The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a gripping history of the early years of the Cold War, the CIA's covert battles against communism, and the tragic consequences which still affect America and the world today

At the end of World War II, the United States dominated the world militarily, economically, and in moral standing - seen as the victor over tyranny and a champion of freedom. But it was clear - to some - that the Soviet Union was already executing a plan to expand and foment revolution around the world. The American government's strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly-formed CIA.

The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies - Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis, and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups, and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.

But time and again their efforts went awry, thwarted by a combination of stupidity and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government - and more profoundly, the decision to abandon American ideals. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union had a stranglehold on Eastern Europe, the U.S. had begun its disastrous intervention in Vietnam, and America, the beacon of democracy, was overthrowing democratically-elected governments and earning the hatred of much of the world. All of this culminated in an act of betrayal and cowardice that would lock the Cold War into place for decades to come.

Anderson brings to the telling of this story all the narrative brio, deep research, skeptical eye, and lively prose that made Lawrence in Arabia a major international bestseller. The intertwined lives of these men began in a common purpose of defending freedom, but the ravages of the Cold War led them to different fates. Two would quit the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had to make; one became the archetype of the duplicitous and destructive American spy; and one would be so heartbroken he would take his own life.

The Quiet Americans is the story of these four men. It is also the story of how the United States, at the very pinnacle of its power, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Espionage, American History, War, Biography

562 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, El Salvador, and many other strife-torn countries. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper's and Outside.

Reviews

[Dax · Rating 5 out of 5]

As more and more records of the Cold War become declassified, the American public is gaining a new understanding of the extremes that the US went through to topple their communist foes. Anderson's "The Quiet Americans" gives a detailed account of the early years of the OSS and CIA after the close of WWII; and even an informed Cold War history buff will be amazed at the bungled efforts on both sides. Anderson is very objective in his book as both the Soviets and the Americans are taken to task for their roles. The key actors in those years, people such as Ed Lansdale, Frank Wisner and the Dulles brothers make for fascinating character studies and give the book a tension that brings the reader back for more. It's a frustrating read in the sense that the reader has to read page after page of self interest leading to geo-political lunacy. After reading this book, it is a fair summation to say that the Dulles brothers are largely responsible for the destruction of America's foreign policy reputation and the government's decision to resort to imperial practices. They probably prolonged the Cold War by about thirty years too.

Anderson doesn't just recount historical events here, though. The strongest aspect of the book is Anderson's evaluations of the lasting impacts of those decisions and actions by the CIA and past administrations: the rift between Republicans and Democrats and the mistrust of just about every other country in the world towards the US (excepting the UK perhaps)- to name just a few. It is a refreshing read and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about how the hell we ended up here.

Anderson is now the only author to have more than one book on my hall of fame shelf. His "Lawrence in Arabia" is fantastic as well.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Scott Anderson (Author, Narrator), Robertson Dean (Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher)

It's a long read, but worth the time it takes.

Generously provided by:

Reviews
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[Left Coast Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Anderson appears incapable of releasing anything less than excellent books. Or at least, nonfiction books; I was less enamored of two fictional works.

Is this an indictment of the CIA and its predecessors? Or of bureaucracies in general? Or of people who fail to acknowledge the collective wisdom that a bureaucracy accretes? Any of these would work as an organizing principle to review this book. Perhaps Anderson's real intent, sly dog, is to use this examination of recent history to raise very real alarm bells about the present.

One of the operatives in this book, weary of tossing patriotic Polish volunteers into the Soviet maw with no discernible benefit, opined that no operation should be established without first, during the planning stages, outlining the means by which it could be shut down once it outlived its usefulness. The same could be said of intelligence agencies as a whole. The fearless, important and noble actions that protected Allied lives in the Second World War morphed into a bunch of spooks with nothing to do. Some tried to keep the spread of Stalinism in check, but others engaged in overthrows of Guatemala and "Project Fat Fucker," which deposed the Egyptian King Farouk. (Farouk was not a slender man.)

(Two interesting asides: The man who named the operation was Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer for 1980's band The Police. Also, anybody who's read The Alexandria Quartet may remember the scene in which the corruption of Farouk and his ministers was illustrated by Nessim, who larded the pages of a Koran with high-denomination bills and presented it as a gift to one of them. Only after the gift had been deemed sufficiently generous was the topic of the meeting discussed.)

Anderson illustrates clearly how evil, incompetent people elevated to high posts can do almost incalculable damage. The biggest enemy of the CIA was not Stalin or Fidel Castro, but J. Edgar Hoover. So petty and vindictive was this man that, when he learned the FBI would not be responsible for collecting overseas intelligence, he decided to destroy the people who won that right. He was more than happy to use Joseph McCarthy to wreck the careers of hundreds of CIA workers. The reasoning was: If a person is homosexual, then by definition they have something to hide, and if they have something to hide, then they are vulnerable to communist spies applying pressure to them to cough up information. Such was the tenor of the times that neither evidence of wrongdoing nor actual evidence of homosexuality were required; one person had to resign from the government, I kid you not, because while working in Italy he was served in a restaurant numerous times by a known gay waiter. In addition to the sheer hatefulness of this, Hoover may have been guilty of enormous hypocrisy as well.

Similarly, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was such a hawk that the U.S. ignored its own spies and failed to seize several opportunities to have a better relationship with the Soviets, and particularly Kruschkev. On the many occasions when Krushkev liberalized his policies and attempted to reach some sort of understanding with the U.S., the U.S. brushed him off, reasoning that this was just a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing attempt to obscure their true world-domination nature. Such an attitude admits no solution.

And don't get me started on Vietnam. Absent our interference, it would probably be a capitalist and well-off nation now, somewhat like its neighbor Thailand.

I may be making this book sound boring. It isn't. Anderson both teaches and makes you think.

(An addendum added a few weeks later: One of the pleasures of reading this is that one of the major events took place in a small palace that lies at the end of a street that I used to live on. I always wondered what function that palace served in modern times; now I know it's a hangout for diplomats and spooks.)

