Talk:Richard M. Bissell Jr.

Corrections and sources

I've amended the aircraft type from B-26 Marauder to Douglas B-26 Invader. See WP articles B-26 Disambiguation and Bay of Pigs Invasion. The JFK reference needs work - I think he said "minimal", not "eight" - eight was final number derived by Hawkins and/or Beerli. Also corrected Bissell's title at CIA to Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). I'm just an aircraft historian, but if anyone wants to use biog stuff and citations, see below quotes from three relevant books. Long passages, feel free to chop it out after extracting any useful stuff for Bissell main article.PeterWD (talk) 18:46, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Jones 2008 pp.13-14

"Bissell also was not what he appeared to be. A Yale-trained economist known for his brilliance, he had left his alma mater's teaching ranks during World War II to take various government positions, including one with the War Shipping Administration that facilitated his attendance at the Quebec, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, and to work closely with the CIA's predecessor, the Office of Policy Coordination. After the war, he became assistant administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany before heading the collection of classified information on Europe for the Economic Cooperation Administration. He then worked with the Ford Foundation before accepting a CIA position in 1954 as Dulles's special assistant, where he helped develop ....the U-2 spy plane and four years later, although inexperienced in covert warfare, became deputy director of plans and hence in charge of "black" operations."

Rodriguez 1999 p.20

"Richard Mervin Bissell was born in New England into a well-off family; studied at Yale and taught there during the 1930s. During World War II, he was named Executive Director of Naval Supplies, supplying the U.S. forces and their allies all over the world. In 1946, he became a professor of economics at MIT. He was called to Washington at the beginning of the Cold War and in April 1948 began to work in the Marshall Plan. In 1953, his friend Allen Dulles, who had just been named Director of the CIA, invited him to join the Agency. Five years later, Bissell was named Plans Director. He directed the plans for the Corona, the first spy satellite, and became known as a pioneer of air reconnaissance, which made a considerable contribution to improving technical intelligence during the Cold War. Paradoxically, he is remembered not for any of his successes but rather for his worst failure: the Bay of Pigs. An Agency summary made months after the disaster assigned much of the responsibility for the failure to Bissell, and he was forced to resign on February 28, 1962. Two months later, a year after the Bay of Pigs defeat, President Kennedy awarded him the National Security Medal."

Wyden 1979 pp.10-19 (quote starts 1 Oct 1960)

"Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr., was the CIA's deputy director for plans. The title was the agency's gentle euphemism for chief of all covert operations, and Bissell was second in influence only to the director, Allen W. Dulles. "Bissell," so the saying went around the agency, "is where the action is," and he and Drain had known each other for a long time. Bissell, a former economist with a Yale Ph. D., had been Drain's faculty adviser at Yale in the 1930s. He had straightened out Drain's freshman schedule and persuaded him that Economics 10 was "Coolidge economics" and a waste of time. When Drain reached the phone, Bissell said in his usual crisp but low-key way, "I hear you've taken some leave of your own." Drain agreed. "I want you to see Jake Engler* about an assignment," Bissell said. "Fine," said Drain. "I'll go to see him in the morning. "No," said Bissell, "I mean now!" A call from Dick Bissell was not taken casually in Washington, not even by the President. Outside the intelligence community, Bissell was all but unknown. Many Washington reporters had never heard his name. He was one of a handful of bureaucrats functioning silently just below the very top level of the government, doing much of its thinking, often able to shape decisions their own way. They were men of enormous power and autonomy. They showed the more visible officials like Allen Dulles which buttons to push. Often they did the button-pushing for their bosses. Their true power derived from their ability to get things done, and getting things done in Washington was the art of arts. Its mastery often eluded even presidents. They needed action men. Among the elite of these men Bissell had acquired the reputation of a virtuoso. When Dulles gave Bissell his own old job in charge of "plans," he said, "The only thing I want you to plan is how to get more intelligence about Russia." Old-fashioned spying was becoming less effective. The contemporary superspy used technology, electronics. By luck, one of President Eisenhower's innumerable advisory committees, the Killian Committee on Surprise Attack, had recommended building a plane that could fly at more than seventy thousand feet and photograph Soviet defense installations, especially missile sites. Earlier, an engineering

• A pseudonym.

