After the Second World War a small group of people began meeting on a regular basis. The group. living in Washington, became known as the Georgetown Set or the Wisner Gang. At the first the key members of the group were former members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This included Frank Wisner, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop and Walt Rostow. Over the next few years others like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Joseph Alsop, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze joined their regular parties. Some like Bruce, Braden, Bohlen, McCloy, Meyer and Harriman spent a lot of their time working in other countries. However, they would always attend these parties when in Georgetown.
Most men brought their wives to these gatherings. Members of what was later called the Georgetown Ladies' Social Club included Katharine Graham, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Sally Reston, Polly Wisner, Joan Braden, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Avis Bohlen, Janet Barnes, Tish Alsop, Cynthia Helms, Marietta FitzGerald, Phyllis Nitze and Annie Bissell.
The men shared similar political views. They tended to hold liberal views on domestic issues. These attitudes were developed while they were students in the 1930s. They were also passionate anti-communists. This was the result of the men's experiences during the was and the events in Europe that followed the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. The vast majority were members of the Democratic Party but John Sherman Cooper and Desmond FitzGerald were both left-wing Republicans. As Sally Reston pointed out: "We were liberal anti-Communist, intellectuals, precisely the class and breed that Joe McCarthy hated and whose careers he wanted to ruin. It was the same old battle: the Republican right versus the Democratic left."
It was members of the Georgetown Set that began lobbying for a new intelligence agency. The main figure in this was Frank Wisner. With the help of another member, George Kennan, the Office of Special Projects was created in 1948. Wisner was appointed director of the organization. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This later became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Frank Wisner used his position to recruit other members into the CIA. This included Tom Braden, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and Cord Meyer. Other leading officials in the CIA including Allen W. Dulles, James Angleton and Richard Helms attended these parties.
The OPC concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Wisner also established Operation Mockingbird, a