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so enjoyed this book. Filled with stories of the unintended outcomes of American idealism via the actions of the CIA during the Cold War. Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Peter Sichel, and Edward Lansdale were flawed, but fascinating men who came together within the CIA to defend freedom, but were all morally compromised by decisions they made.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

Act 1: Great section, lots of interesting information relating to WWII and the four featured spies.
Act 2: Generally good but meandered a bit.
Act 3: Will this book never end?

I can't complain so much about the material in the book but I had great difficulty with how it was presented. In isolation, everything was okay to very good but it never fit together as a cohesive subject. I thought this was a book about four CIA employees during the early years of the Cold War. It kind of is but not really. As the book progresses the Burke/Landsdale/Sichel/Wisner stories become scarcer and less impactful. The author went on long detours about the Dulles brothers, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Vietnam and a few other subjects and it really diminished my interest in the titular characters.

The author attempted to combine too many story lines into one book and it simply didn't work well overall.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Quiet Americans by Scott Anderson
Published August 31, 2020 / by Littoral Librarian

Publication Date September 1, 2020
I am of the generation raised when being patriotic was the default: we dutifully recited the Pledge every school day, stood at parades when the flag went by, etc. etc. We were taught that the U.S. was unquestioningly on the “right side” in every conflict, and that we were against tyranny, and definitely always pro-freedom and democracy, while the “other side” was oppressive, authoritarian, and they were the “bad guys.” Scott Anderson, historian and author of Lawrence In Arabia, turns his focus to the Cold War era and the development of the espionage industry under the CIA in The Quiet Americans.

After WWII, the USSR was busy around the world working to expand their influence, and the US response was run by the new CIA office. There were four men whose spy efforts were part of this activity around the world. Frank Wisner was from a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel was a German Jew who had escaped the Nazis, Michael Burke was a former football star, and Ed Lansdale was an ad executive (think “Mad Men”) before he became a spy. Together, these four were in charge of operations such as directing wars against “Communist insurgents” in Southeast Asia, plotting various coups, and planning ways to outwit the KGB in Berlin.

Despite the portrayal of the spies on the “good” team as the heroes in spy stories, the U.S basically gave up any pretense of being morally superior as they moved from being defenders of freedom to being just sad characters ruined by the work they had done. Possibly if the leadership in Washington had been less ideologically rigid and had maintained ideals that made the country so well respected following the War, things might have gone better for these four. But the messes they got into prompted two to quit the CIA, one to become a stereotypical “bad guy” while still on “our side,” and one just gave up and killed himself.

In the mid to late 60s, I was in college studying history as I watched the war in Vietnam prompt millions to react in various ways, but it was clear that the days of blindly trusting the government to be on the side of good/freedom/right were OVER. A professor of mine once used the analogy that the U.S. was like a big, dumb, lumbering football player who only wants to win the game, make the score, or stop the opposition, and lamented the way we could only watch as that player went stumbling around the globe, just making things worse. My own reaction to the disillusionment was to quit school and marry a Navy man in the summer of 1968. (not the smartest choice I could have made). I had hoped this book would help me regain some of optimism about our country’s future as in 2020 we wobble toward an election while battling COVID and wildfires, with a lunatic in charge.

Five stars because Anderson is such an incredibly good writer and historian. He makes the reader care about the four individuals who are the focus of the larger story of the development of the CIA, and tells the story of the men and their work beautifully. Thanks to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review. Subtitled “Four CIA Spies at the dawn of the Cold War — A Tragedy in Three Acts,” it will definitely be an eye opener for anyone interested in espionage in general or the CIA in particular.

[Arista · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fine, but can we have an honest talk about how many books need a good editor to skinny down a 500 page book to the 350 pages it should be? Do publishing houses not empower editors to do that anymore? My God, I’m so tired of reading through repetitive word-flab for the meat of what the author is trying to say. . .

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and entertaining work.

Anderson vividly tells the story of the CIA’s early years through the experiences of Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Edward Lansdale, and Peter Sichel. I’ve read a lot about Wisner and Lansdale, a little about Burke (mostly dealing with Albania), and Sichel was a new figure to me. Still, if you’ve read about this subject before, you probably won’t find that many new revelations. He also covers J. Edgar Hoover and his distrust of the new Agency. Anderson faults the CIA’s political superiors for much of what ended up going wrong; he’s pretty critical of George Kennan, for example, who he calls a “two-faced weasel,” and of Eisenhower.

The narrative is engaging and moves along at a brisk pace but can jump back and forth a bit, and the style is a little breezy at times. Each person’s life is divided into short chapters, and the narrative might have been smoother if Anderson had focused on them in longer sections. At one point Anderson writes that the CIA failed to appreciate the interplay between moderate and hardliners in the Politburo after Stalin’s death, and views it as a missed opportunity. Anderson does not, however, explain how CIA should have learned of these divisions, or how US policymakers should have exploited them.

A nuanced and insightful work.

[Little Timmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written personal look inside the early years of the CIA. Nice Narrative of the 4 people that the book focuses on. Recommended

[AJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

No denying Anderson is an immense talent. This work, however, has too much exposition and too little analysis on ground that has been well-trod before, and unfortunately the book doesn’t live up to its promise of a tragedy in three acts. Rather it amounts to little more than a jumble of plot threads and doesn’t really contribute anything new to the scholarship on U.S. covert action during the early Cold War.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fucking wild book, a really interesting spy history. I have more thoughts upcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, so you'll have to wait for a full review for then.

UPDATE: My review is available here https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...

[Adrian Dumitru · Rating 5 out of 5]

O carte pe care o recomand cititorilor pasionați de serviciile de intelligence. Pentru un iubitor de legende, aceste povesti din spatele imaginii de conduită morală ireproșabilă ale agențiilor naționale de securitate m-au făcut să îmi mai adaug o piatra la temelia lucrurilor pe care mintea mea le-a construit în legătură cu funcționarea lumii și mecanismele din umbra. Este plina de istorie îmbinând datele pur istorice cu percepția personala a personajelor principale. Compune o narațiune fascinanta pe baza întâmplărilor reale.

