The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Richard Bissell.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations
Richard Bissell	Richard Bissell Richard M. Bissell Richard M. Bissell Jr. Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. Dick Bissell Richard Bissell Jr.	2026-05-15	2026-10-15	Intelligence & Government	Person CIA U2 CORONA BayOfPigs ZRRIFLE ChurchCommittee Lumumba ColdWar	CIA Deputy Director for Plans from January 1, 1959 to February 17, 1962, who ran the U-2 and CORONA programs, the Bay of Pigs operation, and the 1960 Lumumba and Castro assassination preparations.	1909-09-18	1994-02-07	Washington, D.C.	type with start end role fn employed_by Marshall Plan 1948 1951 deputy director 1 type with start end role fn employed_by Central Intelligence Agency 1954-01 1962-02-17 Special Assistant to the DCI for Planning and Coordination; head of the Development Projects Staff; Deputy Director for Plans from January 1, 1959 1 type with start end fn reported_to Allen Dulles 1954-01 1961-11 1 type with start end role fn head_of Directorate of Plans 1959-01-01 1962-02-17 Deputy Director for Plans 1 type with start end role fn head_of Project AQUATONE 1954-12 1962-02 approving officer and project chief for the U-2 overflight program 1 type with start end role fn head_of CORONA 1958 1962-02 senior CIA representative of the CIA-Air Force photosatellite project 5 type with start role fn participant_in Operation PBSUCCESS 1954 coordinated support within the CIA 1 type with start end role fn participant_in Bay of Pigs 1960 1961-04 Deputy Director for Plans responsible for the CIA operation 7 type with start end role fn participant_in ZR RIFLE 1960 1962-02 DDP under whom the Executive Action capability was established 2 type with start end role fn participant_in Church Committee 1975-06-09 1975-09-10 testified June 9, June 11, July 17, July 22 and September 10, 1975 2 type with start end role fn employed_by Ford Foundation 1952-01 1954 staff member from January 1952; described as a consultant by Langenkamp 3

Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. (September 18, 1909 to February 7, 1994) was an economist who joined the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1954 and became its Deputy Director for Plans (DDP), head of the clandestine service, on January 1, 1959. Until his resignation on February 17, 1962 he also kept personal control of the U-2 Spy Plane overflight program, the first photographic reconnaissance satellite project, and the design of the OXCART aircraft. Under him the agency organized the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and, in 1960, made the first preparations in the Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro assassination plots later examined by the Church Committee.¹²

Education and early career

The CIA's official history of the U-2 program describes Bissell as a graduate of Groton and Yale University who studied at the London School of Economics for a year and took a doctorate at Yale in 1939. He taught economics at Yale and, from 1942, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor in 1948. During World War II he managed American shipping as executive officer of the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board; after the war he was deputy director of the Marshall Plan from 1948 until the end of 1951. The Eisenhower Presidential Library's finding aid for his papers states that he joined the Ford Foundation staff in January 1952 after leaving the Economic Cooperation Administration (later the Mutual Security Agency) and resigned in 1954, and Langenkamp describes him as a consultant to the Ford Foundation who left in 1954 to become special assistant to Allen Dulles.¹³⁴

His first association with the agency came in late 1953 with a contract study of how the United States might respond to a rising in the Soviet bloc like the East Berlin riots of June 1953. He concluded, in his later words, that "very little could be done" by clandestine operations against the bloc, a view the CIA historians say made him a leading advocate of technical rather than human collection. He joined the agency in late January 1954 as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, for Planning and Coordination, and was soon occupied with coordination for the operation against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz (Operation PBSUCCESS).¹

The U-2 and the Development Projects Staff

On November 26, 1954 Dulles told Bissell that Dwight D. Eisenhower had approved a secret program and that Bissell was to run it; on December 3 Bissell and Herbert Miller of the Office of Scientific Intelligence went to the Pentagon for the first interagency meeting. Dulles had no answer to the questions who would run the project or pay for it ("You'll have to work that out"). Bissell built a self-sufficient project staff, Project AQUATONE, with its own contracting, finance, logistics, communications and security personnel and funds kept separate from the agency's regular accounts, and reported directly to the DCI, though the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, General Charles Pearre Cabell, supervised its daily affairs. On April 29, 1955 he signed an agreement with the U.S. Air Force and, to keep work moving at Lockheed Aircraft Company, wrote Kelly Johnson's company an advance check. The first test flight was in August 1955.¹

The first flights over the Soviet Union began on Wednesday, July 4, 1956 (a June 20, 1956 mission had covered Poland and East Germany). Bissell gave the "Go" decision at the project headquarters just before midnight Washington time on July 3. When Dulles asked on July 5 whether the overflights of Moscow and Leningrad had been wise the first time, Bissell replied: "Allen, the first is the safest." The program continued, with Bissell bringing maps of proposed routes to Eisenhower in the Oval Office, until Francis Gary Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960; the Paris summit that opened on May 16 ended when Eisenhower refused Nikita Khrushchev's demand for an apology.¹