Plot at the CIA 11

genius, Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Aviation, had suggested a similar airborne spy system. Bissell took the job of building what became the famous U-2 plane. He worked with Johnson, who had turned out the first American jet fighter in World War II, the F-80, in just 141 days; and with E. H. ("Din") Land, the developer of the Polaroid camera. Three superlative minds - but it was Bissell who got the U-2 operational in two years; the normal Air Force time would have been eight. His secrecy was overwhelming even by CIA standards. Most communications were face to face. The ultrasecret safes containing plans were rarelv opened. No other task had ever given Dick Bissell greater personal satisfaction. Not only was its success the key to the safety of the nation. He relished the way he could get it done, keeping control centered in his own hands. His team was "completely compartmented in the interest of security and walled off." He was boss in name and in fact: "Allen Dulles knew less of what went on in that component of the agency than he did about any of them. He didn't see much of the cable traffic. There were an awful lot of details that never came to anybody else's attention." Secrecy meant more than security. It meant control. Control meant power. Power meant getting things done without a lot of kibitzing by outsiders. The U-2 secret kept until May 1, 1960, when Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk. In Dulles' office, Bissell, who enjoyed taking risks, took a big one: he explained how it would have been impossible for Powers to survive the crash. Therefore, the United States should stick to its cover story that his aircraft was a weather plane from Turkey that had strayed off course. So Eisenhower lied. Powers lived. The Soviets went through the roof. The furor torpedoed an upcoming summit conference. But Bissell's intelligence triumph in building the plane its cameras could pick up license plates of parked cars - was warmly remembered in government.* And in August 1960 his victory became complete when, again unknown to the public, the first intelligence reconnaissance satellite, its development again supervised by Bissell, delivered an even more explicit view of Soviet targets. The official Air Force report gave him credit for that enterprise. The closed Communist society had become all but an open book. And at his desk, as he ordered Dick Drain to report for the operation to unseat Castro, Bissell was toying nervously with his favorite coffee mug. It was a present from a colleague in the U-2 operation. It carried the letters "RBAF" - Richard Bissell Air Force.

• More than a year after the Bay of Pigs, the U-2 possibly averted nuclear war when its cameras

spotted the Soviet missiles that produced the Cuban Missile Crisis before the weapons became operational.

12 BAY OF PIGS

Bissell was not the prototypical CIA executive. He had no military, investigative or legal background. Unlike most of the principal intelligence officers of his generation, he had not shared the wartime brotherhood of spies in the Office of Strategic Services. Yet among his colleagues he moved as a marked man, an original, because of his energy and his mind. Lean, stoop-shouldered, long-faced, with dark-rimmed spectacles, he looked professorial but did not act the part. His long legs made him appear even taller than his six feet three inches. He reminded Dick Drain of a great stork. He rarely walked. He loped. It was difficult for him to stay anchored to a desk. He had to pace and keep on pacing. He never dictated except on the move. Another of his assistants, Jim Flannery, always imagined that his coattails were flying as he kept striding, leaning forward as if bucking a wind, hands clasped behind his back, up and down his large rectangular office or on his almost daily outdoor walks to work off steam, an hour or two at a time. Even at his desk he was in incessant motion. He toyed with a screw and a matching nut. He polished his glasses. He threw a toy tire into the air again and again and caught it. He picked up a nasal inhalator and sniffed to fight off a chronic catarrh. His hands mangled a paper clip with the right hand, then with the left, then with both. Then it went between his thin lips to be crushed and chewed by the teeth, again and again, then shifted from one side of the mouth to the other and back again. He picked lint off his slacks. He paced. And paced. The excess energy was all but visible. His colleagues regarded Bissell with awe. Robert Amory, Jr., the agency's DDI (deputy director for intelligence), an elegant former Harvard law professor known for irreverence, thought of him as "a human computer" and "very spookish, a glutton for security." Drain, recalling the U-2, considered his former professor "one of the true heroes of our time" but "too bright for me. Flannery saw him as a perfectionist "who could drive you bananas a "genius," sometimes "frightening to work around." His impact on people was "overwhelming. His colleagues liked and admired Bissell, but they found him "eerie." He could race through a memo, holding each new page at the bottom between two fingers, scanning, flipping every few seconds, gulping the entire contents while others were struggling with the opening pages. He could recall almost any detail months later. If the telephone interrupted him while he was dictating, he could pick up later in midsentence.