[spoko · Rating 5 out of 5]

A critical history of the CIA’s origin story, from WWII through the Philippines, Vietnam, Guatemala, Hungary, and beyond. Anderson details the role of American arrogance in guiding one misstep after another. This quote, about the US approach in Vietnam, nicely sums up the overriding hubris that has caused so many international scandals and failures in the post-WWII era:

In essence, so overwhelming was the U.S. advantage, and so limitless its resources, that it never bothered to try to be smart. Instead, and rather than deal with the tedious details of nation-building or the painstaking work of hearts-and-minds political warfare, it could simply bomb its way to a solution, and if a half-million soldiers on the ground didn’t solve the problem, then surely another 100,000 would. As history going back to the Persians and Romans clearly attests, even the most powerful armies and empires can be defeated if, in their arrogance, they insist on being stupid.
[Emphasis mine.]

Beyond that arrogance, though, what comes across clearly in this history is America’s deep mistrust of the democratic process. Again and again, the administration and the intelligence community either failed to support the spontaneous growth of democracy, or they actively worked to undermine & overturn it. In one episode after another, with few if any counterexamples, US intelligence & military leaders’ distrust of popular will (combined, of course, with their immense power) set the cause of international democracy further and further back. It’s a shameful aspect of our history, and it certainly didn’t end with the chronological end of this book, but Anderson does a good job exposing the way that it formed our approach to international intelligence.

