by Tim Weiner
Inside the White House, Allen Dulles tried to tell the president the meaning of the Hungarian uprising. “Khrushchev’s days may well be numbered,” he said. He was off by seven years.
Dulles contacted Wisner in London the next day, October 27. The chief of covert action wanted to do everything he could to help the uprising. He had been praying for a moment like this for eight years.
The National Security Council had commanded him to keep hope alive in Hungary. “To do less,” his orders said, “would be to sacrifice the moral basis for U.S. leadership of free peoples.” He had told the White House he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare through the Roman Catholic Church, peasant collectives, recruited agents, and exile groups. He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The men he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.
There was no CIA station in Hungary in October 1956. There was no Hungarian operations section in the clandestine service at headquarters, and almost no one who spoke the language. Wisner had one man in Budapest when the uprising began: Geza Katona, a Hungarian American who spent 95 percent of his time doing his official work as a low-level State Department clerk, mailing letters, buying stamps and stationery, filing papers. When the uprising came, he was the only reliable set of eyes and ears the CIA had in Budapest.
During the two-week life of the Hungarian revolution, the agency knew no more than what it read in the newspapers. It had no idea that the uprising would happen, or how it flourished, or that the Soviets would crush it. Had the White House agreed to send weapons, the agency would have had no clue where to send them. A secret CIA history of the Hungarian uprising said the clandestine service was in a state of “wishful blindness.”
“At no time,” it said, “did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation.”
“THE FEVER OF THE TIMES”
On October 28, Wisner flew to Paris and convened a few trusted members of an American delegation attending a NATO conference on the question of Eastern Europe. Its members included Bill Griffith, the senior policy adviser at Radio Free Europe’s Munich headquarters. Wisner, exultant at a real revolt against communism in the making, pushed Griffith to pump up the propaganda. His exhortations produced a memo from Radio Free Europe’s director in New York to the Hungarian staff in Munich: “All restraints have gone off,” it read. “No holds barred. Repeat: no holds barred.” Beginning that evening, Radio Free Europe urged the citizens of Hungary to sabotage railroads, tear down telephone lines, arm the partisans, blow up tanks, and fight the Soviets to the death. “This is RFE, the Voice of Free Hungary,” the radio announced. “In the case of a tank attack, all the light weapons should open fire at the gun sights.” Listeners were advised to throw “a Molotov cocktail…a wine bottle of one liter filled with gasoline…on the grated ventilation slit over the engine.” The sign-off was “Freedom or Death!”
That night, Imre Nagy, a former prime minister who had been expelled from the Communist Party by hardliners, went on the state radio station to denounce the “terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years.” He said that Russian troops would leave Budapest, that the old state security forces would be dissolved, and that a “new government, relying on the people’s power,” would fight for democratic self-rule. In seventy-two hours, Nagy would form a working coalition government, abolish one-party rule, break with Moscow, declare Hungary a neutral country, and turn to the United Nations and the United States for help. But as Nagy took power and sought to dismantle Soviet control over Hungary, Allen Dulles deemed him a failure. He told the president that the Vatican’s man in Hungary, Cardinal Mindszenty, newly released from house arrest, could and should lead the nation. That became the party line on Radio Free Europe: “A reborn Hungary, and the appointed leader sent by God, have met each other in these hours.”
The CIA’s radios falsely accused Nagy of inviting Soviet troops into Budapest. They attacked him as a traitor, a liar, a murderer. He once had been a communist and so he was forever damned. Three new CIA frequencies were on the air at this hour. From Frankfurt, exiled Russian Solidarists said an army of freedom fighters was heading for the Hungarian border. From Vienna, the CIA amplified the low-wattage broadcasts of Hungarian partisans and beamed them back to Budapest. From Athens, the CIA’s psychological warriors suggested that the Russians be sent to the gallows.
The director was ecstatic when he briefed Eisenhower on the situation in Budapest at the next National Security Council meeting on November 1. “What had occurred there was a miracle,” Dulles told the president. “Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.”
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides. It was waiting to see which way the wind from Moscow blew. The Soviets were sending more than 200,000 troops and some 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles into the battle for Hungary.
On the morning of the Soviet invasion, Radio Free Europe’s Hungarian announcer, Zoltan Thury, told his listeners that “the pressure upon the government of the U.S. to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistible.” As tens of thousands of frantic, furious refugees poured over the border into Austria over the next few weeks, many spoke of this broadcast as “the promise that help would come.” None came. Allen Dulles insisted that the CIA’s radios had done nothing to encourage the Hungarians. The president believed him. It would be forty years before transcripts of the broadcasts were unearthed.
