Philby, who in his role as Washington-based liaison between OPC and MI6, had attended planning meetings for BGFIEND. The Anglophile Wisner, who had liked and trusted Philby (the British mole’s nickname was borrowed from Wisner’s favorite writer, Rudyard Kipling), never forgave this act of treachery. (For his part, Philby later contemptuously described the American as “a youngish man for so responsible a job, balding and running self-importantly to fat.”)70 Still, this misadventure did not deter the OPC from carrying out further agent drops behind the Iron Curtain, in the Baltic states, and even in the Ukraine, all leading to the same tragic denouement.
Wisner was also facing difficulties closer to home. In October 1950, after the CIA had failed to predict the outbreak of war in Korea, the pliable Roscoe Hillenkoetter was replaced as Director of Central Intelligence by the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow and Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II, General Walter Bedell Smith. “Beetle” was a very different proposition from “Hillie.” Irascible, foul-mouthed, plagued by stomach ulcers, he was (as one wit put it) “even-tempered”: that is, always angry.71 Furthermore, the new DCI did not care much for Wisner’s OPC, which in its first two years of existence had expanded at a dizzying rate, spinning off “projects” like a giant Catherine wheel. (The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 had made it even easier for Wisner to engage in covert operations by exempting the CIA from congressional budgetary and accounting requirements.) Smith had never been a fan of psychological warfare; in his view, it was too costly, its effectiveness was unproven, and it exposed the United States to the risk of scandal. “If you send me one more project with goddamned balloons,” he once snarled at a cowering subordi-
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nate, “I’ll throw you out of here.”72 Moreover, as a midwesterner of humble origins, Smith felt little sympathy for the Ivy League, dilettante types who flocked around Wisner. More to his liking were the quiet-spoken professionals in the CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO), the Agency division responsible for intelligence collection, or espionage, as opposed to covert action. Observing the parking lot at CIA headquarters, where the Chevrolets and Fords driven by OSO officers stood alongside the MGs and Jaguars owned by OPC-ers, Beetle determined to bring Wisner and his crowd to heel.73
Shortly after Smith’s arrival, the OSO and the OPC were submerged in a new entity, the Directorate of Plans. In January 1951, Allen Dulles, at long last back in from the Park Avenue cold, took up the position of Deputy Director/Plans (DD/P), Beetle’s second-in-command for covert action and espionage. For Wisner, who had enjoyed almost absolute operational freedom for the previous two years, this amounted to a “severe double demotion.”74 Smith was not done, however. A series of staff cuts, clearly aimed at culling the more cavalier elements of the OPC, resulted in as many as fifty forced resignations. “I don’t care whether they were blabbing secrets or not,” said the general to an underling. “Just give me the names of the people at Georgetown cocktail parties.”75 Next, a Project Review Committee was set up to scrutinize the covert operation proposals coming into OPC headquarters from its field staff. Beetle also demanded access to cable traffic between Wisner and his officers. Finally, the DCI approved the creation of an additional layer of Washington administration to contain the enthusiasm of the OPC sharpshooters, the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), an interdepartmental committee designed to coordinate the government’s rapidly proliferating political warfare effort.76 In October 1953, President Eisenhower replaced the PSB with the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), a body vested with enhanced powers of approval and supervision over CIA covert operations.
At the same time that Wisner was becoming increasingly boxed in by bureaucratic constraints, he and his colleagues in covert operations found themselves under renewed attack from the forces of domestic political reaction. The vulnerability of the CIA to criticism from congressmen with immigrant constituencies has already been noted. In the summer of 1953, it was the turn of Joseph R. McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin and anticommunist demagogue supreme, to take on the Agency. With its
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