[Ionuț Anastasiu · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 stele.
Este inutil de precizat faptul că titlul parafrazează celebrul roman al lui Graham Greene, Americanul liniștit. Dar, deși nu face parte din categoria cărților de ficțiune, totuși este atât pasionantă încât ai senzația că lucrurile pot oricând să ia o turnură diferită față de desfășurarea reală a evenimentelor. Altfel spus, Americanii liniștiți este o carte despre Razboiul Rece, cu precădere a perioadei de început a Războiului Rece (deși conține și o relatare a unor momente importante din cel de-al Doilea Război Mondial, totuși tema principală este Războiul Rece), dar și o dublă monografie istorică: mai întâi, este vorba despre biografiile a patru membri ai serviciilor secrete americane, asupra cărora voi reveni imediat, dar și despre apariția și consolidarea CIA, precum și a unora dintre operațiunile CIA, mai mult sau mai puțin cunoscute.
Cei patru eroi ai cărții sunt: Frank Wisner, unul dintre fondatorii CIA, Michael Burke, agent CIA, dar și scenarist la Hollywood, unde a colaborat cu regizorul Fritz Lang, carismaticul agent Edward Lansdale, al cărui rol a fost absolut esențial în operațiunile CIA în Filipine și Vietnam, și, în fine, o figură ceva mai ștearsă, dar care are meritul de a fi unul dintre puținii, poate singurul agent a cărui carieră s-a derulat în acea perioadă și care încă trăiește, Peter Sichel, ce are vârsta de 102 ani. Dar, deși au avut în comun faptul că și-au dedicat o parte bună din viață activității CIA, totuși cei patru au avut o personalitate foarte distinctă.
Probabil epitetul glamour i se poate aplica cel mai bine lui Michael Burke, ce a fost prieten în timpul războiului cu nimeni altcineva decât Ernest Hemingway, iar ulterior va avea o relativ scurtă carieră la Hollywood, dar și în cercul familiei lui Eleanor Roosevelt. Chiar și după ce și-a încheiat cariera de agent CIA, Burke a rămas în luminile rampei.
Capitolul al treilea (ce face parte din prima parte a cărții) este de mare interes pentru noi, deoarece descrie situația României după data de 23 august 1944, când regele Mihai a anunțat că țara noastră trece de partea Aliaților, iar armata română întoarce armele împotriva Germaniei. Pe data de 31 august sosea la București cu un avion ce plecase din Istanbul Frank Wisner. Modul în care Scott Anderson descrie viața din capitala României din acea perioadă este savuros: "Acum, când România ieșise efectiv din războiul contra URSS, ofițeri superiori ai Armatei Roșii împreună cu protipendada din București, răsuflând ușuraţi, aveau chef să sărbătorească, așa că aproape în fiecare seară se organiza câte o petrecere somptuoasă într-o vilă sau alta de pe Şoseaua Kiseleff. Întrucât Bucureștiul era una dintre capitalele est-europene care fuseseră cel mai puţin distruse de război, diverse pivnițe bine înzestrate erau golite pentru aceste reuniuni, astfel încât vinurile de soi și coniacurile fine curgeau din abundență". Dar, ce să vezi, tânărul și competentul agent american participă din plin nu numai la aceste petreceri, ci și la complexitatea vieții bucureștene în general: "Asa cum era de așteptat într-o asemenea atmosferă, curând au început să înflorească zvonuri despre diverse aventuri amoroase. O
sursă de bârfe, în acest sens, a fost relația foarte apropiată dintre ofiterul Tifos [Frank Wisner] și prinţesa Tanda Caragea, tânăra și frumoasa soţie de douăzeci și patru de ani a gazdei mult mai în vârstă a lui Wisner, Dumitru Bragadiru". Despre Tanda Caragea știam de la Neagu Djuvara că a avut o foarte tumultuoasă viață erotică, iată însă că ea s-a străduit din plin să consolideze relațiile româno-americane din epocă.
Un alt detaliu interesant este metoda pe care au pus-o în practică sovieticii odată ce România a trecut de partea Aliaților: ""Tactica salamului" sau "moartea prin o mie de tăieturi": strategia de a smulge părți dintr-o structură politică existentă ("felie după felie, până nu mai rămâne nimic")". Din păcate, România avea să constituie o simplă piesă de negociere între Churchill și Stalin în octombrie 1944, atunci când vor stabili de comun acord sferele de influență valabile pentru țările din Estul Europei (în cazul nostru 90% influență sovietică și 10% influență occidentală). Dar, așa cum era de așteptat, România nu ocupă decât o poziție marginală în ansamblul narațiunii.
Prima escală importantă în povestea declanșării Războiului Rece este Berlin. Acolo tragedia părea că atinsese proporții imposibil de imaginat: numărul estimat de femei germane violate de soldaţii ruși în Germania este de 2000000, dintre care 100000 în Berlin. Orașul pare că este dezmembrat bucată cu bucată și tot ce are o minimă valoare este jefuit de soldaţii sovietici, despre care ni se spune ceea ce știam deja de multă vreme, dar merită să ne reamintim: "Aveau o ciudată obsesie cu ceasurile. Cea mai emblematică fotografie a căderii Berlinului, în care soldați ai Armatei Roșii înfig steagul sovietic pe acoperișul Reichstagului, trebuise retuşată înainte de a fi publicată, pentru a șterge unul dintre cele două ceasuri pe care le purta la mână unul dintre soldaţi". Capitolul 7 descrie dezastrul în care se afla Berlinul aflat în ruine, de unde sovieticii goliseră "efectiv orașul de orice lucru de valoare": automobile, generatoare, mobilier, șinele de tramvai". În 1948 se derulează un alt episod esențial, respectiv Blocada Berlinului realizată de sovietici, ce va suprasolicita avioanele americane și britanice, ce au reprezentat timp de 11 luni singura modalitate de aprovizionare a orașului.
De acum înainte, CIA se va afla în prima linie a Războiului Rece, organizând operațiuni secrete pe întreg mapamondul. Un spațiu foarte larg va fi acordat operațiunilor ce vizează Albania (operațiunea BGFiend ce viza scoaterea Albaniei din sfera de influență sovietică se va dovedi un eșec de proporții, la care însă este foarte posibil să fi contribuit din plin celebrul agent dublu aflat în slujba sovieticilor, Kim Philby), Egipt (operațiunea Fat Fucker din 1952 a avut ca rezultat o lovitură de stat în Egipt, a Ofițerilor Liberi, prin care era răsturnat regele Farouk și înlocuit cu un tânăr colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser), Iran (operațiunea Ajax din 1953 ce a organizat lovitura de stat împotriva premierului populist liberal Mohammad Mossadegh; în locul acestuia, va fi instalat șahul Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), Filipine ("Cu sprijinul americanilor, "omul nostru" Ramon Magsaysay câștigă alegerile prezidențiale din Filipine din noiembrie 1953"), Vietnam (Vietnamul este împărțit în două: Vietnamul de Nord, controlat de Ho Și Min și adepții lui din Viet Minh și Vietnamul de Sud, unde a devenit premier omul consiliat de Edward Lansdale, Ngo Dinh Diem), Guatemala (Operațiunea PBSuccess: la începutul anului 1954 CIA organizează un complot pentru a-l răsturna de la putere pe Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, președintele ales al Guatemalei, o ţară din America Centrală. Liberal declarat Árbenz zdruncinase cultura aproape feudală a ţării lui printr-o reformă agrară radicală. În viziunea secretarului de stat John Foster Dulles, fratele șefului CIA, Allen Dulles, reformele agrare erau adesea premergătoare comunismului. În locul lui Guzmán, va fi instalat liderul rebelilor, Castillo Armas) etc. Toate acestea mișcări politice au, prin urmare, un numitor comun, ele nefiind altceva decât operațiuni ale CIA al căror scop este deținerea controlului american asupra țărilor respective.
De asemenea, un loc foarte important în ansamblul Războiului Rece este ocupat de Revoluția din Ungaria din 1956 și mai ales de sentimentele sfâșietoare de dezamăgire și disperare pe care le-au resimțit revoluționarii maghiari atunci când a devenit clar că americanii conduși de președintele Dwight Eisenhower nu vor face nimic pentru a-i ajuta să scape de sovietici.
Tabloul este înspăimântător, iar distincția dintre bine și rău din ce în ce mai subțire, până la punctul în care se volatilizează complet.
În final, Scott Anderson face un fel de rechizitoriu în care prezintă "nenumăratele excese și greșeli ale CIA de-a lungul anilor". Critica CIA întreprinsă de Anderson este justificată poate, însă nu trebuie uitat că URSS era un dușman brutal și violent al lumii occidentale. Lectură plăcută!

[Brandon Forsyth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing short of a masterpiece. I’ve always been interested in America’s foreign policy rhetoric of “values” and “interests”, and this book does an exceptional job of examining the origins of those concepts being at odds with each other - all while being a cracking spy story at the same time. It’s difficult for me to state how much I enjoyed this - at times it felt like it was written just for me. I thoroughly enjoyed Scott Anderson’s previous LAWRENCE IN ARABIA, and will now have to search out everything else he’s ever done. Do not miss this one!

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Quiet Americans is a fascinating look at the early Cold War through a close study of the careers of four CIA agents from 1944 to the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. The close study is used to examine the bigger picture, of how American foreign policy and the cause of anti-Communism became a bloody lie over a host of atrocities.

The subjects of the book; Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel, Edward Landsdale, and Michael Burke all wound up in the Office of Strategic Services in the Second World War, running the American side of the intelligence and sabotage efforts against the Axis powers. After victory, the OSS was disbanded and dramatically reduced in scope. Wisner and Sichel remained in occupied Europe, witnesses to the fall of what Churchill would soon term the Iron Curtain, as the Soviets disappeared political enemies and looted and pillaged their subjects. Their warnings, that while Stalin's USSR was a necessary wartime ally, it was no partner in peace, went mostly unheard for a few vital years.

