David Wise

Investigative journalist, author of exposé of CIA’S covert work

David Wise, one of the first journalists to expose the clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency andastandard-setterforinvestigative reporting into government espionage, died on Monday in Washington. He was 88.

The death, at Georgetown University Medical Center, was confirmed by his wife, Joan Wise, who said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Wise was the author, with Thomas B Ross, of The Invisible Government, an explosive 1964 exposé of the CIA and its covert operations. To keep its contents from the public, the CIA considered buying all copies of the book but backed off when the publisher, Random House, made clear that it would simply print more.

Wise began his journalism career in the late 1940s as a campus stringer for the New York Herald Tribune while studying at Columbia College. In his senior year, he was editor of the campus newspaper, The Spectator, alongside another aspiring journalist, Max Frankel, who in 1986 became executive editor of The New York Times.

Frankel said that Wise seemed born to write about espionage: He always kept information – even what he hadforlunch–closetothevest.

Wise joined the Herald Tribune’s staff in 1951 and moved to Washington, where he covered politics and the Kennedy White House. He was named Washington bureau chief in 1963 and served in that role until the paper closed in 1966.

At that point, he devoted himself full time to writing books. Over the next half century, he wrote a trove of nonfiction works that include the stories of America’s most notorious spies – Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen among them. In the telling he revealed details of the government’s bungling and deceptions.

He also wrote three spy novels, which were praised for their insight and authority.

Methodical and persistent, Wise would check, double check and triple check his work, his wife said. He cultivated his sources over periods of years.

“Even people he criticised would still come back and talk to him because they knew they would get a fair shake and they trusted him,” she said.

His nonfiction work began with The U-2 Affair, a 1962 collaboration with Ross recounting the behind-thescenes story of the Soviet Union’s 1960 downing of a US spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers.

“While the Air Force was still clinging to the fiction that the spy craft was a weather plane, the pair wangled their way into a U-2 plane on Edwards Air Force Base in the remote California desert,” their agent, Sterling Lord, wrote in a memoir, Lord of Publishing. They received an up-close look at the plane and other details.

“They were admitted on to the base after expressing great interest in research on cloud formations,” Lord added.

Wise and Ross followed that success with The Invisible Government. It was a startling unmasking of CIA involvement in the Bay of Pigs and in coups in Guatemala and Iran. It also revealed the agency’s covert operations in Laos and Vietnam and its attempts, with British assistance, to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia, among many other previously undisclosed activities.

Theciaobtainedanadvance version of the book and fought ferociously to censor it. After dropping the idea of buying up all the copies, Lord said, the agency appointed a task force that recommended that the CIA use “such assets as the Agency may have” to plant bad reviews.

The efforts came to naught. The book became the No.1 bestseller on the Time magazine list and No.2 on The New York Times list, behind Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It remained on The Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and was published in eight foreign editions.

David Wise was born on 10 May, 1930, in New York City. His father, Raymond, was a lawyer in private practice who also took on cases for the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother, Karena (Postan) Wise, sang professionally, including, in her early years, as a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus.

David showed an interest in journalism as early as 10 years old, when he would cut out newspaper articles about the Second World Warand paste them into a journal.

Wise grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended the High School of Music and Art, where he became editor of the school paper, Overtone.

Frankel, also a student there, said Wise was a mentor to him in both high school and college. While they were at Columbia, a job as a campus reporter – or stringer – for The Times came open, and the two sat down over hamburgers to game out their futures, Frankel recalled.

Wise went to Washington in 1958. At the book party for The U-2 Affair, he met his future wife, Joan Sylvester, who became a lawyer. She survives him, as do their son Jonathan; a brother, William; and three grandchildren. Their older son, Christopher James, died in 2004.

Wise contributed to many magazines, including Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Republic and Smithsonian. He was also an intelligence and national security commentator on CNN for six years.

All told, he wrote 15 books, including The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power, published in 1973. It was an unvarnished analysis of government duplicity and won a George Polk Award.

Despite his illness, Wise spent the last year finishing his final book, The Seven Million Dollar Spy, a nonfiction account of the FBI’S payment of $7 million to a Russian agent who enabled the bureau to identify Hanssen as a mole. It is due to be released this month as an audiobook by Audible, his wife said.

“Just a few weeks ago, David was carefully writing out a pronunciation guide with all the Russian names for the reader,” Wise said. “He was always very careful, down to that level of detail. His was a good brand. Very reliable.” KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

“Even people he criticised would still come back and talk to him because they … trusted him”