URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/us/06wyatt.html
The New York Times
July 6, 2006
F. Mark Wyatt, 86, C.I.A. Officer, Is Dead
By TIM WEINER
F. Mark Wyatt, a career Central Intelligence Agency officer who played
a significant role in the agency's first major cold war covert action,
an operation to swing the Italian elections of 1948, died on Thursday
in Washington. He was 86.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his daughter, Susan
Wyatt.
Mr. Wyatt joined the C.I.A.'s clandestine service in 1948, months
after the agency's birth, and plunged into its first successful covert
effort. The mission was to ensure the electoral victory of Italy's
Christian Democrats over the Communist Party.
Mr. Wyatt helped deliver millions of dollars to the eventual victors;
the precise cost of the covert campaign has never been declassified,
though the details of the operation were.
"We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to
defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters,
for pamphlets," Mr. Wyatt said in a 1995 interview recorded for "Cold
War," a 1998 documentary shown on CNN. Suitcases filled with cash had
changed hands in the four-star Hotel Hassler in Rome, he said. The
Christian Democrats won the elections by a comfortable margin and
formed a government that excluded the Communists.
The C.I.A.'s practice of buying political clout was repeated in every
Italian election for the next 24 years [i.e, until 1972], and the
agency's political influence in Rome lasted a generation, declassified
records show.
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Michael