But when the Truman administration realized that Something Had to be Done, something was done with a vengeance. Wisner became head of the Office of Policy Coordination, the anodyne title concealing a blacker-than-black agency with responsibility for unconventional warfare worldwide, and with a confused chain of command that left him accountable solely to himself. The OPC embarked on a variety of projects, two of which would fall under characteristic original sins. The first was a taste for covert commando teams, modeled on the Jedburghs of World War 2, which would parachute agents recruited from the mass of refugees across Europe into communist countries to collect intelligence and foment revolution. Hundreds if not thousands of agents were recruited and trained, and all of them were almost immediately captured by Communist security forces and either doubled or executed. Net intelligence effect was zero.

The second issue was that a lot of the committed anti-Communists floating around Europe in the late 1940s were also committed Nazis who had participated in the Holocaust. Sichel was actually a Jewish refugee himself who wound up working with Nazis under a strict policy of "I don't care what you did during the war." Working with Nazis and war criminals provided a propaganda victory to the Soviets, and also seems to have minimal intelligence value, as most of these assets traded off of stale historical insights from the war, and were more concerned about avoiding accountability for their past than producing good intelligence.

As the Cold War ground on, Eisenhower became president and the Dulles brothers took preeminent roles, the CIA moved into new battlefields. The first was against an old internal enemy, J. Edgar Hoover, who believed that the nations intelligence apparatus should rightfully report to him, and his catspaw in the Red Scare, Senator McCarthy. Second was the nations of the third world. Coups in Iran and Guatemala demonstrated the effectiveness of covert action, while Landsdale's work in the Philippines and Vietnam provided a model for counter-insurgency psychological warfare. But this expansion of the battlefield came at the expense of blowback, the coups showing that America was more a friend to multinational capitalism than democracy, with temporary gains leading to decades-long strategic setbacks for American values worldwide.

Events came to a head in 1956 with the Hungarian Revolt. The CIA had neither predicted nor instigated a protest march that grew into a national rebellion. But when the moment came to commit to rollback and liberation, the Eisenhower administration demurred, focusing instead on the Suez Crisis. The Red Army rolled in with tanks, Hungary was crushed, thousands killed, and the Cold War dragged on for another 35 years at immense cost. Each of the four principles burned out, drifting away from intelligence work. Wisner committed suicide, and the rest had decent second acts.

Anderson returns with two interesting bits of analysis on the CIA itself. The first is that the confused lines of authority set up with the Office of Policy Coordination and continuing until the present are deliberate, to make the CIA the fall-guy for anything the government wants to do and also disavow. Far from being a rogue agency, this CIA structure serves a vital political role. The second is that covert operations have a terrible momentum despite almost never working because they are so expensive and effortful. Handlers fall in love with their plans and agents, big budgets are easier to sell to Congress, and no one is every promoted for cancelling an operation.

There are a few warts here. The Landsdale chapters feel disconnected from the rest of the book, it's not a quick read, and really should be read in partnership with a book on the Dulles brothers (I recommend Kinzer) and one on the Red Scare for the domestic scene. But as a fan of spy histories, this one is at the top of the pack. Well recommended.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was already familiar with two of the four men (Lansdale and Wisner), but all four of the stories are tied into the war years of the OSS and its 1947 successor, the CIA - particularly the Office of Policy Coordination ("OPC"), created in 1948 as the covert operations arm of the new agency. Focused on the work of these men in Eastern Europe and Central America and, for Lansdale, the Phillipines and Vietnam, Anderson pulls together the difficulties - practical and political - that the agency faced, reminding readers that the operations that are known best are of course the failures, not the successes. I have read about the Agency's operations to influence elections in Italy and in Greece, two of the key focal points of the early years of the Cold War battle against communist expansion, and I have read about Lansdale, but the depth of the stories, and interviews with participants, make this a fascinating look at the early years of OPC and covert operations, including what went wrong in policy and operations in fighting the Cold War and missing opportunities like Hungary in 1956 and, of course, in Vietnam.

[Bonnieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! A spy memoir, a history of the late 40s and 50s, and a revelation of oh so many mistakes the U.S. made in those decades. This is an important piece of rewriting the history of our foreign relations and insights into the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in those decades. I was shocked by much, but maybe shocked most by the incredible power of the Dulles brothers, John Foster as Secretary of State and Alan as head of the newly formed CIA.

This is a dense 470 pp book that is sometimes like reading a spy thriller--except it is real. Other times, it dips into military history, not a favorite of mine but providing new perspectives. It is not an easy read. It is an excellent read. As I read it, I kept saying to myself, “Why didn’t I know this?"

[Emily Carlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quiet American's content gets 5 stars (if not 6). The writing, on the other hand, gets 3 stars (if not 2). Good on a structural level but painful on a sentence by sentence level (imo). I knew I was in for a tough ride when the last sentence of the preface made my head hurt:

This book is the chronicle of those four men. In its own way, it is also the chronicle of the greater tragedy in which they participated, of how at the very dawn of the American Century, the United States managed to snatch moral defeat from the jaws of sure victory, and be forever tarnished.

...My head hurts anew.

Anyway...This book recounts the final years of WW2 into the first decade or so of the Cold War through the interwoven stories of four CIA operatives: Edward Landsdale, Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, and Peter Sichel.

Anderson does not paint a particularly rosy portrait of the motives or of the strategic prowess of the United States during these years. It's less an indictment of CIA employees themselves and more one of their bosses. Most notably: Eisenhower, Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Dulles, the director of the CIA + John's brother Allen Dulles, and some Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover sprinkled in as well.

Anderson points to Eisenhower's New Look policy as the source of many of the worst miscalculations during the early years of the Cold War. New Look held that the nature of war had changed such that a large standing army was no longer the best way to intimidate enemies. Instead, Eisenhower invested in the threat of "massive retaliation" (i.e. nuclear weapons) as well as covert operations, which were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to fight. So the US avoided overt military action in the Soviet Union and its satellite states because of the risk that it would escalate into nuclear war -- a risk that the US created itself (at least in part) by way of the New Look policy. This led directly to the many proxy wars of the time as well as to inconsistent application of US military resources.

