Reply #24: Sorry I'm too late to rec. Thanks for keeping up on the Wisners!

[robertpaulsen]

By coincidence, I'm reading The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph J. Trento. There's quite a bit of revealing info on Frank G. Wisner Sr. prior to the debacles in Iran and Guatemala in the 50's. This is from page 23:

Allen W. Dulles, second in command of the OSS, sent a young colleague, Frank Gardiner Wisner, to accept the surrender of Gehlen and several hundred of his officers and their families.

Through Wisner, Gehlen convinced Dulles that the United States must provide protection for thousands of high-ranking Nazis who would otherwise fall under Soviet control.

Gehlen was of course Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi general who since 1942 was head of Branch 12 of Foreign Armies East. To continue from page 23:

Gehlen signed an agreement with the Americans that turned his organization into U.S.-controlled intelligence asset. Years later, in 1956, it became the intelligence service for the new West German government. This partnership between the ex-Nazis and the OSS/CIA dominated U.S. activity against the Soviet bloc for the next three decades.

But this was only the beginning of Wisner's trickery. From page 46:

Wisner's bureaucracy within the State Department, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), was enormous. While officially the OPC was concerned with refugee affairs and worked in conjunction with the International Red Cross, in reality it was authorized by the new National Security Council to conduct sabotage and other covert operations against the Soviets.

By late 1947, Wisner, in an underhanded way, wielded vast power in the State Department bureaucracy. He never asked permission to conduct his operations. Rather, he played a deceptive double game in which he informed either Secretary of State George Marshall or Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that the other secretary had approved his operation. Then he went ahead and carried it out.

With help from the U.S. Army, Wisner's OPC quickly created a U.S. intelligence network manned by anti-Soviet Russian emigres and refugees concentrating on searching Eastern Europe for Nazis to use against the Soviet Union. The OPC supervised Gehlen's operations, now relocated to Munich, and it was engaged in quietly transporting Nazi war criminals, including rocket scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and doctors, into the United States.