Richard Bissell hid CIA failures in private letters for 63 years
By Harlan Pryce ·
Cuban exiles died and U-2 pilots risked cages or coffins while the official record stayed a ghost, leaving the truth to hide in private letters for decades.
Cuban exiles died on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs while their architects watched from Washington. The pilots of the U-2 flew alone over Soviet airspace, knowing a single mistake meant a cage or a coffin.
Those operations were the domain of Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. The public record identifies him as a Central Intelligence Agency officer who steered the U-2 program and the disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba; Annie Jacobsen notes he was known to some as "the mayor of Area 51" for his role in turning the Nevada salt flats into a clandestine testing ground. But the official government record of his work is often a ghost.
According to a catalogue entry from the US National Archives, the "Correspondence Files" of Richard M. Bissell consist of personal and professional papers spanning from 1931 until his death in 1994. For those looking to understand how the CIA managed its most ambitious and failed projects, the archival description offers a frustrating realization: the professional business records created during Bissell's time as a Special Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Plans are "sparse."
The Church Committee
If the official business files are thin, the private ones are where the real history lives. The file's catalogue entry records that most of the information concerning Bissell's activities in the CIA is actually found in his personal correspondence with friends and researchers.
It is a telling gap. In the world of intelligence, the distance between a professional memo and a private letter is where the truth usually hides. The archival description notes that these private papers touch on the most volatile moments of the early Cold War: the U-2 aircraft, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the process of Bissell's own acceptance into and resignation from the Agency.
Even as the government’s formal records remained locked or empty, Bissell continued to interact with the outside world. The catalogue describes a pattern of researchers seeking his "opinions on and remembrances of the intelligence field," to which he frequently responded. He spent his later years as a private arbiter of his own legacy, sharing his views on the value of published works that attempted to document the community he helped build.
Among the topics referenced in these personal letters is the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Better known as the Church Committee, this 1975 investigation was the first time the American public saw the scale of the CIA's domestic spying and assassination plots. That Bissell’s personal files track the committee's work suggests he was closely monitoring how the state was finally accounting for the secrets he had spent decades keeping.
A Gasoline Turbine Engine
Before he was managing the invisible borders of the Cold War, Bissell was managing the economic survival of Western Europe. The archival description notes that the series documents his time with the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), where he administered the European Recovery Program—the Marshall Plan.
In these records, the power dynamic is one-sided. The catalogue states that "virtually all the documentation from this period was created by Bissell," with very little coming from the people he wrote to, including notable figures like Paul G. Hoffman and Averell Harriman. It is the paper trail of a man who set the terms of the conversation.
This habit of control extended into his corporate life. After leaving the shadows of the CIA, Bissell moved into the aerospace and defense industries. The archival description indicates that his time as Director of Marketing and Economic Planning at the United Aircraft Corporation is "heavily documented."
Here, the economist in Bissell took the lead. The record shows he provided economic guidance for a dizzying array of projects. While some were standard defense fare, others were peculiar. The catalogue lists the joint development of a gasoline turbine engine with John Deere and Company, the construction of railway equipment, and even the development of "an amino acid diet" and "Techite pipe."
1931 to 1994
There is a strange dissonance in these files. On one hand, you have the man who managed the high-altitude surveillance of the Soviet Union and the tactical failure of a paramilitary invasion. On the other, you have a man meticulously documenting pipe manufacturing and social invitations for dinners and conferences.
This duality is the hallmark of the mid-century intelligence officer: the ability to move from the existential terror of nuclear brinkmanship to the mundanity of corporate planning without missing a beat. The archives show a man who was an "active correspondent," maintaining a social life that remained robust even as he carried the weight of the Agency's most guarded secrets.
What remains is a fragmented mirror. The professional CIA records are sparse, the Marshall Plan records are one-sided, and the corporate records are detailed. The only place where the Bay of Pigs and the U-2 are discussed with any regularity is in the letters Bissell wrote to his friends and the researchers who chased him for the truth.
The catalogue ends with his death in 1994, leaving a collection that spans sixty-three years. It leaves us with a final, unresolved question: what did Richard Bissell tell his friends that he never put in a CIA memo?