Talk:Frank Wisner

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In popular culture / fiction.[edit]

So uh I just read Tim Kring's _Shift_. Might wanna mention that if only to clarify how far reality that work strays with Mr. Wisner's life. 76.176.121.75 (talk) 05:22, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]


I take issue with Turgidson's reversion of my additions ...[edit]

I apologize in the delay in this post as for whatever reason wikipedia.com was unavailable for me to hit on my browser for a period of about six hours after I posted the initial revision.

To quote from Wikipedia on disputes:

"Do not simply revert changes in a dispute. When someone makes an edit you consider biased or inaccurate, improve the edit, rather than reverting it. Provide a good edit summary when making significant changes that other users might object to."

Instead of simply removing the questionable sentences in my additions as the above guidelines on disputed text suggests, Turgidsan instead chose to revert, thereby removing all my contributions to the text, justifying his actions as follows:

"(rv POVish additions (with formulations such as, "CIA began preparing to put him out to pasture"), based on a couple of blogs of questionable reliability)"

Of the two sources I use as references, only ONE was a blog and its sole purpose was to serve as an additional backup to the quotation I provided from Deborah Davis's biography of publisher Katharine Graham, a reference of which was made in my primary source, the truthout.org article by Roger Morris. I have since replaced the 'blog' reference with the original published book including its ISBN-13 number.

Second, truthout.org is NOT, despite Turgidson's un-researched insinuation to the contrary, a blog site of any kind but is rather a reputable online news organization. Should Turgidson believe to the contrary, I would challenge him back up his accusation with even ONE news article (sans unintentional and thus noted published retractions) they have printed of "questionable reliability". The demonstrated level of accuracy of MSM, I believe would reveal a much poorer track record.

The primary article from which I drew as a source was the second of a two part article by Roger Morris titled "The CIA and the Politics of Counterrevolution: Robert Gates, The Specialist (Part 2)"[[1]]. Had Turgidson taken enough care to read it, or at least researched the author, he might have discovered the article are in fact excerpts from his upcoming publication "The Specialist; The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates" whom Turgidson is claiming of 'questionable reliability'.

Here is Morris's biographical information which you can find augmented at the conclusion of the article:

Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who served in the Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry Kissinger's Special Projects Staff conducting the initial highly secret "back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-1970. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952," and the best-selling "Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America" as well as, most recently, "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America" (co-authored with historian Sally Denton). His "Shadows of the Eagle," a history of US covert intervention in the Middle East and South Asia since the 1940s, will be published by Knopf early in 2008. His studies and commentary on American politics and foreign policy appear regularly on the website of the Green Institute where he is Senior Fellow.

In this case I feel that Turgidson's decision to 'revert' all of my Frank Wisner entry instead of simply removing/disputing the sentences he found POV'ish, and furthermore to label my sources to be of "questionable reliability" was both sloppy and irresponsible as it acted contrary to the aforementioned quoted 'guidelines' of conducting 'reversions' in Wikipedia, and thus was a disservice to Wikipedia itself.

Since the original posting of my dispute, I was unable to access the wikipedia.com site for a period of about six hours during which Turgidson has chosen to trash my reversion without giving me proper time in response.

Arias 08:40, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

This is too long winded for me to go point by point. Look, I added a whole bunch of stuff to the article, based on reputable, verifiable sources -- you cannot simply go about and blindly revert that material. I also put inline references, which is the better style. Now, if you want to put your own material, please go ahead, but do that without deleting sourced material, or removing relevant wikilinks, or valid categories, etc, etc. Turgidson 12:14, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and contrary to your own instructions to not delete sourced materials, you've chosen to remove my addition of Operation Bloodstone and Wisner's primary involvement, as well as my quotation from Deborah Davis's mention of Wisner based on nothing more vague references to your poorly researched claims that they were sourced from blogs of questionable reliability and have chosen not to provide any further justification for your censorship after I challenged your claims to be demonstrable falsehoods. I find it ironic that in your choice arrogance you would now instruct me that I cannot simply go about blindly reverting material when if you had followed the wikipedia guidelines from the start or had conducted due diligence instead of arbitrarily trashing my sources to justify your censorship, this whole situation could have been avoided. Instead, you revert whole blocks of my additions with no credible justification before making your own additions, making any attempt for me to recover my information appear to be removing your contributions. Instead of questioning my conduct, maybe you should first question yours, as your hypocrisy is equally irresponsible and reprehensible. Arias 23:34, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Before engaging in such vitriolic personal attacks, please review Wikipedia guidelines, especially WP:NPA and WP:AGF. If you can refrain from such attacks in the future, and assume good faith from fellow editors as a starting point, then (and only then) we can talk. Otherwise, I have nothing to say to you. Have a good day. Turgidson 00:16, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright problem removed[edit]

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: Granville, Johanna (2004). The First Domino: International Decision Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. Texas A & M University Press, College Station, Texas. ISBN 1585442984.. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and according to fair use may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Moonriddengirl (talk) 11:05, 17 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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The affair[edit]

This proposal is motivated by email sent to Wikimedia ticket:2019073110010294 but it is not necessary to see the original email to comment here.

