You may have clicked on my post because of this title, wondering if I was actually referring to the “dong,” or the male genitalia. If you thought that, you are correct!
Possibly one of the most baffling plans to go down in US history, Operation Thunder Dong was a plan in which American air forces would drop enormous condoms labelled “medium” onto Soviet territory, hoping to demoralize Soviet forces with their anatomically superior soldiers.
And who in their right mind would come up with an idea like this? Frank Wisner, a charming, jocular Southern lawyer who grew tired of office life and joined the Navy. After Pearl Harbor, he found himself spying on enemy lines and witnessed the brutal Soviet occupation of Romania. Even after the war, he missed spying and thus formed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).
The OPC was invested in “psychological warfare,” which proved by Operation Thunder Dong, can have a lot of different definitions. Its charter gave it responsibility for “propaganda, economic warfare; preventative direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation measures.”
Although the concept of psychological warfare may sound ridiculous now that you’ve heard of Operation Thunder Dong, one of the OPC’s most famous projects was Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA tried to influence foreign media. By the 1950s, Wisner owned respected members (including Pulitzer Prize Winners) of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and other media sources. Operation Mockingbird inserted countless pro-American news stories, some of them fake.
Wisner eventually organized a secret army in Europe of five thousand refugee volunteers. It was his most exhausting job yet, as Wisner orchestrated a massive spy ring, and the majority of his spies were captured and killed straight away. To help visualize how much money he was devoting to these operations, once the OPC was finally absorbed into the CIA, it consumed 75% of the CIA’s budget.
Despite being relentless, his job’s toll was becoming apparent. The failure of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 against Soviet expansion (2,500 Hungarians killed, 200,000 forced to flee, thousands imprisoned) was the nail in the coffin of his career, as Wisner blamed the government’s negligence due to fear of triggering a nuclear war.
Wisner can be remembered for a lot of things: his sense of humor (Operation Thunder Dong), his shady tactics (Operation Mockingbird), his nationalistic passions (espionage in Europe). However, it is undeniable that Operation Thunder Dong will be the one to go down in US history.
Sources:
https://archive.totalfratmove.com/cia-once-considered-convincing-the-soviets-that-all-americans-had-huge-dongs/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/10/14/how-the-cia-paid-and-threatened-journalists-to-do-its-work
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/48959/retrobituaries-frank-wisner-father-american-covert-operations
I was totally not expecting the intro! This entire operation came off as comedic to me; however, Wisner took the his job very seriously, and his life after he left the OPC went down an unfortunately tragic path. He experienced a mental breakdown shortly after he retired, causing him to be hospitalized and receive aggressive shock therapy treatment. He was never quite the same afterwards, and he unfortunately committed suicide in 1965. His dedication and hard work in the OSS had an impact on those around him, however. His son, Frank G. Wisner, entered the diplomatic service, and the deputy director of the CIA remembers him as a man who worked “far more than any other man, to build our defenses from the ground up and with all speed.”
ReplyDeleteSources:
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwisner.htm
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/48959/retrobituaries-frank-wisner-father-american-covert-operations
I thought your post was very interesting to read and I don't recall hearing about Frank Wisner before, so it was very informational as well. I liked how you explained each of his plans about spying on enemy lines and how he created the OPC after leaving the Navy. I also wanted to add some parts about his early life because I was intrigued by his character - he was asked to compete in the olympic trials for his sprints and hurdling. While he ended up joining the Navy instead, his athleticism is very apparent and I wanted to add this because it shows his great candidacy as a spy.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwisner.htm