in the four-week period surrounding Beetle Smith’s assumption of the CIA directorship, U.N. forces poured across the 38th parallel in pursuit of a now routed North Korean army; communist China invaded Tibet; a French garrison of six thousand troops was virtually wiped out by Viet Minh guerrillas in Vietnam; and the Polish government arrested some five thousand dissidents for anti-state activities in a twenty-four-hour dragnet. As Frank Wisner surely appreciated as he tried to keep track of the hailstorm of events occurring around the globe, the era of covert operations and proxy war wasn’t
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