quite unique. Frank Wisner, the head of the OPC answered not to the DI, but
to the secretaries of defense, state, and the NSC, and the OPC's actions were
a secret even from the head of the CIA. Most CIA stations had two station
chiefs, one working for the OSO, and one working for the OPC. Their
relationship was competitive, even poaching each other's agents, a lopsided
competition, the better funded OPC often claiming victory.
Early successes and failures
In the early days of the cold war, successes for the CIA were few and far
between. The gradual Soviet takeover of Romania, the Soviet takeover
of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet blockade of Berlin, CIA assessments of
the Soviet atomic bomb project, the Korean War, and then, when the 300,000
Chinese troops waiting at the Korean border entered the war,
[26]
all,
arguably, failures of Central intelligence of the highest profile imaginable.
The famous double agent Kim Philby was the British liaison to American
Central Intelligence. Through him the CIA coordinated hundreds of airdrop
operations inside the iron curtain, all compromised by Philby. American
intelligence suffered from almost countless compromises of the networks it
tried to set up. There were spies in the Manhattan project, and
even Arlington Hall, the nerve center of CIA cryptanalysis was compromised
by William Weisband, a Russian translator and Soviet spy. The CIA reused
the tactic of dropping plant agents behind enemy lines by parachute again
on China, and North Korea. This too was fruitless.
Cryptanalysis was not the CIA's sole success story. In the 1948 Italian
election the CIA quietly backed the Christian Democrats. James
Forrestal and Allen Dulles passed a hat around Wall Street and Washington,
D.C., then Forrestal went to the Secretary of the Treasury, John W. Snyder, a
Truman stalwart. He allowed them to tap the $200 million Exchange
Stabilization Fund which had been designed during the Depression to shore
up the value of the dollar overseas, but was used during World War II as a
depository for captured Axis Loot, and was, at that time, earmarked for the
reconstruction of Europe. Funds moved from the fund into the bank accounts
of wealthy Americans, many of whom had Italian heritage. Hard cash was
then distributed to Catholic Action, the Vatican's political arm, and directly
to Italian politicians. "A long romance between the party and the agency
began. The CIA's practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags