From Douglas Waller, New York Times bestselling author of Wild Bill Donovan, an intimate and expertly researched biography of little-known early CIA leader Frank Wisner, whose behind-the-scenes influence on Cold War policy--and hundreds of highly secret anti-Soviet missions--resonates with the international crises we see today.
Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA's most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world.
Following an early career marked by exciting escapades as a key World War II spy under General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Wisner quickly rose through the postwar intelligence ranks to lead a newly created top-secret unit tasked--under little oversight--with overseeing massive propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla operations all over the world, including such daring initiatives as the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala.
But simultaneously, Wisner faced a demon few at the time understood: bipolar disorder. When this debilitating disease resulted in his breakdown and transfer to a mental hospital, the repercussions were felt throughout Washington's highest levels of power.
Waller's sensitive and exhaustively researched biography is the riveting story of both Frank Wisner as a national figure who inspired a cadre of future CIA secret warriors, and also an intimate and empathetic portrait of a man whose harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder makes his impressive accomplishments on the world stage even more remarkable.
Douglas Waller, a former TIME Magazine correspondent and author of the critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling biography Wild Bill Donovan, writes about the adventures of the OSS years of four men who served under Franklin Roosevelt’s spy chief.
Disciples tells the story of their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe. Based in Switzerland, Dulles ran the OSS’s most successful spy operation against the Axis. Casey, from London, organized dangerous missions to penetrate Nazi Germany with OSS operatives. The debonair Colby himself led OSS commando raids dropping by parachute behind the lines in occupied France and Norway. Helms mounted risky intelligence programs against the Russians in the ruin of Berlin after the German surrender in the darkest era.
Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Four very different men, they fought in World War II as secret warriors and later led (or misled) the successor CIA.
Dulles launched the calamitous operation to land CIA-trained, anti-Castro guerrillas at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
Helms, the loyal keeper of secrets, was convicted of lying to Congress over the CIA’s role in the coup that ousted President Salvador Allende in Chile.
Colby would become a pariah among the agency’s old hands for releasing to Congress what became known as the “Family Jewels” report on CIA misdeeds during the 1950s, 60s and early 70s.
Casey would nearly bring down the CIA—and Ronald Reagan’s presidency—with a scheme that secretly supplied Nicaragua’s contras with money raked off from the sale of arms to Iran for American hostages in Beirut.
For each man, his OSS years seemed to presage how he would later lead the CIA from the compulsive to the showy to the ruthless and sometimes flamboyant in the cause of fighting America’s enemies.
Mining hundreds of thousands of once-secret World War II documents and interviewing scores family members and OSS colleagues, Waller has written a worthy successor to Wild Bill Donovan, giving us a riveting spy story full of intrigue and historical insight.
He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government documents and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.
The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, William Joseph Donovan married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership. After the war he made millions as a lawyer on Wall Street until FDR tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless, risking his life unnecessarily in war zones and engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies.
Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in Donovan's OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Deftly separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career, making for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.