Bissell became DDP on January 1, 1959 and on February 16, 1959 turned the Development Projects Staff into a division of the Directorate of Plans, placing all agency air activities under himself; the history states he kept personal control of the U-2, the photosatellite project and OXCART. Edwin Land and James Killian, his supporters among the presidential science advisers, came to fear he was too involved in covert action to give the reconnaissance programs enough time. The CIA's CORONA history names him the "recognized leader of the early CORONA program" and the senior CIA representative beside Air Force Brigadier General Osmond Ritland; Bissell recalled learning of his role "in an odd and informal way" from Land in 1958, and the first successful recovery, of mission 9009 (DISCOVERER XIV), came on August 19, 1960.¹⁵

Congo, 1960

According to the Church Committee's interim report, DDP Bissell in the summer of 1960 asked the Chief of the Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, to explore the feasibility of assassinating Lumumba, and asked a CIA scientist given the pseudonym Joseph Scheider, then Special Assistant to the DDP for Scientific Matters, to prepare to assassinate or incapacitate an unspecified "African leader." Scheider testified that Bissell told him he "had direction from the highest authority" and that he understood this to mean the President. Scheider reviewed a list of materials at the Army Chemical Corps installation at Fort Detrick, chose one that "was supposed to produce a disease" indigenous to the region, and in late September delivered the lethal substances to the CIA station officer in Leopoldville with instructions to assassinate Lumumba.²

On August 19, 1960 Bissell signed a cable to Leopoldville stating "You are authorized proceed with operation," and on September 19 Bissell and Tweedy sent the station a cryptic message through a restricted channel. Bissell testified that it was "entirely probable" he discussed the assassination with Tweedy and "very probable" he discussed it with Scheider, that he "most certainly" approved the cables, and that his belief in presidential authorization "has to be described as inference." He read the Special Group minutes of August 25 as meaning that "if it had to be assassination, that that was a permissible means." He told the committee the August 26 cable from Dulles was, in his belief, a circumlocution for the President's wish that Lumumba be killed.²

A July 1981 clipping in the CIA's reading room from the London Daily Telegraph reported that Madeleine Kalb's The Congo Cables, then about to be published, named the scientist who brought the poison kit to the Congo as Sidney Gottlieb, "the CIA's top scientist at the time"; a separate clipping in the same collection describes Gottlieb as head of the agency's Technical Services Division, which, the clipping says, ran the drug experiments of the MKULTRA program and stored toxins. The Church report's description of Scheider's post as Bissell's science adviser is the record connecting the DDP's office to that division.²⁶

Castro, the Office of Security and ZR/RIFLE

The Church Committee found the earliest concrete evidence of the CIA's gambling-syndicate plot against Castro in a conversation between Bissell and Colonel Sheffield Edwards, Director of the Office of Security, which the Inspector General placed in August 1960 and Bissell remembered as late summer or early autumn. Bissell testified that he asked Edwards to find someone to assassinate Castro and believed Edwards raised the idea of contacting members of a gambling syndicate; Edwards assigned the task to the chief of the Office of Security's Operational Support Division (the "Support Chief" of the report), who engaged Robert Maheu, who recruited Johnny Roselli, who in turn brought in "Sam Gold" (Sam Giancana). Edwards told Bissell contact had been made. On October 18, 1960 J. Edgar Hoover sent Bissell a memorandum reporting that Giancana had told friends Castro would be "done away with very shortly," in November. The Support Chief testified that Colonel J. C. King gave $50,000 in Bissell's office to be paid to a Cuban contact for the assassination and that Bissell authorized the delivery of communications equipment; Bissell did not recall the meeting and considered it unlikely, though he knew poison pills had been prepared. The Inspector General placed the money passed at $10,000.²

In early 1961, per Bissell's own account, William Harvey was assigned responsibility for a general capability within the CIA for disabling foreign leaders, with assassination as a last resort, called Executive Action and later covered by the cryptonym ZR/RIFLE. Bissell described it to the committee as "internal and purely preparatory" and said he was "quite certain" Dulles had full knowledge of it. Harvey's notes record that on November 16, 1961 Bissell asked him to take over the gambling-syndicate operation from Edwards and that they discussed the "application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba"; Bissell testified the operation was not reactivated until after he left in February 1962. Bissell and Harvey briefed Richard Helms, who replaced him as DDP, and Bissell did not recall briefing John McCone, who had succeeded Dulles as DCI; McCone testified he had no knowledge of the project. The committee records Bissell as DDP under McCone for three months, November 1961 to February 1962.²

Bay of Pigs

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation records Bissell's direct involvement in the Guatemalan base arrangements. Jake Esterline, Chief of WH/4, the Cuban task force, told the CIA historian Jack B. Pfeiffer that he went to Guatemala in 1960 "on specific instruction from Bissell and Dulles" to draw up a status-of-forces agreement with President Ydigoras; on November 14, 1960, when Ydigoras asked to borrow part of the Brigade to put down an uprising at Puerto Barrios, Bissell told Pfeiffer in 1975 that he was called at 2:30 in the morning and sent a cable saying "Yes" on his own responsibility because he did not think the decision should be left to the station. His Assistant DDP for Action was Tracy Barnes.⁷

