Frank Wisner

--- created: 2026-05-15 updated: 2026-05-16 title: Frank Wisner aliases:

• Frank Gardiner Wisner tags:
• Person
• CIA
• ColdWar
• CovertOperations
• 1940s
• 1950s category: "Intelligence & Government" summary: "Frank Wisner was the CIA officer who founded and directed the Office of Policy Coordination - the agency's political warfare arm - from 1948 to 1958, organized the stay-behind networks across Europe (Operation Gladio), and suffered a mental breakdown after the Hungarian Revolution's failure, eventually committing suicide with a shotgun at his Maryland farm on October 29, 1965." born: 1909-06-23 died: 1965-10-29 location: "Washington, D.C."

Frank Gardiner Wisner (June 23, 1909 - October 29, 1965) was the founding director of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the political warfare branch that organized the agency's largest covert operations in the late 1940s and 1950s. His decade-long direction of the OPC - which encompassed stay-behind networks across Europe, psychological warfare programs, political action in dozens of countries, and early anti-Soviet operations in Eastern Europe - made him arguably the most consequential figure in the CIA's formative period after Allen Dulles. The failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - which Wisner had indirectly encouraged through Radio Free Europe broadcasts - broke him psychologically; he resigned from the CIA in 1962 and committed suicide in 1965.¹

Early Career

Wisner was born in Laurel, Mississippi, to a prominent family, educated at the University of Virginia, and worked as a New York attorney before serving in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His OSS posting to Romania in 1944-1945, during the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, gave him a direct and formative experience of Soviet methods of political control - including witnessing the NKVD's operations against Romanian anti-communist forces - that shaped his subsequent conviction that the United States had to fight the Cold War with the same covert methods the Soviets employed.

He joined the CIA in 1947 and within a year was appointed to head the newly created Office of Policy Coordination, which absorbed the covert action functions that had previously been split between the CIA and the State Department.¹

Office of Policy Coordination

The OPC was established in 1948 under National Security Council directive NSC 10/2, which authorized "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups."

Under Wisner the OPC became the dominant organization within the CIA, eventually absorbing the clandestine collection functions and becoming the Directorate of Plans (the clandestine service) under Wisner as Deputy Director for Plans from 1952. The programs he organized included:

Stay-behind networks: The OPC organized "stay-behind" networks in West European countries - primarily Italy, France, West Germany, and smaller NATO members - which were designed to conduct resistance and sabotage operations if the Soviet Union occupied Western Europe. These networks, known in Italy as Gladio, were staffed with former resistance fighters, intelligence personnel, and in some cases former fascists retained for their paramilitary skills and anti-communist reliability.

Anti-Soviet operations in Eastern Europe: The OPC organized programs to support anti-Soviet resistance movements in Poland, Ukraine, Albania, and other countries, parachuting agents and supplies into Soviet-controlled territory. Most of these operations were penetrated by Soviet intelligence from early stages - partly through the Kim Philby connection - and resulted in the death or capture of the inserted agents.

Political action: In Italy and France, the OPC organized substantial programs to support non-communist political parties, labor unions, and media, counteracting Soviet-funded communist party influence. These programs were more successful than the paramilitary operations.¹

Hungary and Breakdown

The Hungarian Revolution of October-November 1956 was the defining catastrophe of Wisner's career. Radio Free Europe, which the OPC had established and which operated under CIA direction, had broadcast material encouraging Hungarian resistance with language that could reasonably have been interpreted as implying the United States would provide military support if Hungarians revolted. When Soviet tanks crushed the revolution in November 1956, the United States did not intervene.

Wisner had traveled to Europe to observe the situation and was in Budapest as the uprising was crushed. The experience - watching Soviet armor destroy a popular uprising that American broadcasts had encouraged while the United States did nothing - produced a psychological breakdown from which he never fully recovered. He was diagnosed with manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder) and hospitalized. He returned to the CIA but never regained his operational authority.

He was assigned as London station chief in 1959, a posting that reflected his diminished status within the agency hierarchy. He resigned in 1962.²

Death

Wisner retired to his farm in Maryland and was under continuing psychiatric care. On October 29, 1965, he shot himself with a shotgun. He was fifty-six years old.

Evan Thomas's 1995 account The Very Best Men placed Wisner alongside Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, and Tracy Barnes as part of the generation of brilliant, idealistic CIA officers whose ambition and overreach produced operations that damaged both the agency and themselves. Wisner's trajectory from the OPC's founding energy to his breakdown and suicide traced one of the sharpest arcs in the CIA's early history.