller’s exhaustive research and spiced with anecdotes from a wealth of sources.”—Cipher Brief (Four Trench Coats)

"This monumental biography by the author of Wild Bill Donovan delivers an understanding of the man, his times, and his covert action operations. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history and culture of CIA." —JR Seeger, Studies in Intelligence

"An important contribution to the intelligence literature on CIA’s formative years... an achievement and a fitting tribute to its legendary subject." —Ian B. Ericson, Studies in Intelligence

"A fair and sympathetic biography of Frank Wisner, a leading figure in the history of U.S. intelligence." —Foreign Affairs

"A sprawling and detailed biography of Frank Wisner, a CIA pioneer who played a pivotal role in shaping the United States’ clandestine operations during the Cold War. The text’s originality lies in its detailed portrayal of the rise and fall of Wisner’s brilliant career plus his personal struggles with mental illness, providing a nuanced exploration of his contributions to espionage and psychological warfare... An excellent biographical history for anyone interested in Cold War history and the CIA’s formative years and those who appreciate the complexities of espionage and its human cost." —Library Journal

“In this sweeping, immersive, and full-bodied study, journalist Waller, who authored a 2011, biography of OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan, turns to another central figure in American spycraft, Frank Wisner.” —Booklist (Starred Review)

"In this fascinating and deeply researched biography of the CIA bigwif Frank Wisner, Douglas Waller uncovers a trove of mid-century secrets that help explain the world we’re living in today, and how a man who most people have never known about shaped it." —Town & Country

"A revealing look at the early history of a spy agency with a decidedly checkered past." —Kirkus

“In The Determined Spy, Douglas Waller does an admirable job of piecing together long hidden and very forbidden secrets, among them development of the notorious MKUltra mind-bending drugs intended to create human robots. For more than a decade, during the coldest days of the spy war with Moscow, Frank Wisner ran the CIA’s most secret department as deputy director of plans. For spy-readers, Waller’s new book is a wonderful follow-on to his earlier book on the founder of the OSS, Wild Bill Donovan.” —James Bamford, national bestselling author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and SpyFail

"Secret agents, soaring ideals, coup plots and intelligence disasters — all of it runs through Douglas Waller’s remarkable biography of CIA pioneer Frank Wisner. This is a tale of a shadow warrior at the dawn of the Cold War who fervently fought for freedom then tragically succumbed to personal demons." —David E. Hoffman, national bestselling author of The Billion Dollar Spy

"Unknown to the public, Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in the world during the early days of the Cold War. He ran covert actions for the CIA when the spy agency was at the peak of its ambition. That Wisner ended up in a mental hospital and later died by suicide was a fascinating and profound tragedy. A thorough and fair-minded historian, Doug Waller reveals the whole story, in gripping detail, and he tells it brilliantly." —Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of The Very Best Men and The Road to Surrender

“Thanks to an illustrious career of tracking the intelligence world, there are few who write about the CIA with as much authority as Douglas Waller and as much understanding of the human beings involved. In The Determined Spy, he deftly lays out the challenges, the compromises and the controversies of the CIA, but also the heavy personal cost to one of its early and most powerful leaders, Frank Wisner. With sensitivity but also admirable rigor, Waller reveals the story of a flawed man who fought the Cold War in the shadows with everything he had but was consumed by his own demons. A must for students of spying.”—Sonia Purnell, author of Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and IntrigueDouglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He has authored seven books on the military and intelligence, including the New York Times bestseller Wild Bill Donovan. Waller lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Judy.Chapter 1

Laurel

Through the early 1800s, the millions of acres of virgin pine forest in southern Mississippi had been home to Native Americans, to trappers, and then to settlers who saw this vast resource of trees merely as obstacles to be chopped down and cleared for hardscrabble farming. But after the Civil War, with forests in the North becoming depleted and continental railroads finally reaching into southern Mississippi, Northern lumbermen began invading to harvest its rich Piney Woods. The region became a major industrial center feeding wood-hungry builders in other parts of the country.

Laurel was one of the Yankees' conquests in southern Mississippi. It was a nondescript, rough-edged mill town in the heart of the Piney Woods, eighty-five miles southeast of the capital of Jackson. The town had been named after a toxic underbrush that grew in the pine forest. Laurel was located in Jones County, or the "Free State of Jones" as it came to be called because the anti-secessionist sentiment among many of its farmers too poor to own slaves had made the county a magnet for deserters and unionists during the Civil War.

One of the Northern lumbermen who came to Laurel in 1897 to harvest the towering trees was Frank Gardiner Wisner's father, Frank George Wisner, who could trace his American lineage back to 1714. Frank George Wisner's father was George E. D. Wisner, a tailor and Union corporal during the Civil War who had fought in General William Sherman's army during the battle for Atlanta. After the war, George Wisner settled in Clinton, Iowa, and married the daughter of a former Hessian infantryman who had immigrated there. In 1873, the couple had one son, Frank George Wisner.

Frank George's father died of tuberculosis when his son was not quite four years old, leaving the family impoverished. The boy was a fine student-he delivered his high school's valedictory-but there was no money for college after he graduated from high school, so Frank George signed on with the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Company, where he worked for the next seven years as a conductor.

