The Invisible Government

Wise joined the New York Herald-Tribune in 1951, and became the paper's White House correspondent in 1960. He was chief of the paper's Washington bureau from 1963 to 1966.[2] In 1970-71 he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and in 1977-79, he lectured in political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.[2] He was later a commentator on intelligence issues for CNN for six years.[2] Beginning in 1962 with an examination of the Lockheed U-2, Wise published a series of non-fiction books (the first three with Thomas B. Ross). Their book Invisible Government (1964), exposed the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in foreign policy. This included CIA coups in Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS) and Iran (Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.[3] A confidential CIA review of Invisible Government, declassified in 1995, declared that "In Great Britain, which is second to none in its devotion to liberty, there exists an Official Secrets Act under which the authors would have been tried and sentenced to prison. ... That much of this material has been printed before does not reduce the value to the Soviets of having it gathered in one volume under such genuine American auspices."[4]