For example, when the Hungarian Revolution occurred in 1956, it seemed like it should have been the US's dream come true; the CIA had been trying (and failing) to foment anti-communist revolution in Eastern Europe and elsewhere for years. Now a revolution was unfolding, and Hungarians were ready for Americans to back them up against the Soviets. However, no Americans came. The rationale for this non-intervention owed in part to New Look -- the US had painted itself into a corner of only being able to retaliate massively or through subtle covert operations. There wasn't any middle ground that would allow for sending soldiers to support the revolution. Anderson quotes historian Elizabeth Hazard:

"Not only had the US held out false hope to those who were willing to risk their lives in a desperate crusade, but its policies had subverted the possibility of an early detente with the Soviet Union....by abandoning those who had placed their faith in its promises, the United States betrayed the hollowness of its pretense as the champion of liberty and exposed its willingness to exploit the desperate hopes of its clients."

The situation in Hungary illuminated one of the wildest observations that Anderson makes: The United States had no idea would do if one of the CIA's many covert operations to spark anti-communist revolution were to actually succeed. Even though the missions had no clear end goal or follow-through in mind, even though they were failing left and right, the US persisted because to be doing *something* was seen as better than doing nothing. Here's one of the CIA operatives, Peter Sichel, reflecting on this bias towards action (however misguided), as a ninety-something year old:

We need to get away from this idea that were are always right in the world, and that somehow when we're invading countries or overthrowing their governments, we're doing it to help them. We're not helping them. It is often easier to act, especially with the belief that we are always right, than to wait and let problems solve themselves. This is the disease of empires."

While Anderson has a definite perspective in the way he recounts these years (one that is evident in the book's subtitle: "A Tragedy in Three Acts), he really comes alive in the last few chapters. He argues that you can draw a line from the way anti-communist rhetoric was weaponized during the Cold War to some of the country's current divisions:

[T]he excesses and crimes committed in the name of anti-communism in the early Cold War carved a dividing line through the American body politic, planting the seeds of the blue-state/red-state schism that we grapple with today. Amid the domestic Red Scare, those who embraced the belief that America was under siege from within traveled one divergent path, while those who believed it was largely a cynical myth traveled another, with both paths ultimately so antithetical to each other as to make their travelers all but impervious to contradictory facts. As political scientists have pointed out, by knowing which side of the political divide a person chose during the Red Scare of the late 1940s, it's possible to predict with near certainty their and their offspring's political views on foreign affairs ever after: their support or opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960's, their children's support or opposition to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars initiatives in the 1980s, their grandchildren's support or opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

This is a book that would reward a reread, I think. It's so dense with names, dates, references, that it can be hard to follow, at times, at least for someone like me who went into it with a pretty superficial understanding of the Cold War. Even so, I learned a lot this first time around -- both about the (oft misguided) larger political forces of the time and a ton of delightful (but also disturbing) details, like the involvement of the CIA's covert operations branch, the OPC, in the founding of the Paris Review.

In the acknowledgments, Anderson references the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act. One disturbing incident recounted in the book, wherein John Foster Dulles tries to engineer a protest in East Berlin that would result in lives lost and thus be an anti-Soviet propaganda win, was described in Michael Burke's memoir. However, the CIA's Publications Review Board scrubbed it from the version that was published. Anderson writes:

"By what rationale it is a matter of national security to withhold an eyewitness account, written three decades after the fact, of how one of the most powerful Secretaries of State in American history tried to provoke an incident in which he knew -- indeed hoped -- that innocent people would be killed? There is no adequate rationale, and this becomes no longer the sanitizing of history, but rather its attempted erasure."

Luckily, Anderson was able to describe the incident because an anonymous CIA official told him how to find Burke's uncensored memoir. All of which is to say that the end of this book has inspired what I'll pick up next, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, by one of my favorite authors, Nicholson Baker.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the first decade or so of the CIA, with enough of an overview of its OSS ancestor to set the table.

I was familiar with the basics of two of the four main protagonists, Frank Wisner and Ed Lansdale. I had heard of Michael Burke's name in conjunction with the pre-Steinbrenner Yankees but knew nothing of his CIA past. And, I knew nothing at all of Peter Sichel, whether in the CIA, as a Holocaust survivor, or as a scion of a German wine family who eventually introduced to/inflicted on America the famous Blue Nun label after leaving the spook shack.

Anderson humanizes both of the former two without whitewashing any of their doings, especially Wisner on the Guatemalan coup. He does note that Wisner had, in the past, been less favorable to such things and a general voice of caution, but, for a variety of reasons, whether nudged by Allen Dulles or totally willingly, took it on.

Anderson later notes Wisner's despair over Washington doing nothing over the Hungarian uprising and Cabot Lodge deliberately sandbagging the UN looking at it. Out in the field at the time, he was unable to add his voice in Washington, although it probably wouldn't have helped change things anyway.

An interjection at this point. For all the people who tout Eisenhower's "farewell address" warning about the military industrial complex, let's remember that with the Mossadegh coup followed by the Arbenz coup, he had willingly decided to replace much of it (but not all of it — mutual assured destruction and more nukes!) with the spying-snooping-overthrowing complex. And, Anderson leans toward the side of historians who say Ike was in no way a creature of his Cabinet or other advisors, but made them (in this case, ultimately John Foster Dulles and brother Allen) his tools.

Add in that Ike willingly agreed with Foster Dulles to make no effort at rapproachment with the early post-Stalin leadership, above all, the initial CPSU general secretary, Georgi Malenkov (who wanted the USSR to cut back on the arms race and work on more consumer goods manufacture), and Ike comes off as pretty loathsome. (That's not even counting his abandoning Hungarians to their fate, when Anderson thinks a US intervention could have been pulled off without World War III. But, if Ike was worried about that, he had only himself to blame due to developing the "New Look" and MAD.)