In 1897, Frank George married into wealth. Petite Mary Jeannette Gardiner, who looked much younger than her twenty-two years, was the daughter of one of the most prominent families in Clinton. Her father, Silas W. Gardiner, who had lost both legs in a train accident, owned a successful lumber mill and was known in Clinton as much for his love of literature and the arts as he was for his business acumen. Jeannette was the product of a Davenport finishing school that inspired in her a passion for reading, and her name occasionally appeared in newspaper society columns, sometimes for performing in amateur musicals. Her wedding in Grace Episcopal Church to Frank George Wisner was described in the local paper as "brilliant."

Clinton had been the leading lumber town between Minneapolis and St. Louis. But by the time Frank and Jeannette married, the Northern forests were becoming exhausted and the lumber business in Clinton had fallen off. After shopping around, Silas Gardiner and his relatives moved to Laurel to chop and mill the yellow pine and start anew. They were joined in the venture by the family of another lumber baron, Lauren Eastman. Frank George Wisner and his new bride moved to this isolated Mississippi settlement to work in what became the Eastman-Gardiner Lumber Company. Jeannette was so proud that her "precious Frank," as she called him in her love letters, soon became a top executive in the Mississippi business.

Within a decade, Eastman-Gardiner had a high-tech plant in Laurel with eleven hundred employees turning out a quarter million feet of lumber daily. The company, which eventually headquartered in an opulent mansionlike building, added to their Piney Woods land holdings for many miles around. Though tree cutting and mill work could be dangerous, it paid more than tenant farming. Bonuses were handed out and the company instituted a ten-hour workday even before it was mandated by the state. By 1905, Eastman-Gardiner had become one of Mississippi's largest companies. The town, whose population eventually grew to some twenty thousand persons, boasted more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. To pamper buyers who visited, Eastman-Gardiner and four other lumber firms that resettled there arranged to be built the Hotel Pinehurst, one of the finest in the South.

The socialite wives and privileged children of the Eastman-Gardiner men also came to Laurel to stay. Along a wide, tree-lined street given the New York name "North Fifth Avenue," they constructed grand mansions in the Georgian and Classical Revival styles. The families also arrived with highly progressive values by Mississippi standards. For workers' children, they built schools that were considered the best in the state. The schools included one for Black children that needed to be separate in order to abide by the state's strict racial-separation laws. Eastman-Gardiner's African American workers were paid the same wage as their white counterparts-considered then a radical move that helped spawn one of the first Black middle-class communities in the South.

A handsome man with dark eyes and a long forehead, his hair parted neatly on the side, Frank George Wisner was among Eastman-Gardiner's next generation of energetic leaders. He oversaw mill operations and became the company's treasurer as well as a founder and president of the First National Bank of Laurel, which Eastman-Gardiner set up. Wisner was elected a city alderman and served several terms on the school board. He also had a wide range of interests outside lumber, such as growing tung trees for tung oil, manufacturing starch from sweet potatoes, and standardizing syrup to make the cane that Mississippi farmers cultivated more marketable.

Wisner joined mansion row, building at 726 North Fifth Avenue a comfortable Midwest-style stick-and-shingle home that he and Jeannette called the "Green Barn" because it was painted a dull military green. Its front door opened into a large foyer with high-quality pine beams Frank had carefully selected from the mill, and a fireplace. Off the foyer there were a music room with matching grand pianos, a wood-paneled library with hundreds of books, and a main dining room, also wood paneled, served from a kitchen and a butler's pantry. Separate staircases-one for family members, the other for the servants-went up to a second-floor foyer, with bedrooms and sleeping porches branching off it. Outside, ceiling fans hung from the wraparound porch to make Mississippi summers more tolerable. The backyard had a spacious two-story garage and a swimming pool on a little hill.

Jeannette became involved in a variety of civic activities, as was expected of the wife of a prominent town leader. She meticulously attended to a terraced garden, which the local newspaper complimented; served in her church's women's auxiliary; and became an officer in the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Mississippi. The activities could be a strain for her. Slight of build, she was frail, constantly sick, and in later years accident-prone. Shy and withdrawn, Jeannette always wore glasses with a sad look on her face in photos. Later, her grandchildren, who called her "Gammy," found her wonderful. She spent hours reading to them and taught them how to draw and play card games. But family members eventually suspected that Jeannette had suffered from depression.

She experienced heart-wrenching tragedy with the children she tried to bring into the world. George Brockway Wisner, her first child born in 1899, died a year later after suffering one illness after another. The baby boy's death shocked friends and crushed Jeannette. Elisabeth Gardiner Wisner was born in 1903 and survived into adulthood. But Jeannette's third child, Louise Gardiner Wisner, died in 1907, three months after her birth, another crippling blow for Jeannette. She was understandably nervous when she became pregnant once more. Would this child survive?

***


Frank Gardiner Wisner was born on June 23, 1909, most likely at home in one of the bedrooms of the Green Barn. Mississippi had no bureau of vital statistics when Frank arrived, so there was no public record of his birth, except for a baptism memorandum from Laurel’s St. John’s Episcopal Church a year later.