Plot At The CIA 13

When the independence movement was taking hold in Africa, Bissell once said he had half an hour to be brought up to date on that continent. The division chief and his deputy arrived for the briefing, and Bissell said, "To save time, why don't I tell you what I know and you take it from there?" He talked for ten minutes. Flannery thought, "It was the damnedest thing; they didn't have a thing to add." The performance was a Bissell characteristic: he could intimidate without intimidation; he only had to display the power of his mind. Bissell's world was an elitist's possession divided between "decision-makers" and "technicians." If technicians seemed to labor sluggishly, his impatience could be incendiary. His face reddened and he shuffled his feet as if he wanted to stamp them. During the Bay of Pigs, Jake Engler, the project director, sometimes found that his head was the target for one of Bissell's well-sharpened pencils. Another eruption hit Cord Meyer, Jr., head of the agency's International Division, who frequently submitted thick reports to Bissell for concurrence shortly before they were due in Dulles office. One afternoon, caught with another Meyer report and an imminent deadline, Bissell phoned the author and shouted, "I'm going to tear it up! I'm going to tear it up!" He dropped the phone, tore up the report, picked up the receiver and shouted, "I just tore it up!" From then on, the reports arrived in time for his scanning. Low-key salesmanship, combined with mastery of his subject, overcame many of Bissell's frustrations with bureaucracy. William P. Bundy, another of his Yale students, remembered how, as deputy administrator of the Economic Cooperation Administration, Bissell was "the real mental center and engine room of the Marshall Plan." He infused congressional committees with the confidence to vote billions of dollars for then revolutionary foreign-aid schemes. The requisite facts and figures poured out of Bissell's head, usually without reference to notes. He acknowledged his impatience, his preference for "very direct kind of intervention," using power "just to get things done." During the Marshall Plan days he became "so thoroughly fed up" with French budget policy that he "wanted to cut off all aid to France." The fact that France was then one of America's stoutest allies made little difference. The French civil-service mentality was more frustrating than Bissell could bear. The State Department came to France's rescue; it was one of his many run-ins with the department and its maddeningly cautious ways. "I admire and believe in the use of power, when it's available, for purposes that I regard as legitimate," he said years later. Greater

14 BAY OF PIGS

freedom for direct action made the CIA attractive to a man of Bissell's temperament.

No movie director would cast Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr., as an assassin. He was an elitist born. His father was president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and generally considered a millionaire. Dick's friends thought Mr. Bissell looked as if he had just stepped out of the frame of the oil painting of himself that hung in his board room. He seemed to address others from "two steps up from where you were standing." He was a symbol of the Hartford, Connecticut, establishment and always dressed for dinner. His authority was quietly exercised but unquestioned. When Mr. Bissell said, "Now I think we'll play bridge," no discussion was required. Dick's mother was a Truesdale from Cleveland; her father had been president of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad. She ran a punctilious salon: the appearance of ashes in an ashtray was a signal for the nearest servant to whisk it away. She was "strong-willed" and "very interested" in her children's success. Until Dick was nine years old, the family lived in the Mark Twain House near central Hartford, a brooding multigabled red brick mansion with five baths. The thickly paneled stairwell measured fifteen by twenty-five feet. Speaking tubes connected the six bedrooms with the servants in the kitchen. Mark Twain had written Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in these imposing surroundings. Eventually the house was turned into a museum. Dick's home environment became more cosmopolitan when the family moved to suburban Farmington in 1918. In Avon, at the other end of "The Valley," lived the Alsops-Joseph, the columnist and friend of President Kennedy, became Dick's best childhood chum - and scattered on estates throughout the stately hills were families that traveled and read widely, argued passionately and had prized their ties to the Theodore Roosevelt administration. Bissell found it "a stimulating place to grow up." His parents took it for granted that he would go to Groton and Yale. Bissell's drive for control emerged early. Joe Alsop found Bissell "a terrific dominator, possessive of his friends until he married. He ran their lives." His friends did not resent him for it. When they were together at Groton, stars of the long-remembered class of '28, Alsop was grateful when Bissell reconstructed his chaotic finances from bank deposit slips and drew up a budget. Another pal, Francis Sargent Cheever, never forgot how easily he passed his college boards in