On Lansdale, Anderson says he wasn't the "ugly American" in Vietnam, or the Philippines before that, despite the book of that name, allegedly about him, coming out in 1958. Indeed, Lansdale wanted the US and South Vietnam to follow through with the Geneva Accords mandated Vietnam-wide elections, and he thought Diem could have one. That said, Anderson does note in the epilogue that Lansdale later became the ugly American indeed when in charge of Operation Mongoose. A side note to that, and more on how, as Anderson notes, US regime change backfires? An Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala in 1954 during the coup.

Burke? His main claim to fame in the early years of the CIA was running various infiltrators into places like Albania, then Ukraine. He took a while to stop being credulous about their success, but eventually realized these operations weren't working, and became burned out on CIA work and left.

Sichel? The most interesting of all. In interviewing many Germans in the early post-1945 years, he had what he told Anderson (Sichel is still alive) was "the conversation" with those claiming to be "good Germans." He would essentially say, I don't want to hear about your past, that's your conscience. I want you to be good today. But, as with some members of the Gehlen Org, he at times in recruiting some CIA operatives, consciously decided to never have "the conversation." Anderson asks him about this, and Sichel eventually comes off as stuck and still unable to answer clearly.

Besides Ike and other antagonists mentioned above, two others are of note. J. Edgar Hoover hated the CIA's existence, and even before it was officially created out of its predecessor, conspired to take down Wild Bill Donovan. He also repeatedly went after Wisner.

And, George Kennan gets called things like "two-faced weasel."

From having previously read "Lawrence in Arabia," this book lived up to that one indeed. On politics, I wouldn't call Anderson a leftist, but I would call him an insightful left-liberal.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

For most readers with a passing interest in espionage, the operations of the CIA beginning in the 1950s are reasonably familiar. But that’s not the case of the Agency’s work in the years immediately following World War II. Scott Anderson corrects that gap in The Quiet Americans, an illuminating account of four veterans of the wartime OSS who rose to positions of prominence in the new agency that came into existence in 1947.

A FOCUS ON FOUR REMARKABLE MEN
The four do not include any of the four OSS officers who later became directors of the agency. Allen Dulles and Richard Helms figure in Anderson’s reporting in supporting roles. William Colby appears only as a source and William Casey is mentioned only in the notes and bibliography. Instead the focus is on two names that are familiar to many of us—Frank Wisner and Edward Lansdale—and two who are not: Peter Sichel and Michael Burke. It’s a fascinating account of four men who helped the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations set the nation on the fateful and misguided course for which we are still paying the price.

THE FOUR “QUIET AMERICANS”
In capsule biographies scattered through the pages of his book, Anderson traces the early lives of the four CIA spies, with emphasis on their service in the OSS in World War II and into the 1950s. Some of what he writes is familiar territory, as the story of the OSS is well known. But much else is available to a general reader only through the biographies and memoirs written by and about three of them and both official and academic studies of US foreign policy in the period.

FRANK WISNER
Frank Wisner (1909-65) helped found the Central Intelligence Agency and played a pivotal role in its operations throughout the 1950s. As Anderson explains, Wisner had been widely expected to be Dwight Eisenhower’s choice as Director of the Agency instead of Allen Dulles. But J. Edgar Hoover‘s backroom manipulation and hostility—to him personally and to the CIA—denied him the job. He served as Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) until September 1958, heading up the Agency’s covert operations around the world. (It was the number two, and later number three, position in the CIA.) In 1958, however, he experienced a mental breakdown. He retired from the Agency four years later and committed suicide in 1965, despondent that so many of the foreign interventions he’d engineered had gone so badly awry.

EDWARD LANSDALE
An officer in the US Air Force who later worked for the CIA, Edward Lansdale (1908-87) gained fame in the early 1950s for his collaboration with Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay in crushing the Huk insurgency. It was during that experience that Lansdale pioneered the techniques of counterinsurgency and psychological warfare that he later brought to bear in South Viernam with Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

As Anderson sees him, Lansdale was “one of the most celebrated and influential military intelligence figures of the coming Cold War, a theorist who painstakingly studied and then sought to emulate the enemy. So vast was his impact that he would serve as the thinly disguised protagonist of one best-selling book, The Ugly American, and quite possibly of a second, The Quiet American.” And a CIA director later named him as one of the ten greatest spies in modern history. He retired from the air force in 1963 as a major general but continued working thereafter with the CIA.

PETER SICHEL
Peter Sichel was born in 1922 in Mainz, Germany, and is thus now nearly 100 years old as I write. To wine lovers throughout Europe and North America, he is known as a wine merchant, having rebuilt the family’s German business in the United States. But for nearly two decades earlier in life he worked, first, for the OSS during World War II, and later for its successors and the CIA. In the Agency, he was responsible for overseeing sabotage and intelligence missions behind the Iron Curtain, sending detachments of exiles behind the lines to disrupt Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The majority of them were caught, and most were killed, sometimes immediately upon folding up their parachutes. The bitter experience of attempting without success to persuade his superiors to stop these suicidal missions led him eventually to resign from the CIA in 1960.

MICHAEL BURKE
Few people of any era can top the storied career of Michael Burke (1916-87). As Wikipedia notes, he “was a U.S. Navy Officer, O.S.S. agent, C.I.A. agent, general manager of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, CBS executive, President of the New York Yankees, the New York Knicks, and Madison Square Garden.” New Yorkers in the 1960s and 70s knew him as a curse to their beloved sports teams, which invariably chalked up badly losing seasons under his management. In the OSS and the CIA, by contrast, he was brilliantly successful as an operative in the field. Burke worked behind German lines with the French Resistance and later organized and managed many of the missions behind the Iron Curtain that so disturbed his boss, Peter Sichel.

ANDERSON’S VERDICT ABOUT THE FOUR
Of these four men, “[t]wo would leave the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had been asked to make, or by their role in causing the deaths of others. Another, battling mental illness and haunted by a Cold War calamity he had tried to avert, would end up taking his own life. The fourth would make a kind of Faustian bargain, embracing governmental policies he knew to be futile in order to maintain his seat at the decision-making table, only to become a scapegoat when those policies failed.”

