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By Root 969 0

not to, see. The man he was replacing was Frank Wisner, his old friend and the man who first introduced Bissell to the CIA. It was Frank Wisner who’d knocked on Bissell’s door unannounced and then spent a fireside evening in Bissell’s Washington, DC, parlor eleven years before. It was Wisner who had originally asked Bissell to siphon off funds from the Marshall Plan and hand them over to the CIA, no questions asked. Wisner had served the Agency as deputy director of plans from August 1951 to January 1959, but by the end of the summer of 1958, the job proved too psychologically challenging for him—Frank Wisner had begun displaying the first signs of madness. The diagnosis was psychotic mania, according to author Tim Weiner. Doctors and drugs did not help. Next came the electroshock treatment: “For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief. A broken man, Wisner did not last long overseas. He shuffled in and out of mad-houses for years until finally forced to retire in 1962: “He’d been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well.” Tragically, on October 29, 1965, Wisner was getting ready to go hunting with his old CIA friend Joe Bryan at his country estate when he took a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and put a bullet in his own head.

The pressure that came with being the deputy director of plans for the CIA was, for some, as treacherous as a loaded gun.

As workers toiled away at Area 51 getting ready for the arrival of the Oxcart spy plane, Richard Bissell focused on his orders to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. By 1961, the Agency decided that Bahía de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs, was the perfect place to launch its “paramilitary plan.” The little sliver of coastline on the south shore of the island was barely inhabited. A few summer cottages were scattered among little bays, used mostly for fishing and swimming, and there was a valuable asset nearby in “an airstrip not far from the beach.”

Surely, the U-2 spy plane could help in gathering intel, Bissell decided. After Gary Powers was shot down, President Eisenhower had promised the world there would be no spy missions over Russia, but that promise did not include dangerous Soviet proxies like Cuba. In his new position as deputy director of plans, Bissell had used the U-2 to gather intelligence before. Its photographs had been helpful in planning paramilitary operations in Laos and the Dominican Republic. And in Cuba, overhead photographs taken by the Agency’s U-2s revealed important details regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede the water landing by commandos.

Hundreds of pages, declassified after thirty years, reveal the hand of economics wizard Richard Bissell in the design of the paramilitary operation. Bissell painstakingly outlined: “Contingency Plans… Probabilities… Likelihood, chance of success… Plans for Operation ‘T,’… Operation ‘Z,’… Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3… Pre-Day Day plans… D-Day plans… Post D-Day plans… Unattributable actions by the Navy… Post-Recognition Plans… Arguments for maximum sabotage… Arguments for simultaneous defection… Feasibility of declaration of war by certain Central American states… Disclosures… Non-Disclosures… Continuation of Psychological Warfare Plans… How to deal, and how not to deal with the press.” For all the organization and preplanning, the operation might have been successful. But there are many reasons