Plot at the CIA 15

geometry because Bissell instructed him not to go through old exams but to bone up on axioms which were the basis for most of the problems. When a sizable contingent of the class was quarantined for six weeks in "the pest house" with whooping cough, accompanied by frequent vomiting, nobody considered it odd that it was Bissell who laid down rules for making it to the bathroom just in time. All his life he was to exercise this benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. It was welcomed because it offered better solutions. He was a mover who could assemble pieces of a problem and move them forward against formidable obstacles of distances, time and physical impediments. When he was small and railroads were the principal instruments for massive movements, he memorized railroad timetables as other boys loaded up on pulp novels. At CIA staff meetings he delighted colleagues by recalling precisely how many hours and miles separated one point of the world from another. He could, also from memory, draw the main lines and principal branches of every railroad system in the United States and knew the gauges of all trains in Latin America and Africa and most of those in Asia. His fascination with railroads dated back to sitting on his father's lap absorbing picture books of trains. Toy trains became his favorite preoccupation. He liked his maternal grandfather, the railroad president, and among Dick's earliest memories was a glorious ride aboard that formidable relative's private railroad car, the Anthracite. Later, his interest expanded to maps and railroad geography, and, since he almost never did anything casually, he pursued this hobby with the single-mindedness of obsession. All his life, often during his hours of rapid walks, he mentally rerouted railroads or built new systems where none existed. These fantasies were invariably precise. On the Union Pacific main line, for example, west of Cheyenne, he discovered a stretch of about a hundred miles that had been built "just plain in the wrong place, and any damn fool could have been able to see it when they built it." If the railroaders had followed the North Platte, they could have circumvented Sherman Hill, lowered the elevation of their highest grade by five hundred or possibly a thousand feet, and made the trip much shorter and easier. This ancient gaffe did not merely annoy Bissell. It offended him. Never a team man, he was equally offended by organized sports and by secret fraternities. They had no sensible purpose. At Yale, he not only refused to be pledged himself; the day Gene Rostow was to be pledged, a 'rare honor for a Jew, Bissell took his friend for a long ride in the country to save him from temptation. Instead, Bissell became leader

16 BAY OF PIGS

and spokesman of a group of intellectual rebels, "a brilliant coterie of iconoclasts, loud in speech, brutal in analysis, enthusiastically uninhibited in their attack on the old tribal gods." From the gloomy Harkness Memorial Quadrangle, they issued The Harkness Hoot. On university issues they took elitist stands. "It is time to ring down the curtain on mass production," said an editorial by Bissell. "The proper cure for indifference is expulsion." On social issues, they railed against the Depression and the other injustices of their fathers' world. But Bissell and his band used a weapon that reflected their own forte. "These rebels placed a special trust in the intellect," said one Yale historian. "They believed that by taking thought they could evolve a new and better world. Injustices should be righted, but by collective planning, not via the barricades." Bissell's planning - against the economics of his father and much later against enemies of the United States from his power station within the CIA - never strayed from the system. As the Yale historian analyzed the wave-makers of the Hoot: "For all their criticism of private enterprise they betrayed an urgent wish of their own for security. They enjoyed the showers and other comforts of Harkness with scarcely a twinge. ... They wanted to have the cake yet scold the cook." Nor did Bissell merely write for the Hoot. Together with his roommate Richard S. Childs, he owned it. Wealth could buy influence, even at Yale. When Dick was a junior, he met a Hoot writer, a sophomore named Herman W. ("Fritz") Liebert, later the rotund and loquacious director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Their friendship would survive their twenty-year joint ownership of a fifty-four-foot yawl, the Sea Witch. Liebert became its cook - and the principal eyewitness expert on Bissell's career. Fritz took issue with Bissell watchers who likened Dick's mind to a computer making series of small choices. Liebert regarded his friend as an innovator on the grand scale, in search of new patterns, new rules that he could frame personally. Bissell had "intellectual peripheral vision" and experienced "extreme frustration" when he encountered imperfection. Sometimes Liebert helped him to laugh off the realities of human frailty. Together, they formed the Procrustes Corporation,* and whenever they encountered flawed products oyster-cracker packages that couldn't be pulled open or a ship's engine that would not follow

• Procrustes was a legendary robber in ancient Greece who, impatient with individual differences

and needs, stretched (or cut off) his victims' legs to adapt them to the length of a bed.

