Wisner, a former Olympic competitor, had once been considered handsome. An Office of Strategic Services spy during the war, Wisner was rumored to be the paramour of Princess Caradja of Romania. Now, although not yet forty years old, Wisner had lost his hair, his physique, and his good looks to what would later be revealed as mental illness and alcoholism—but the true signs of his downfall were not yet clear. During the fireside chat in Richard Bissell’s Washington parlor, Bissell quickly learned that Frank Wisner was the man in charge of a division of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. At the time, not much was known about America’s intelligence agency because the CIA was only three and a half years old. As for the mysterious office called OPC, only a handful of people knew its true purpose. Bissell had heard in cocktail conversation that OPC was “engaged in the battle against Communism through covert means.” In reality, the bland-sounding Office of Policy Coordination was the power center for all of the Agency’s covert operations. All black and paramilitary operations ran through OPC. The office had been set up by the former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the nation’s first secretary of defense.
Seated beside the fire in the parlor that foggy evening in 1951, Wisner told Bissell that the OPC needed money. “He asked me to help finance the OPC’s covert operations by releasing a modest amount of funds generated by the Marshall Plan,” Bissell later explained. Mindful of the gray-area nature of Wisner’s request, Bissell asked for more details. Wisner declined, saying that he’d already said what he was allowed to say. But Wisner assured Bissell that Averell Harriman, the powerful statesman, financier, former ambassador to Moscow, and, most important, Bissell’s superior at the Marshall Plan, had approved the money request. “I could have confirmed Wisner’s story with [Harriman] if I had any doubts,” Bissell recalled. But he had no such doubts. And so, without hesitation, Richard Bissell agreed to siphon money from the Marshall Plan and divert it to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. Largely unknown until now, this was how a significant portion of the CIA’s earliest covert black budgets came to be. Richard Bissell was the hidden hand.
Equally concerned about the nation’s needs in gathering intelligence was Colonel Richard Leghorn. For Leghorn, the mock nuclear naval battle called Operation Crossroads in 1946 had spurred him to action. Leghorn presented papers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing that overflying the Soviet Union to learn about its military might was urgent business and not just something to consider down the line. He walked the halls of the Pentagon with his papers immediately after Crossroads in 1946, and again in 1948, but with no results. Then along came another war. The Korean War has often been called the forgotten war. In its simplest terms, it was a war between North Korea and South Korea, but it was also the first trial of technical strength and scientific prowess between two opposing teams of German-born scientists specializing in aviation. One group of Germans worked for America now, as Paperclip scientists, and the other group worked for the Soviet Union, and the jet-versus-jet dogfights in the skies above Korea were fights between American-made F-86 Sabres and Soviet-made MiG-15s, both of which had been designed by Germans who once worked for Adolf Hitler.
When war was declared against Korea, Colonel Leghorn was called back into active duty. As commander of the reconnaissance systems branch of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, Leghorn was now in charge of planning missions for American pilots flying over denied territory in North Korea and Manchuria to photograph weapons depots and missile sites. American spy planes were accompanied by fighter jets for protection, but still the enemy managed to shoot down an undisclosed number of American spy planes with their MiG fighter jets. In these tragic losses, Leghorn saw a further opportunity to strengthen his argument for overhead. Those MiGs could reach a maximum altitude of only 45,000 feet, meaning that if the United States created a spy plane that could get above 60,000 feet, the airplane would be untouchable. After the armistice was signed, in 1953, Leghorn went back to Washington to present his overhead espionage idea to Air Force officials again.
One man in a position to be interested was Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt, the Army commander whose men had captured Hermann G?ring’s Volkenrode aircraft facility in Germany just before the end of the war as part of Operation Lusty. Putt had smuggled one of the earliest groups of German scientists, including V-2 rocket scientists Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff, out of the country and into America. Now, Putt was overseeing the fruits of the scientists’ labor from inside his office at the Pentagon. Putt had been promoted to deputy chief of staff for research and development at the Pentagon, and the three stars on his chest afforded him great power and persuasion about America’s military future involving airplanes. But Putt listened to a presentation of Leghorn’s spy plane idea and immediately said that he was not interested. The Air Force was not in the business of making dual-purpose aircraft, airplanes that carried cameras in addition to weapons. Besides, Air Force airplanes came with armor, Putt said, which made them heavy. Any flier in the early 1950s knew heavy airplanes could not fly anywhere near sixty thousand feet.