Frank Wisner, a longtime CIA official, suffered in his later years from what we now call bipolar disorder and, like Forrestal, would take his own life. But it is remarkable how much he did to destabilize the world before showing any symptoms at all. As the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations, Wisner helped orchestrate the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, leaving power in the hands of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s increasingly harsh authoritarian rule eventually provoked a massive popular uprising against his regime and its American backers in 1979, whose reverberations we are still living with.
In Guatemala in 1954, Wisner staged a coup to oust another elected official who was too progressive for Washington’s taste, President Jacobo Árbenz. The excuse was that his land and tax reforms showed him to be communist. If Árbenz “is not a communist,” Wisner’s man in Guatemala cynically cabled him, “he will certainly do until one comes along.” The coup triggered a brutal, decades-long civil war between rebels and a string of US-backed military dictators that left more than 200,000 Guatemalans dead and provoked still more to emigrate to safety abroad, mostly in the United States.
Wisner also arranged to parachute or infiltrate hundreds of operatives into Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe as well as overseeing the MK-Ultra program, which experimented with giving mind-altering drugs to unwitting subjects. He had a major hand in secretly subsidizing, on a huge scale, dozens of supposedly private independent groups like the US National Student Association, the Free Trade Union Committee, the American Society of African Culture, the International Commission of Jurists, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. When investigative journalists at Ramparts magazine and elsewhere revealed all this in the late 1960s, it was a major boon for Soviet propaganda, tarnished the various groups involved, and, among their employees and grantees, shattered hundreds of relationships between those in the know and those who had now discovered that a key secret had been kept from them.