Plot At The CIA 17

orders - they joked that the offending items had been manufactured by this fictitious company. Even trivial frustrations could trigger a Vesuvian outburst in Bissell, a release with the quality almost of an orgasm." If his wife made him fifteen minutes late for a dinner party or he suspected someone of having mislaid his wallet on his boat, this jarred the equilibrium of his world. It constituted disorder, and "Dick went wild." His body shook. He waved his fists. Whatever articles were in his way went flying through the air. Within moments the tantrums passed. Bissell was forever amazed that they filled witnesses with "terror." These explosions were infrequent and fairly private. Among the Yale intellects, Bissell ruled with quiet urbanity. In discussions he would follow a pattern of his own. He led off by laying out many alternatives to solving a problem. Then he would encourage others to talk themselves out, rarely interfering unless someone went off in a direction he considered unusually foolish. Next he would push the solution of his own choice by saying, "Really this problem is . . ." Rarely would there be serious opposition, because Bissell's polish made him - in the words of McGeorge Bundy, another of his Yale students and a Bay of Pigs veteran - "a great expositor." When Secretary of State Dean Rusk, reconstructing the White House sessions about the Cuba affair years afterward, called Bissell "a persuasive briefer," he did so with a meaningful wink. It was another characteristic of Bissell's winning manner: many of his peers felt he was a manipulator but liked him too well or were too awed by his persuasiveness to say so outright. As a skipper of small boats - he always did act as the skipper - he operated the same way. If Liebert and the rest of the crew were discussing the destination of a cruise, proceedings remained "democratic up to a point." Dick suggested where to go, got out the charts and sat back. After hearing the others talk he said, "Of course you can see this is what we must do ..." The crew always did see matters Dick's way, much as Dick's family back in Farmington followed his father s ea when Bissell Senior suggested playing bridge. There was one difference: Dick liked to buttress his views even after a "team decision." He then brought out one or two additional arguments that he had withheld before. His pattern-making skills made him a fine navigator, yet in spite of his planning, or perhaps because of it, he often took needless risks. The wives were terrified of Dick's chance-taking." Sailing down the Connecticut River near Old Saybrook, he concluded that the railroad

18 BAY OF PIGS

drawbridge wasn't opened for his boat because his mast was low enough to squeeze through. In fact the bridge was closed because a train was coming. Bissell's mast came down, and he ran aground. It was not the first or last time. Stuck in harbor because of fog off the dangerous Nova Scotia coast, he got tired of waiting for the weather to clear and said, "Goddammit, we'll go out anyway" - and ran aground. The challenge of adverse conditions excited him. Caught in trouble, he always found room to extricate himself. But not when he was climbing. Bissell's love of conquering heights, Fritz Liebert thought, was also in character. He usually did it alone, taking considerable risks. As an undergraduate, he clambered about the Neo-Gothic steeples of the Harkness quadrangle in the dead of night. Later, when he was an instructor, he fell off cliffs outside Farmington, sustained a concussion, and broke his collarbone. Always there was the urge to search, to push beyond the frontiers of the known; to systemize the unorganized, to make order out of disorder, to explore ground where there were few footsteps, preferably none. At Yale, Dick became interested in economics but soon grew impatient with its lack of "discipline." He veered to mathematical economics before Maynard Keynes made it fashionable, before it was even a recognized field of study (though quickly becoming anathema to his father and other establishmentarians). Dick was not superior at mathematics; he used it "in search of a greater degree of rigor in economic theory," to make amends for the Great Depression. He did not have to search for disciples; they rallied on their own, and they were formidable personalities too. When Bissell joined the economics faculty as a graduate student, McGeorge Bundy, later Kennedy's Special Assistant for National Security, took two courses with him. He found Bissell quick, clear, authoritative, rejoicing when he was questioned knowledgeably, never happier than when he was satisfied that nobody had beaten him in an argument, pacing, always pacing. Mac's older brother Bill, who would work on plans for the Bay of Pigs as Kennedy's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, also studied with Bissell. The year Mac took the course, Walt W. Rostow, Mac's deputy on the National Security Council during the Bay of Pigs, graded papers for Bissell. Rostow had met Bissell when he was in high school in New Haven, and Rostow's older brother, Eugene, later an Assistant Secretary of State, had worked for Bissell on the Hoot. Together the two student editors developed a plan for reviving the national economy. The scheme was widely discussed; its authors even defended it on a Boston radio station.

Plot at the CIA 19

Walt Rostow gravitated naturally toward an unlisted "black market" seminar which Bissell gave on economic theory, afterward relishing the wide-ranging discussions in Bissell's living room in the Neo-Gothic building that housed Davenport College. It was a long room; Bissell paced up and down the middle, expounding, his listeners' heads bobbing back and forth as at a tennis match. Talk was mostly of getting the Depression economy moving again. Later in the evening everybody went out for hamburgers. Rostow remembered, "Part of my growing up was learning to articulate differences with this most articulate man that has ever been - temperately and precisely." Bissell's personal qualities had worked well for him and for the CIA during the agency's 1954 coup to unseat the government of Guatemala. Now they would go to work on Cuba. It was Jake Engler's job to put the boss's ideas into action."

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Contradiction - what did Bissell tell Kennedy about the guerilla fallback option?

In the section Bay of Pigs Invasion plans, one sentence says, "As Bissell explained to Kennedy, this meant that the guerrilla fallback option had been removed from the operation." But a later one says, "Bissell added that even if the project failed the invasion force could join the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains." These seem contradictory. Anyone have reliable sources to clear this up? Burritok (talk) 15:13, 10 March 2021 (UTC)