In four brutal days, Soviet troops crushed the partisans of Budapest, killing tens of thousands and hauling thousands more away to die in Siberian prison camps.
The Soviet onslaught began on November 4. That night, Hungary’s refugees began besieging the American embassy in Vienna, begging America to do something. They had barbed questions, said the CIA station chief, Peer de Silva: “Why hadn’t we helped? Didn’t we know the Hungarians had counted on us for assistance?” He had no answers.
He was bombarded by commands from headquarters to round up nonexistent legions of Soviet soldiers who were throwing down their weapons and heading for the Austrian border. Dulles told the president about these mass defections. They were a delusion. De Silva could only guess that “headquarters was caught up in the fever of the times.”
“STRANGE THINGS ARE APT TO DEVELOP”
On November 5, Wisner arrived at the CIA station in Frankfurt, commanded by Tracy Barnes, so distraught he could barely speak. As Russian tanks slaughtered teenage boys in Budapest, Wisner spent a sleepless night at the Barnes residence playing with toy trains. He took no joy in Eisenhower’s re-election the following day. Nor did the president appreciate awakening to a fresh but false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets were ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal from the British and French. Nor was he happy at the CIA’s inability to report on the actual Soviet attack in Hungary.
On November 7, Wisner flew to the Vienna station, thirty miles from the Hungarian border. He watched helplessly as the Hungarian partisans sent their final messages to the free world over the wires of the Associated Press: “WE ARE UNDER HEAVY MACHINE GUN FIRE…GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS.”
He fled Vienna and flew to Rome. That night he dined with the American spies of the CIA’s Rome station, among them William Colby, the future director of central intelligence. Wisner raged that people were dying as the agency dithered. He wanted “to come to the aid of the freedom fighters,” Colby recorded. “This was exactly the end for which the agency’s paramilitary capability was designed. And a case can be made that they could have done so without involving the United States in a world war w
ith the Soviet Union.” But Wisner could not make a coherent case. “It was clear that he was near a nervous breakdown,” Colby recorded.
Wisner went on to Athens, where the CIA station chief, John Richardson, saw him “revved up to an extreme velocity and intensity.” He soothed his nerves with cigarettes and alcohol. He drank whisky by the bottle, in a swoon of misery and rage.
On December 14, he was back at headquarters, listening to Allen Dulles assess the CIA’s chances for urban warfare in Hungary. “We are well-equipped for guerrilla fighting in the woods,” Dulles said, but “there is a serious lack of arms for street and close-in fighting and, in particular, anti-tank devices.” He wanted Wisner to tell him what were “the best weapons to put into the hands of the Hungarians” and “freedom fighters of other iron curtain countries who might revolt against the Communists.” Wisner gave a grandiose answer. “The wounds to the communists in Russia brought about by recent world developments are considerable and some of them are very deep,” he said. “The United States and the free world seem to be pretty much out of the woods.” Some of his fellow officers saw a case of battle fatigue. Those closest to Wisner saw something worse. On December 20, he lay in a hospital bed, delirious, his underlying disease misdiagnosed by his doctors.
That same day, at the White House, President Eisenhower received a formal report of a secret investigation into the clandestine service of the CIA. If it had ever become public, it would have destroyed the agency.
Ambassador David K. E. Bruce was the report’s principal author, and David Bruce was one of Frank Wisner’s very best friends in Washington—close enough to run over to Wisner’s house for a shower and a shave one morning when the hot water in his magnificent Georgetown mansion ran out. He was an American aristocrat, Wild Bill Donovan’s number-two at the OSS in London, Truman’s ambassador to France, Walter Bedell Smith’s predecessor as undersecretary of state, and a candidate for director of central intelligence in 1950. He knew a great deal about the CIA’s operations at home and abroad. Bruce’s personal journals show that he met Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner for dozens of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, and discreet chats in Paris and Washington between 1949 and 1956. He recorded his “great admiration and affection” for Dulles, who personally recommended that Bruce serve on the president’s new intelligence board of consultants.
Eisenhower had wanted his own set of eyes on the agency. Back in January 1956, following the secret recommendation of the Doolittle report, he had publicly announced his creation of the president’s board. He wrote in his diary that he wanted the consultants to report every six months on the value of the CIA’s work.
