Frank Wisner Jr.'s 2011 White House request and historic ties to CIA and Mubarak

Chapter Four: The Jaws of Connection In which the Seventh Sense explains the strange, new way power behaves on networks. 1. The Envoy, Frank Wisner Jr., had gotten the phone call on a Thursday, late in the afternoon, and within a few hours he was on a plane. It was an unusual request from the White House and from the State Department - and though he was a man who had lived a life of many unusual requests, he knew that this one had a certain significance, a weight you might say, if you were the sort of man who measured such things in human lives. The Envoy was such a man. His father, Frank Wisner Sr., had been one too. Senior was one of the most famous and effective of America’s Cold War spies. He’d run the Office of Special Services in Southern Europe during World War Two and then built operations for the Central Intelligence Agency in the years after. He was a tough man, from a generation of Americans that had fought and won wars and who, unquestioningly, weighed their actions in human lives. As a spy in Romania in 1940, Wisner Sr. had watched the Red Army, like some sort of sick machine, round up and then execute scores of his friends. The course of his life was set. “Wisner landed like a dynamo,” William Colby - a future CIA director who worked for Senior - observed. “He started operating in the atmosphere of an order of the Knights of Templar, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness—and war.”®° Frank Wisner Jr., was known too as a dynamo. He was 72 in the winter of 2011 when the White House called. He’d had already a storied career as a diplomat, following a rough trace of his father’s man-on-a-mission trajectory, also with a bit of that secretive Knights of Templar feeling: Princeton, Vietnam, the Philippines, the halls of the State Department in Foggy Bottom. Wisner had become the first phone call for some of America’s leading corporate figures when they found themselves billions of dollars backwards in some strange land, even as he’d remained closely in touch with the most explosive policy puzzles. Iran. North Korea. He was a voluble and opinionated man, but somehow also discreet, exact and patient. The combination made him at once totally reliable and a great deal of fun. He had been, over the years, a warm and personable figure in my own life, the sort of man who took the long view of any problem, who lay his hand comfortably on your knee with reassurance when some promise came undone and threatened a bit of chaos. He was like an ideogram of reliability: Bukly, bald, coiled, loyal. He’d seen it all, you felt. Frank Wisner Jr. had served as Ambassador to Egypt for half-a-decade in the 1980s. Almost inevitably, his careful manner and easy charm led him into a close relationship with Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Mubarak was an urbane former fighter pilot who had come to sudden and surprising power after the 80 “Wisner landed”: William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York 1978), 73 59 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018291