Lindsay also wrote a nine-page memorandum to Wisner and Dulles, “arguing point by point why Kennan’s notion of a counterforce was not working.”81 “Having spent a fair amount of time with guerrilla organizations, I already knew that they fight for their own purposes,” he later explained to an interviewer. “You don’t direct them. . . . They take on a life of their own.”82 The irony was that rollback was expiring at just the time that an administration identified in the public mind with a foreign policy of containment was giving way to one that, rhetorically at least, espoused liberation. Of course, this did not mean a cessation of covert action. Indeed, as is discussed in later chapters, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles believed clandestine foreign interventions to be a relatively inexpensive, and conveniently deniable, means of waging the Cold War. The success of CIA-staged coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 (which, recently published documents reveal, owed as much to good fortune as effective planning) strengthened this bias. However, as these two operations showed, the geographical focus of covert activity was shifting away from the Soviet empire, which, as Lindsay put it, “seemed impervious,” toward regions of the developing world, such as central America and the Middle East, where defenses against penetration were weaker (and the stakes for the U.S. economy higher).83 Even Wisner was growing more cautious in eastern Europe. Hence, when rioting broke out in East Germany in June 1953, he heeded the advice of CIA colleague John Bross not to try and equip demonstrators with arms.84 Still, he did not give up on his dream of one day liberating the east; the memory of the hopeless civilians herded onto boxcars in 1945 continued to haunt him.
Wisner’s crisis came in 1956, and it was the émigrés who were at least partially to blame. Among the satellite nations targeted by the NCFE, the one perceived as most susceptible to psychological warfare was Hungary.
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Consequently, while observing the State Department’s injunction against calls for armed rebellion, RFE made particular efforts to inspire Hungarian resistance “through appeals to religion, invidious comparisons with life in the West, and invocations of the tradition of nineteenth-century freedom fighter Louis Kossuth.”85 In October 1956, fighting broke out in the streets of Budapest, followed by the installation of Imre Nagy, a communist moderate, as head of government. At first the Russians appeared content to let events take the same course as they had in Gomulka’s Poland, and withdrew their troops to the border. When, however, Nagy announced his intention of taking Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, Soviet tanks rolled back into Budapest. In the bloody fighting that followed, thousands of Hungarians were killed, along with 669 Russian troops. Later, 300 resistance leaders, including Nagy, were executed.86 The Eisenhower administration loudly protested the Soviet action, but did not intervene militarily.
Liberation was exposed as a sham.
This is not the place to relate the complex controversy about Radio Free Europe’s role in the origins of the Hungarian uprising.87 Suffice it to say that an internal review of the Voice of Free Hungary’s broadcasting at the time of the unrest in Budapest found that, while announcers had not explicitly promised western military support to the demonstrators, nonetheless, “for much of the time neither the American management of RFE
nor the head of the Hungarian service was in control of what was transmitted” and (to quote a senior CIA officer’s summary of the findings) the tone used by the émigrés “was more exuberant and optimistic than the situation warranted.”88 Certainly, Frank Wisner felt responsible for what had happened. On an inspection tour of European CIA stations at the time, the Deputy Director/Plans rushed to Germany and then on to Austria, where he stood at the border watching helplessly as Hungarians attempted to flee. “People [were] killed by the Russians as he stood there, in his sight,” recalled a colleague. “It was a profound emotional shock.”89 Returning to the U.S. embassy, Wisner frantically telephoned Washington, pleading with the White House to commit troops, all to no avail. His behavior grew manic. An operations man in Athens, the next stop on his tour, remembers him dictating cables to headquarters that simply did not make sense. By the time of his return home, Wisner was on the verge of a complete breakdown, “rambling and raving all through dinner, totally out of control.”90 Three years later, he was eased out of his duties as DD/P and
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given the largely ceremonial role of station chief in London. In 1965, at the age of fifty-six, Frank Wisner took his own life.