The agency's post-mortems pitted Bissell's directorate against its Inspector General. The Inspector General's survey of October 1961 was transmitted on November 20, 1961 with a 150-page report and ten recommendations; the Deputy Director, General Cabell, called it deficient in a memorandum of December 15, 1961. An unsigned memorandum to the DCI of December 1, 1961 in the same file listed three factors to which the failure should be charged: the government's lack of recognition of the operation's scale, its failure to plan for using regular U.S. forces, and its unwillingness to commit the resources needed. The DDP's analysis of January 18, 1962 blamed factors outside the agency's control and the failure of the air drops on Cuban reception crews; an agency memorandum of January 26, 1962 replied that it was "preoccupied with interdepartmental policy-making and military strategy" while the survey was concerned with the failure to build internal resistance in Cuba, and that its discussion of Miami activities was inaccurate. The Taylor Committee's conclusion, summarized in an August 15, 1961 memorandum, was that the operation's leaders "did not always present their case with sufficient force and clarity to the senior officers of the government" particularly concerning the cancellation of the D-Day strikes. In his memorandum of February 15, 1962 Dulles wrote that the Inspector General had not requested information from him or from the DDP, that the Brigade had reached the landing area on schedule and with complete surprise, and that the failure to land ammunition and supplies "was due to circumstances beyond the control of the Brigade commander."⁸

Departure

The CIA's U-2 history states that the Bay of Pigs "discredited Bissell with the Kennedy administration," that Dulles resigned in November 1961, and that Killian and Land pressed for removing the overhead reconnaissance programs from the DDP into a science-oriented directorate, which Bissell resisted. He resigned on February 17, 1962 after refusing McCone's offer to become the CIA's first Deputy Director for Research, and the new directorate absorbed the Development Projects Division two days later. Helms succeeded him as DDP.¹²

Later life

After the CIA he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses and in industry, and wrote Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs, with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, which Yale University Press published in 1996 after his death on February 7, 1994.⁹

Footnotes

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1. Pedlow, Gregory W., and Donald E. Welzenbach, The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974 (CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998), chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 and biographical glossary, including interviews of Bissell by Welzenbach (November 8, 1984) and Pedlow. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA355539 ↩︎

2. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (1975), sections on the Congo and on Cuba, citing Bissell's testimony of June 9, June 11, July 17, July 22 and September 10, 1975, and Scheider, October 7 and 9, 1975. https://archive.org/details/allegedassassina00unit. The report states that pseudonyms were used for some individuals. ↩︎

3. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Richard M. Bissell Jr. Papers, Ford Foundation Series finding aid, series description ("Richard Bissell joined the staff of the Ford Foundation in January 1952 after leaving the Economic Cooperation Administration (later the Mutual Security Agency). After a brief tenure he resigned in 1954."). https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/finding-aids/pdf/bissell-richard-m-jr-papers/ford-foundation-series.pdf ↩︎

4. Harm Langenkamp, "A Most Interesting and Complex Involvement," Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports (2021), note 8 (Bissell as consultant to the Ford Foundation, left 1954 to become Dulles's special assistant). https://rockarch.issuelab.org/resources/38323/38323.pdf ↩︎

5. Ruffner, Kevin C., ed., CORONA: America's First Satellite Program (CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1995), including Kenneth E. Greer, "CORONA," Studies in Intelligence, Spring 1973 supplement. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA499635 ↩︎

6. Hugh Davies, "Eisenhower 'ordered Congo assassination,'" The Daily Telegraph (London), August 7, 1981, CIA-RDP90-00552R000403870002-9; "CIA Secrecy," CIA-RDP90-00965R000705910017-5 (reading room clipping). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00552r000403870002-9 ↩︎

7. CIA History Staff, Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume II, "Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy" (Jack B. Pfeiffer), citing Oral History Interview, Richard M. Bissell by Jack B. Pfeiffer, October 17, 1975. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-0001237696 ↩︎

8. CIA Reading Room: Memorandum from Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick to John McCone, "Survey of the Cuban Operation," November 20, 1961 (CIA-RDP80B01676R001900160016-0); memorandum of December 1, 1961 and C. P. Cabell memorandum of December 15, 1961 (CIA-RDP80B01676R001900160013-3); "The IG's Cuban Survey and the DD/P's Analysis of the Cuban Operation," January 26, 1962 (CIA-RDP80B01676R001900160009-8); "Taylor Report," August 15, 1961 (CIA-RDP80B01676R001900160002-5); Allen W. Dulles, "The Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," February 15, 1962 (CIA-RDP80B01676R001900160008-9). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01676r001900160008-9 ↩︎

9. Bissell, Richard M. Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (Yale University Press, 1996). ↩︎