Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,709

This is the grave of Richard Bissell.

Born in 1909 in Hartford, Bissell grew up very wealthy. His father was a big-time insurance executive who had purchased Mark Twain’s former home, which you can tour today. It was there where Bissell entered the world. He went to Groton and then to Yale. He graduated in 1932, studied at the London School of Economics for a bit, then came back to New Haven for a PhD in Economics in 1939. The Roosevelt administration brought him into the government during World War II, where he managed the shipping program to get goods to American soldiers and allies, an important job.

In 1946, Bissell took a job teaching economics at MIT, but that didn’t last long. The Cold War was beginning and elite men such as Bissell had all sorts of fun opportunities. That was even more the case when the government created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. So many elites would move into that agency and raise hell around the world. Oh, it was all so fun. As it would be for Bissell, though it took him awhile to get there. For him, it was the Marshall Plan that got him to Washington again. Now, the Marshall Plan is probably the most successful bit of foreign policy in American history–a massive program to build other nations’ economies that put Americans to work, undermined communist parties without outright violence, and secured American leadership in the western world for the next half-century. God, I wish it was consensus that this was the way to conduct a foreign policy today. Anyway, from 1948-52, Bissell was in top leadership of the Economic Cooperation Administration and then its successor, the Mutual Security Agency. On his very first day, he signed off on $35 million of economic aid to western Europe.

Bissell also became part of the Georgetown Set, the group of elite foreign policy oriented men, almost all from wealthy backgrounds and who went to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton and who liked to dabble in foreign policy while partying with each other. Basically an entire generation of American foreign policy leadership came out of this, culminating in the Best and the Brightest era of the Kennedy administration, with all the mistakes these men made. Bissell was central to all of it.

In 1954, the CIA hired Bissell to run the U-2 spy plane program. He and his fellow CIA officer William Miller chose Area 51 at the Nevada Test Site as it home. This was his baby for the rest of his time with the CIA. The first thing the planes did was demonstrate that the U.S. did suffer from a bomber gap with the Soviets, though the government couldn’t share this information with the public, so it still existed as a political issue. Then, when Khrushchev discovered the program, Bissell was the head of Project RAINBOW to develop camo for the planes. He also became a huge advocate in the government for the CIA ignoring the law. Seeing technology as the future, he advocated for massive funding and if it engaged in illegal activities, or “gray activities” as he put it, well, wasn’t America worth the CIA breaking the law for?

In January 1959, Bissell became the CIA Deputy Director for Plans. This was the same day Fidel Castro walked into Havana and the CIA began hatching plans to get rid of him and putting good men like Fulgencio Batista back in power. Bissell became obsessed by Castro. This was the agency in the CIA that had run all kind of coup-based operations, including in Guatemala and Iran. So Bissell and his top lieutenant Richard Helms were determined to use full CIA powers to overthrow Castro. Eisenhower approved of getting rid of Castro in March 1960. First, Bissell contacted members of the mafia to eliminate Castro, offering a $150,000 payout to the gangster who could pull it off. Of course this also gave the mafia cover from FBI prosecution so they were cool with it. Ah, the glories of the Cold War. Can you imagine thinking this was a good idea? You know who can really serve American interests globally? Meyer Lansky.

When the mob couldn’t kill Castro, Bissell organized groups of right-wing Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro government. This of course became the Bay of Pigs invasion. At first Bissell wanted something even flashier. He believed that if the Air Force could give the exiles four days of air cover around Trinidad, that the city would rise up against Castro. By this time, John F. Kennedy was president and he thought this was insane. He told Bissell no. Working with CIA director Allen Dulles, Bissell came up with the secondary plan for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Knowing that this was in a swampy area, Dulles and Bissell figured this would force Kennedy to use the military to back up the exiles in order to prevent American embarrassment when the operation failed. That, uh, didn’t happen quite according to plan. Kennedy was no bleeding heart on the Cold War and would engage in awful stuff too, but unlike Eisenhower, he wasn’t going to approve of everything. The whole thing fell apart and it was a huge disaster for the CIA.

Kennedy fired Bissell in 1962. Bissell had initially offered his recognition right after the failure, but Kennedy knew this was a tricky case. He had to make sure Bissell got the right kind of treatment, which meant keeping him on for a year and giving him the National Security Medal for his service. But he was finished. Much of the CIA itself was disgusted by Bissell’s hubris and machinations, believing, probably correctly, that Bissell wanted the president to commit American troops to the operation and thus attempted to trap Kennedy. The president offered Bissell the off ramp of running the A-12 program, to replace the U-2. But Bissell turned it down and went into the private sector. First he ran the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank around weaponry systems. Then he left that in 1964 for United Technologies, a defense contractor back in Hartford, where he worked until 1974.

In these later years, Bissell was involved in God knows what kind of behind the scenes shenanigans, but the private sector stuff is harder to track than the CIA. I am sure that he gave only the best advice on Vietnam.

Bissell died in 1994, at the age of 84. He had written a memoir, titled Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs, that was published posthumously in 1996. Could be interesting, probably extremely self-serving.

Richard Bissell is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Farmington, Connecticut.

\If you would like this series to visit other lovely CIA people, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Helms is in Arlington and so is Frank Wisner. In fact, these people litter Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.