Even more than Acheson’s appeal, it may have been the counsel of his old OSS colleague Allen Dulles that finally took Wisner back into public service. During one of their how-to-save-the-world conversations in New York, Dulles had advised Wisner to “find an inconspicuous slot in the government and start building up a network for political warfare from within.” As the take-charge Wisner had himself discovered, first in Romania and then in Germany, government positions were often just as big or as small as their occupant chose to make them.
