Cracking the Mighty Wurlitzer

Delving into the Frank Wisner Papers

Greetings Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,

If you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, you’ll want to now. Help support The Hunt for Tom Clancy as we bring you the weirdest true stories that have affected some aspect of your life. Today, I’m jazzed up to show a little bit of what I’ve found going through the papers of a long-dead superspy.

I hope this fine September finds you well. Thank you for reading The Hunt for Tom Clancy and please tell your friends!

-Matt

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Let’s get into it—this is the CIA’s clipping of a Washington Post obituary of a CIA pasha who killed himself in 1965.

This week we’ll be discussing a Navy man, a UVA man, and a CIA man named Frank G. Wisner. You may know the man by his actions, and he’s the man who quarterbacked the coups in Iran and Guatemala, was in charge of American covert action against the Soviets, and then ran a covert global propaganda network so responsive to his commands it was known within very select, cleared circles as “The Mighty Wurlitzer” for its ability to play any propaganda tune CIA might get orders to play.

Thanks to the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, I’ve been able to access Wisner’s private papers and I’ve been going through them; boy are they interesting, and I love being down in an archive, leafing through thin onionskins and carbon copies from a generation ago.

Also, that’s where the keep the University’s Mace, which was donated by the Seven Society at a time Frank Wisner was a member of the Seven Society and also Chief of Station, London, for CIA.

Go to your library and do this with something you’re interested in; you won’t be disappointed.

It is not every day you see a document handwritten by James Angleton.

Angleton and Wisner served together in Europe during the War, in OSS.

I think about a young Jim Angleton in the late 1930s tracking down Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy, to get him to contribute to a Yale Literary Magazine; then not a decade later, tracking him down again to have him waterboarded for high treason before he was shipped back to the US and found unfit to stand trial for treason and shunted off to a mental hospital—Pound was a prolific propagandist for the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

Among the documents in Wisner’s later recommendation for Angleton and his wife to join an exclusive social club in New York. Ernest Hemingway would lead the charge to have Pound freed from a mental hospital—St. Elizabeths, no apostrophe—in Washington DC. The grounds of that Mental Hospital are now headquarters for various components of the Department of Homeland Security.

The world spins on.