I'm looking at two articles (and I will post this to the talk page of both):

The article on Frank contains a statement and includes a link to the article on Catherine:

The FBI provided details of Wisner's affair with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; the FBI counterintelligence claimed that Princess Caradja was a Soviet agent.

The article about Catherine includes this statement which includes a link to the article about Frank:

According to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Princess Caradja had an affair during the war with Frank Wisner, who was working in Bucharest as chief of OSS operations in southeastern Europe. Claiming that Caradja was a Soviet agent, Hoover passed that information to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was investigating at the time Wisner and the Office of Policy Coordination.

Each of the two statements is supported by a reference. The respective references are:

  • Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 98–106.
  • Evan Thomas (1996). The very best men: four who dared: the early years of the CIA. New York, NY: Touchstone. ISBN 0-684-82538-4.

The first reference has a publication date of 1995 but presumably that's an error and it should be 1996. There is a minor difference in the title, but these appear to be the same source.

The book is partially available at Google books Link

The following citation is derived from the Google books link:

(As a minor note I see that the ISBNs do not match. I think this turns out to be a minor issue as the one in the article about Catherine is the paperback version, while the other one may be the hardcover version.)

Unfortunately, the Google books link does not display pages 95 to 138, so without having a copy of the book I cannot read the exact text used to support this claim.

However, on page 139 of the book, the following sentence occurs:

Wisner had been the subject of "vicious rumors" from our Romanian émigrés, Dulles wrote Hoover on April 19, 1954, but he stood by an earlier "eyes only" report that the CIA's own investigation "discloses no association with Mr. Wisner since approximately 1945 nor any indication that he had any knowledge of espionage activities on the part of Tanda Caragea [Caragea is the original Romanian spelling]"

We don't know the exact year of the alleged affair, other than the generalized assertion that it occurred during the war (but there's reason to believe it was 1944).

If we pick 1944 as a representative year, then Frank, born in 1909, was 35 at the time, while Catherine, born in 1893, was 51. It is not impossible to envision that a 35-year-old man would have an affair with a 51-year-old woman but it is much more plausible that he might have an affair with her daughter. I don't have a birthdate, but it seems likely she would be in her early 30s.

The article on Frank makes reference to an affair with Princess Caradja. Is my supposition that someone leapt to the erroneous conclusion that this was a reference to Princess Catherine Caradja. Keep in mind that her daughter would also be referred to as a princess, so a reference to Princess Caradja is not necessarily the mother, it might be the daughter.

So far, this is largely circumstantial. It is not impossible for 35-year-old man to have an affair with a 51-year-old woman, and if we had no other information, we would some concerns about what could be said in these two articles.

However, note that this CIA document Specifically talks about Frank, in 1944, being "billeted at the home" of a woman known as Tanda Caragea. This is the daughter of Catherine and presumably also a princess.

As additional information, this CIA document specifically talks about allegations of an "intimate relationship with Tanda Caragea"

Both of those CIA documents are primary documents, and we must use primary documents with extreme care, but I don't see much doubt that the reference should be to the daughter not to the mother.