Ambassador Bruce requested and received the president’s authorization for a close look at the covert operations of the CIA—the work of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. His personal affection and the professional regard for them added immeasurable weight to his words. His top secret report has never been declassified—and the CIA’s own in-house historians have publicly questioned whether it ever existed. But its key findings appeared in a 1961 record created by the intelligence board and obtained by the author. Some of its passages are reproduced here for the first time.
“We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive psychological warfare and paramilitary program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it,” the report said. “No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on.”
The planning and the approval of exquisitely sensitive and extremely costly covert operations were “becoming more and more exclusively the business of the CIA—underwritten heavily by unvouchered CIA funds…. The CIA, busy, monied and privileged, likes its ‘King-making’ responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating—considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from successes—no charge is made for ‘failures’—and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).”
The report continued:
[T]here is great concern throughout the State Department over the impacts of CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities on our foreign relations. The State Department people feel that perhaps the greatest contribution this board could make would be to bring to the attention of the President the significant, almost unilateral influences that CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities have on the actual formation of our foreign policies and our relationships with our “friends.”…
CIA support and its maneuvering of local news media, labor groups, political figures and parties and other activities which can have, at any one time, the most significant impacts on the responsibilities of the local Ambassador are sometimes completely unknown to or only hazily recognized by him…. Too often differences of opinion regarding the U.S. attitude toward local figures or organizations develop, especially as between the CIA and the State Department…. (At times, the Secretary of State–DCI brother relationship may arbitrarily set “the U.S. position.”)…
Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations (often growing out of the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being) today are being conducted on a world-wide basis by a horde of CIA representatives [deleted] many of whom, by the very nature of the personnel situation [deleted] are politically immature. (Out of their “dealings” with shifty, changing characters their applications of “themes” suggested from headquarters or developed by them in the field—sometimes at the suggestion of local opportunists—strange things are apt to, and do, develop.)
The CIA’s covert operations were conducted “on an autonomous and freewheeling basis in highly critical areas involving the conduct of foreign relations,” said a follow-up report by the president’s intelligence board in January 1957. “In some quarters this leads to situations which are almost unbelievable.”
For his next four years in office, President Eisenhower tried to change the way the CIA was run. But he said he knew he could not change Allen Dulles. Nor could he think of anyone else to run the agency. It was “one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have,” he said, and “it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it.”
Allen had accepted no overseers. A silent nod from Foster had sufficed. There had never been a team quite like the Dulles brothers in American government, but age and exhaustion were wearing them down. Foster was seven years older than Allen, and he was dying. He knew he had a fatal cancer, and it killed him slowly over the next two years. He fought bravely, flying all over the world, rattling every saber in the American arsenal. But he dwindled, and that created a disturbing disequilibrium in the director of central intelligence. He lost a vital spark as his brother weakened. His ideas and his sense of order became as evanescent as his pipe smoke.
As Foster began to fail, Allen led the CIA into new battles across Asia and the Middle East. The cold war in Europe might be a stalemate, he told his chieftains, but the struggle had to go on with a new intensity from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.
14. “HAM-HANDED
OPERATIONS OF ALL
KINDS”
“If you go and live with these Arabs,” President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and the assembled members of the National Security Council, “you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run successfully a free government?”
The CIA set out to answer that question by trying to convert, coerce, or control governments throughout Asia and the Middle East. It saw itself wrestling with Moscow for the loyalties of millions of people, grappling to gain political and economic sway over the nations that geological accident had given billions of barrels of oil. The new battle line
was a great crescent reaching from Indonesia across the Indian Ocean, through the deserts of Iran and Iraq, to the ancient capitals of the Middle East.
The agency saw every Muslim political chief who would not pledge allegiance to the United States as “a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action,” said Archie Roosevelt, the chief of station in Turkey and a cousin to Kim Roosevelt, the CIA’s Near East czar. Many of the most powerful men in the Islamic world took the CIA’s cash and counsel. The agency swayed them when it could. But few CIA officers spoke the language, knew the customs, or understood the people they sought to support or suborn.
The president said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he said at a September 1957 White House meeting attended by Frank Wisner, Foster Dulles, assistant secretary of state for the Near East William Rountree, and members of the Joint Chiefs. Foster Dulles proposed “a secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.