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, and the agency's political influence in Rome lasted a generation, declassified records show.
Mr. Wyatt spent most of his next two decades with the C.I.A. in Italy, becoming deputy chief of the Rome station in 1964. He worked as a liaison aide with South Vietnam's spies at the Saigon station in 1968 and 1969; at the C.I.A.'s New York base, focusing on the United Nations, from 1970 to 1972; and as chief of station in Luxembourg from 1972 to 1975. After his retirement, he worked to help Soviet defectors start new lives in the United States.
Felton Mark Wyatt was born in Woodland, Calif. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942, and served in the Pacific on the destroyer Conner in World War II. He joined the C.I.A. after earning a degree in foreign affairs at George Washington University.
In 1951, he married a fellow intelligence officer, Ann Appleton Wyatt.
Besides his wife and daughter, of New York; surviving are two sons, Alan, of Carrboro, N.C., and Thomas, of Warwick, Mass.; and four grandchildren.