Jeannette's depression could have been passed on to her new son. Doctors at the time knew little about the mental illness. They dismissed the very idea that a young child could even be afflicted with depression or mania. Psychiatrists today recognize that these diseases can occur in childhood-although detecting them can be difficult-and that genetics plays a big part in determining whether a person is stricken with depression or mania, although exactly how still baffles doctors. Depression affects about twice as many women as it does men, and little boys have a greater chance of inheriting depression from a mother with the disease.

Frank Gardiner was a rambunctious, intense, and bright child, always running instead of walking, relying on his wit to make up for his lack of size. By the time he was three years old he was giving orders to the Black servants in the house, which no one else would have dared to do. He was bossy with his older sister Elisabeth, though she took it in stride. The two children were unusually close, spending hours together in the playroom their parents had set up in the Green Barn's attic. Frank Gardiner was considered too small for rough-contact sports but he played them nevertheless, looking fierce in his leather football helmet and pads. His father, who was a vestryman at St. John's, had to drag his son to church and in the pew kept a hand clamped on his neck so he wouldn't act up. The boy might have displayed symptoms of bipolar disorder. Or it might have been attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Or Frank Gardiner might have just been a busy kid.

Frank George Wisner's career took off as his son was growing up. Developing a national reputation as both a lumberman and an advocate of forest conservation, Frank George made regular trips to Washington to testify before Congress on issues that affected his industry like corporate taxes (Wisner wanted them lower). He became president of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association, whose members hailed him as the "little giant of Mississippi," and he became a regular at White House conferences on forestry. During World War I, he served on a lumber subcommittee of the War Industries Board, advising the Wilson administration on wood for barracks.

Wisner refused compensation for being president of the lumber association. He accepted only a dollar a year for his War Industries Board service, which became a grind and kept him away from home for months. Still, Frank George could afford to work in Washington for free. Back in Laurel he was a wealthy man. His tax return for 1919 showed he earned $30,104, which is more than $500,000 in today's dollars. He began giving sizable chunks of money to his children. Frank Gardiner received $4,920 in 1926, which is more than $80,000 in today's dollars. The lumber association also gave Frank Gardiner and his sister $10,000 each in association bonds (more than $170,000 in today's dollars) because of their father's free service to the group. In 1916, Frank George put down $18,523 (just over a half million in today's dollars) to join sixty-four other men in buying a 556-ton schooner docked at Gulfport, Mississippi.

Frank Gardiner respected his hard-driving father. But he was never close to him. Frank George was a dour, straitlaced man who extolled to no end the virtues of education and public service to his children. After lunch each day, Frank George would lie on the floor for a half hour power nap, and at night, he would always drink a shot of Demerara rum to help him sleep. Frank Gardiner hated his father being away for long stretches on lumber business; he would act up and be especially disobedient toward his mother during these absences.

Young Frank's relationship with Jeannette was even more complicated. Mothers with depression can show more anxiety and less warmth or have few simple interactions with infants and toddlers, which can affect a young boy into his adulthood. It is difficult to accurately assess from afar and a century later the impact Jeannette had on her son. Frank loved his mother, but her child-rearing became odd at times. When her son was naughty, Jeannette would give him a switch and tell him to go into a closet and spank himself, which Frank did, crying and moaning. He would then come out and tell her the devil had taken flight. Jeannette had been afflicted with arthritis since early in her marriage. She leaned on Elisabeth and Elisabeth's future husband, Alexander Field Chisholm, for care and often was unable to travel because she did not feel well. Her son suspected she was just a hypochondriac and he came to resent her passive and dependent nature. After he left college, he had little to do with her. The Sheppard Pratt psychiatrists thirty years later suspected that Frank Wisner's relationship with his mother had something to do with his manic depression.

***


Elisabeth, who looked so much like her mother, excelled in school, making practically all A’s on each report card. After Laurel High School, she attended the elite National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, and then went to Smith College in Massachusetts, where she graduated cum laude in 1924 with a major in music. Her brother’s grades were good early on, too-A’s and B’s, for example, in fifth grade-and his “deportment” always got an A. He showed a flair for line drawings, penciling unusually accurate sketches of birds flying, gladiators fighting, and jazz musicians playing their instruments. Frank Gardiner became scrappier in his teenage years, enjoying hard-fought matches on the tennis court and qualifying as a “pro-marksman” in the Winchester Junior Rifle Corps. But in high school his grades grew uneven. He received mostly B’s with an occasional A, and several times, his report cards noted he had been given a lower grade for his deportment.

In Mississippi, Laurel High School had an excellent reputation. Its graduates with straight A's were automatically accepted into the prestigious University of Chicago without having to take an entrance exam. Frank Gardiner was far from having those kinds of grades when in 1925 he graduated early at the age of sixteen. His father, who was willing to spend anything on Frank Gardiner's education, decided the boy was too young for college and needed a year or two of seasoning in a college-prep school first. The elite of Frank Gardiner's generation attended the exclusive Groton School in Massachusetts to prepare for college. But Frank George instead chose for his son the finishing school wealthy Southern families sent their children to in the South-Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia.