F. Mark Wyatt was a CIA operative in Italy during the crucial 1948 Italian elections. On orders from his superiors at the new U.S. intelligence agency, he funneled CIA money to selected Italian politicians in order to prevent a communist victory. He spoke with the producers of COLD WAR in November and December of 1995.

I was deeply concerned, and I was glad to see things like [George] Kennan ... saying that, "This election is coming up, and should the communists be able to form a government, should they win, our whole position in the Mediterranean and probably in Europe will be undermined." And I was delighted to see that attention was paid on it.

But if there was one man that I would point to that really was responsible [for drawing attention to the problem], that was George Marshall. George Marshall had a great distrust of the Soviets. ... When he became secretary of state, replacing Mr. Burns, this was very high on his docket. ... When he learned, and we all learned, that in municipal elections in '46 and in '47 the Christian Democrats and other secular parties of the center did very poorly, and the communists did very well, it was alarming.

The communist party of Italy was funded, in the first place, by black bags of money directly out of the Soviet compound in Rome; and the Italian services were aware of this. As the elections approached, the amounts grew, and the estimates [are] that $8 million to $10 million a month actually went into the coffers of communism. Not necessarily completely to the party: Mr. Di Vittorio and labor was powerful, and certainly a lot went to him.

But a very important factor was what we called "the friendly firms arrangement" -- big industries in Italy had to deal with the leftist labor union of Di Vittorio; and to be friendly they had to carry out certain things, or there would be serious strikes. And there were certain "friendly firms" dealing not only from the Soviet Union, but from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia, from Romania, where if a company in Western Europe, [and] specifically in Italy, wanted to import, they made the license and the agreement was made that a large sum of money would be paid, way over the cost of the goods itself, and the excess went to the communist elite -- to the communist party and other communist organizations. ...

And you had firms in Italy that were not really pro-communist but they were forced, in order to get the deal, to listen to what Moscow said: "This is the way you get the contract." And so money really flowed into Italy. We had the intelligence that the situation was perilous, and that the communist party could well win the elections in April of 1948.

In the CIA in 1946-1947 ... the mission was collecting secret intelligence through clandestine means by recruiting agents abroad. That was the No. 1 priority. Also, the CIA had to conduct counter-intelligence, simply for protection alone, but it was a very important function. Beyond that, we in CIA had studied covert action operations. The oldest document I know of goes back to 1639, when the French were running a covert operation through Poland into Transylvania, and the documents are just fascinating. But really, the United States was an infant as far as that kind of operation went. Only Pearl Harbor really alerted us to classic intelligence -- that we had to get on the ball.

The idea of covert action fascinated [people], particularly in '46 and '47, when the Italy crisis grew. Young CIA people said, "Well, we've got to have approval to help these parties, to save them, and we have to do it secretly because if the communists become aware of it, it becomes a scandal in the [Italian] Chamber of Deputies." And we used to discuss those things at great length.

But we realized there was no charter. Admiral [Roscoe] Hillenkoetter, the head of what became CIA, simply didn't have it. But it was the great General Marshall who was aware of these things, and said: "We've got to somehow break through. ..."

Really what the CIA needed was authority to develop a program of covert action which could confront and meet the everlasting and indefinite expansionism of the Soviet Union. And [in] that expansionism ... the prime country of strategic importance to the West was Italy. And it was clear that the [communist] focus was going on Italy. In labor, in veterans [groups], in student groups, in women's organizations -- [communists] dominated all of these particular sectors, and it certainly was alarming.

The run-of-the-mill operative in the [CIA] was hopeful that we could get into a [covert] operation. ... My colleagues in CIA, in 1946-47, when I was involved, were gung ho. We had been in the war; we didn't question authority -- "Should we do it this way, should we not?"; we definitely knew that the Soviet empire was, as Reagan said, the Evil Empire, and that was it. And when we were stationed abroad ... whether we were in Sri Lanka or we were in Iceland, we knew what our target was: it was the Soviet target. We were interested in what was going on in that country, and the connections of that country with the pervasive expansionist Soviet power.

The atmosphere in the CIA today I think is entirely different. I served in a training role, and the young people questioned [me]: "Why did we do this in Managua, Nicaragua? Did we have approval for this kind of a thing? We must be in a democracy, have a government of law and order." These questions never [came up] when I was a junior officer at the time of the Italian elections. We were gung ho; we knew what we had to do, and we understood that our boss had the authority and it came from Harry Truman -- and that was enough.

George Marshall really was the man who led this group of distinguished Americans who were fighting for a way that we could influence these elections, so we could be sure that the communists didn't win. ... We had to do something rather different, something that American intelligence has never done, and that is that we had to help those parties directly, not only in finances, but in advice. And it was most important. ...

Admiral Hillenkoetter, as head of our only intelligence agency working abroad, [asked]: "Do I have the authority to pay money to the Christian Democrats and three secular parties?" You know, he raised the question. [CIA general counsel] Lawrence Houston, who unfortunately died just a few months ago, and was a giant in CIA, studied all of the documents that set up CIG [Central Intelligence Group] and then CIA, [and] that expanded into psychological warfare to an extent, and propaganda and so forth. [And] Lawrence Houston said, "Admiral, the language is not precise enough. You do not have the authority."

And this was very distressing, and I'm sure the ... gentlemen working with Marshall were disappointed. But actually, Larry Houston went back to the drawing board and came up with the solution: that if the head of the National Security Council is the President of the United States, and if he specifically directs the CIA, under Hillenkoetter, to carry out operations to help democratic parties, and if the Congress gives the money to support such a thing, then the authority is there.

And that was the green light; and I believe it was in November of 1947. We very hastily moved to support the Christian Democrats, and our contact man, of course, was Alcide De Gasperi, this giant of the Christian Democratic Party. And it's a fascinating thing what he did. He said, "I'm grateful for the fact you're doing it. It may save our lives, it may save Italy. But I want you to support not only my party, which is a clerical party close to the Vatican, but you must support [the] Social Democrats, and the Republicans ... and the Liberal Party." And it was a wonderful thing, because the two largest parties in Italy, by far, were the Christian Democrats and the communists; they were the big parties. The others, you know -- the neo-fascists were out of the picture then; the monarchists were dead. ... And then there was the leftist Socialist Party, and they were the communists. [De Gasperi said], "If one [of the two big parties] is clerical and the other secular, the communists are going to beat you to death on it, and the pope is going to be embarrassed, and it's going to be a loser." And he was smart to know that. I'm not saying that Americans, who didn't have a Catholic president until John F. Kennedy, necessarily would have gone ahead with supporting only the clerical party. I don't know. But I know that De Gasperi insisted upon it, and let's give him credit for that idea.

Well, I wish I could say it was better organized. I was in that branch of the CIA at the time that had to rush into the breach without training in covert action. ... We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets, what have you. And we did many things to assist those selected Christian Democrats, Republicans, and the other parties that were completely reliable -- that could keep the secret of where their funds came from. They were talked to by CIA experts: "What do you say if all of a sudden you have in Turin the greatest extravaganza of propaganda? Who pays for it? Does the Fiat Corporation pay for it, or what? You've got to have some reason for your munificence at this time, and we don't want an indication that it's young Americans that are passing the money to you ... [in] black bags."

We did the best that we could at that time, and I think that we did do it judiciously, and that it [wasn't exposed], and it was successful. ... It was very gratifying, there's no question about it. All indications were the communists might well form a government. There was no way they could, because of the votes of those four parties that we helped.

We would like to have done this in a more sophisticated manner. Passing black bags to affect a political election is not really a terribly attractive thing. But we only had a few months to do this, and that was the principal thing that we did.

It's pretty simple. I mean, you use clandestine tradecraft, which you have to train the recipient in. You know, cars have licenses, and you park in certain places. And passing messages is easy, but passing black bags is not as easy. But I will credit the CIA: in the period through 1947 [we] were well trained in tradecraft, and that we were able to do this. But we had to have the recipient well trained as well, and this did take quite an effort, and we did this in the early days. ...

It was very important that the recipient was very, very cautious in the handling of the thing. But I think many things were devised. In other words, [we would ask], "Where does your wife go in the afternoon? Does she have a separate car that has a different license?" Maybe that helps, maybe it doesn't; but you would devise arrangements and meetings, and you had to have telephone contact. You're dealing with very busy people who are in the Chamber of Deputies or in the Senate, and they're running around and everything, and they cannot change their schedule. So telephone calls have to be made, and that's a dangerous and tricky thing. And so there really had to be a plan, and that's the way that this was done.

Maybe we were lucky that it didn't blow -- I don't know. But it went satisfactorily. ...

It was one of those things. I mean, the Soviets were coming out of ... their tremendous compound in the city of Rome, and they were passing black bags to the communists. [It] was going on in both directions.

For me personally, it was very exciting. And we didn't know at that time that we had carried out the first covert political action program in the history of American intelligence. [It] would be followed by many, many, many more, and this would be copied in a way -- and it was, not long after that -- in Chile, where, for different reasons that are beyond the pale, it didn't work out well. But I guess we had some luck on our side, and I think it was a highly successful operation. ...

And I must say it was very, very exciting. ... I mean, we were euphoric: "We've won this one, and we'll win others." And we didn't win them all, but it was a great life, and I loved it.

I assure you that I'm very proud of that particular thing. ... Our operatives do work under rather difficult circumstances, given their families and their friends and their contacts and their parents and what have you. It can be a little bit dicey. But, boy, I'll tell you it's worth it. I'm very proud of that connection with Italy and the work that we did, and the fact that we feel it was very successful. It's an amazing country, a country of great freedom. But, you know, they've had 35 governments (laughs) since that time, and are constantly changing. But I guess that's democracy. They're great, a great country.