that Kennan’s idea of creating a new government body devoted exclusively to covert operations won widespread support. The result was a compromise whereby the CIA was to house the new organization—supply it
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with “quarters” and “rations,” to employ the military parlance still in common use at the time—and the Secretary of State (meaning, in effect, Kennan’s PPS) provide it with policy guidance. NSC directive 10/2, approved on June 18, 1948, superceded NSC 4-A by creating an Office of Special Projects endowed with powers to conduct “any covert activities” related to “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anticommunist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”48
To carry out this mission, the intellectual Kennan turned to the men of action, the Park Avenue cowboys. William Donovan’s best days, it was generally agreed, were now behind him, so Kennan’s first pick to head the new political warfare outfit (whose name was soon changed to the deliberately more opaque Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC) was Wild Bill’s European deputy, Allen Dulles. Mistakenly believing that he would become Director of Central Intelligence in a Republican administration following the 1948 presidential election, Dulles declined the invitation.
Kennan then turned to the former chief of OSS eastern European operations, the hard-driven Frank Wisner, who had rejoined government service in 1947 as a State Department official overseeing intelligence operations in occupied Germany.49 As the Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, Wisner lost no time in recruiting to the OPC men like himself, OSS old boys and professionals with European experience, in the process creating, in the words of one recruit, future CIA Director William Colby, “the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templars, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness.”50
The new recruits were assigned either to headquarters in Washington (housed in a collection of dingy huts strewn along the Mall) or undercover positions in diplomatic posts and military bases abroad. The Washington-based personnel were split into five “Functional Groups”—psychological warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, preventive direct action, and “miscellaneous”—and, in deliberate imitation of the Marshall Plan, six geographical divisions, the heads of which controlled the field staff.51 In practice, however, OPC officers abroad, who were usually second-in-command at their embassy, enjoyed a large measure of autonomy,
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often initiating their own operations, or “projects,” as they were called.52
The independence of individual officers was mirrored by that of the organization as a whole, which, although housed by the CIA and guided by Kennan’s PPS, was practically nonaccountable thanks to the broad mandate of NSC 10/2 and Wisner’s secret access to the unvouchered “counterpart funds” set aside for Marshall Plan administrative expenses, which amounted to roughly $200 million a year.53 The determined interventionists had triumphed: covert operations had at last acquired truly effective organizational form.
Such were the origins of the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer. Willi Münzenberg had pioneered the front organization in Berlin, then during the 1930s watched it take root in the United States, that society of inveterate joiners. With the approach of World War II, a group of “fading Wilsonians”54
who habitually thought of their private and the public interest as one and the same thing, overcame an innate American aversion to government secrecy and established the nation’s first central intelligence agency. (The great expansion of federal power that had taken place under the New Deal made this change much easier to accomplish than it might otherwise have been.) Immediately after the war, as Soviet-American friendship gave way to enmity and the OSS was revived in the shape of the CIA, George Kennan grafted the communist front tactic onto the new Cold War U.S. intelligence apparatus. All that was needed now was for the dashing young Ivy Leaguers in Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination to translate this plan for political warfare into action.
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As George Kennan and other “determined interventionists” discussed possible means of not only containing the spread of communism but also rolling back the Soviet empire in a campaign of liberation, they kept coming back to the same idea: the possible usefulness to their cause of the numerous exiles from the communist world now living in the west.