I think it is clear that we need to make edits to both of these articles but I'd like some feedback from anyone interested, especially those who have edited this article, before taking next steps.S Philbrick(Talk) 23:31, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Sphilbrick:: The Simon and Schuster hardcover edition was published in 1995. The Touchstone paperback edition was published in 1996 (Touchstone is a Simon and Schuster imprint). If details are important, there is also an updated Simon and Schuster edition from 2006 to consider. WP's Wisner article is a total hodge-podge, previously stuffed with non-RS material. Some of this is gone, but you should by no means assume that even RS material is cited accurately. If it matters, you should look at the Thomas book yourself. Why cite primary source material if the secondary source used in the article has the correct story? (Thomas signed the CIA secrecy agreements and was given access to detailed files on Wisner. That doesn't mean he is free of interpretational errors, or misplaced emphasis, or even gross bias, but in general he is reliable on basic facts.) Rgr09 (talk) 02:54, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Should have looked a little harder. The Thomas reference is on pp. 20-21, it is available in the preview of the 2012 edition on Google books (search for princess):
Wisner had requisitioned  the thirty room mansion of Romania's largest brewer, Mita Bragadiru, along with his Cadillac El Dorado. He befriended the brewer's wife Tanda Caradja, a twenty-four-year-old Romanian princess...
The passage in the Catherine Caradja article on Wisner having an affair with Catherine is ludicrously wrong. Suggest just deleting that whole passage. Note that according to Thomas the aftermath was that Tanda divorced Bragadiru and married an American pilot who was later expelled from Romania. She followed her new husband to Vienna, where the U.S. embassy reported that she was a possible Soviet agent. Thomas carefully annotates this to indicate that Tanda strongly denied this when he interviewed her in 1993. In any case, it wasn't just Hoover making something up. The claim that Hoover fed this story to Joseph McCarthy for his hearings is from Mark Riebling's book Wedge, and is, uh, questionable. Rgr09 (talk) 03:43, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Rgr09, Thanks for looking into this. A simple removal is one option. I'd like to hold off making an edit until some others, ideally one with access to the relevant passage in the book, can weigh in. S Philbrick(Talk) 13:15, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Philbrick: Whoops, already removed paragraph in Catherine Caradja article. I have access to Thomas's book at the local library, I will check the print edition to make sure the Google Books preview is correct.
As noted on the Catherine Caradja talk page, I have also moved a link to a document from the Catherine article to the Wisner article. I am not sure it belongs in the article at all; perhaps just moving the link to this talk page would be better. I wil go over this article in the near future with the Thomas book in hand and try and clean it up some more. Rgr09 (talk) 13:41, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Rgr09, I'm fine with removing it from the Catherine article. I'm mulling over whether it should be left in the Frank article and simply remove the link to Catherine as it may literally be correct he is alleged to have an affair with Princess Caradja, but not Catherine Caradja. S Philbrick(Talk) 14:14, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More research sources[edit]

For people interested in doing more research on this subject please see:

  • Maior, George (2018). America's first spy : the tragic heroism of Frank Wisner. London Washington, DC: Academica Press. ISBN 9781680530803.

I am also informed that the private papers of Frank Wisner are located in the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. S Philbrick(Talk) 14:12, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the link in the article to the declassified document on Tanda Caradja mentioned in the last section. The document, as originally cited, is here: Memorandum from immigration and naturalization service files - Subject : Caradja, Princess Catherine. This article is about Wisner, no need for the Caradja document. Rgr09 (talk) 12:52, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wisner and stay-behind nets[edit]

The article originally stated "Wisner oversaw the creation of all the stay-behind networks in East and West Europe." For this it cited Ganser, Daniele: NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (2005) pp. 55 ff.

This is not so. See, for example, Peer Henrik Hansen. "Falling Flat on the Stay-Behinds". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. 19 (1): 182–186.. Ganser 2006 has many problems, yet it is used in many articles throughout Wikipedia. A closer look is needed for all of these. Rgr09 (talk) 21:46, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Unsourced or questionable claims[edit]

The article has long been marred by a number of unsourced, questionable, and sometimes difficult to understand claims. I am cleaning these up with annotation here. Rgr09 (talk)

  • "On August 23, 1951, Wisner succeeded Allen W. Dulles and became the second Deputy Director of Plans, heading the Directorate of Plans, with Richard Helms as his chief of operations. This office had control of about 75% of the CIA budget and used about 60% of all CIA personnel." The source cited (Cullather's History of PBSUCCESS) does not give the figures cited here. I removed these
  • "In this position, [Wisner] was instrumental in supporting pro-American forces that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954." This claim is also sourced to Cullather. Wisner's role in Guatemala is well documented in Cullater, but this is not the appropriate source for his role in Iran. I added a citation tag to the Iraq reference.
  • "The FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, described the OPC as 'Wisner's gang of weirdos'." This quote did not come from Hoover, but from an FBI agent author Mark Riebling interviewed. I have simply removed the quote.
  • "The FBI provided details of Wisner's affair with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; the FBI counterintelligence claimed that Princess Caradja was a Soviet agent." This is discussed above. I have clarified that this was a reference to Alexandra (Tanda) Caradja.
  • "In March 1945, Wisner was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, where he served as OSS liaison to the Gehlen Organization." Source is Theoharis et al, p. 304, but this is in error. As the Reinhard Gehlen article notes, the organization was not established until after 1946. Rgr09 (talk) 21:39, 13 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Wisner was put in charge of the operation (OPC) and recruited many of his old friends from the Carter Ledyard law firm." No source is given for this and I have not found it in any of the sources I consulted. Removed.
  • "The FBI carried out investigations into the past of OPC employees and discovered that many of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Republican Party Wisconsin U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC.[citation needed]" No source is given for this and I have not found anything that fits such a broad claim; removed.

Frank Gardiner Wisner in Cairo in 1943 to 1944[edit]

Frank Wisner served with the OSS in Cairo in 1943-1944. See Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men,(1996) Kindle version, pages 20 and 182.----Ellis Wisner, May 31, 2020[1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.105.255.79 (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Added! Rgr09 (talk) 22:54, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men
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