SIX OVERARCHING THEMES
Six themes dominate Anderson’s account in this eye-opening book. The CIA was deeply involved in all six:

** The step-by-step buildup toward the Cold War, which might well have become a hot war very quickly after World War II. In fact there were those on both sides who seemed to wish it to happen. And the American military leadership was convinced it would.

** How the US stumbled its way into what became the Vietnam War, beginning with modest support for the French, who were struggling to hold on in Indochina, and steadily increasing as the 1950s turned into the 1960s.

** The emergence of what was later called Mutually Assured Destruction under Dwight Eisenhower in what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called his New Look foreign policy.

** The tragically misguided policy of the Eisenhower Administration to overthrow foreign governments who threatened US commercial interests and, in too many cases, assassinating their leaders. The principal examples of this policy are well known: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), and Cuba (1962), when the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. There were many others.

** The twin spectacles of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, fueled by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s fury at being denied the leadership of the nation’s foreign intelligence operations when the CIA was launched. Hoover’s determination to wreak revenge on the CIA and the State Department led him to feed FBI files on “subversives” to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the useful idiot in his scheme.

** How Edward Lansdale pioneered America’s counterinsurgency strategy, first in leading the fight with Congressman and later President Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines against the Huk guerrillas, and then (against his wishes) in guiding Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in his resistance to the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong.

TWO CONSEQUENTIAL INSIGHTS
What may be the most consequential of the insights Anderson offers in this book regards the Eisenhower Administration’s dismissive response to overtures for peace almost immediately after the death of Stalin. “[B]y deriding the concept of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in favor of a continued policy of confrontation, they undercut the moderate faction within the Kremlin and bolstered the militants. In the estimation of President Eisenhower’s ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Charles Bohlen, by misplaying the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, the United States may have missed a golden opportunity to dramatically alter the course of the Cold War.” And we paid for that miscalculation with the more than three decades of costly belligerence that followed.

Anderson also upends the popular view that the CIA drove foreign policy, not just under Dwight Eisenhower but in the decades that followed as well. “Far from being the ‘rogue elephant’ of Frank Church’s imagination,” he writes, “virtually every major covert mission undertaken by the CIA from its inception until today—from the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh, to the plots to kill Fidel Castro; from interfering in elections in Italy, to building a mercenary army in Laos; from secretly funding the Nicaraguan contras, to ‘proving’ Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—has been done under the express, if unwritten, orders of presidents. In adherence to the doctrine of plausible deniability, the CIA always has been—and likely always will be—the ultimate fall guy.” And the four CIA spies profiled in this book ended, in the final analysis, becoming fall guys themselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Anderson (1959-) has written seven nonfiction books, two of them coauthored with his big brother, Jon Lee Anderson, and two novels. His best-known work is the biography, Lawrence in Arabia. He was raised in East Asia, primarily Taiwan and Korea, where his father was stationed as an agricultural advisor for the US government. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book with too many parts to it —- poorly written. The author works too hard trying to bunch together too many different people. Another book highly not recommended —- I am in need of finding a good book these days!

[Simon Mee · Rating 3 out of 5]

As for the would-be revolutionary infiltrator, the question was even more basic: what would happen if it actually worked? By 1953, Michael Burke and every other CIA officer involved in the missions had a firm grasp on what failure looked like, but what about winning? To put the question in concrete form, as Michael Burke did in his memoir: “Even if underground movements had succeeded in gaining enough strength in numbers and arms to rise up, what armies of the West would intervene to ensure their success?”

Not one of America’s finest hours.

What makes this book mostly work is that Anderson obtained interviews with one of the CIA “spies” (now 102!), along with family members of the others. He also tracked down (what I understand to be) an otherwise unreported story that John Foster Dulles asked one of the other main characters to provoke riots in Berlin similar to those that did occur 1953. There is bookworthy material here. It allows the introduction of “fresh” information to a well-covered subject (US cold war espionage_

Anderson achieves his overall goal-demonstrating in his book that the United States, through pig-headedness and lack of understanding of the opposition, missed several opportunities to lower the conflict’s temperature versus some form of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The denouement is that the United States, through its “New Look” policy froze in place the conflict in Europe while squandering its goodwill global through ill-considered regime changes (Guatemala and Iran being the main examples used). I am not necessarily agreeing, because I haven’t looked at the period in detail, but the book has an internal coherence and is backed by material that supports Anderson’s position.

In some centers, so many books were removed that librarians simply ran out of storage space for them all. In those instances, and notwithstanding Roy Cohn’s outrage when the suggestion was put to him, the offending books were burned.

There is the occasional tone choices (such as Stalin’s prewar actions and motivations) and sourcing (a Smithsonian article by a journalist is not sufficient to show Leslie Groves ordered the bombing of Germany’s atomic stockpile before the Soviets reached it) but none of that really troubles me, as the book introduces new material without wildly diverging from accepted narratives.

What is my main problem? I will restate with an addition: The book introduces some new material without wildly diverging from accepted narratives.

A few months later, the doctor would pen a vivid account of those hectic last days in Guatemala entitled “I Witnessed the Coup Against Arbenz,” in which he proclaimed that the United States had now become the enemy; as he wrote in his prophetic closing: “the struggle begins.” The doctor’s name was Ernesto Rafael Guevara, but he was soon to become better known to the world by his nom de guerre: Che.

I don’t know the creation process, but I do find it interesting that the book includes two relatively obscure characters (but with interesting new information!) with two relatively well know characters (with a lot less new and interesting information). Maybe it was the only way to get the book published, or maybe it was the only way to put together the main point of America’s policies having a global impact (as Lansdale covers the Asian elements).

With four characters who crossed paths in very limited ways there is a lack of central narrative other than the main thesis that the US missed the boat on de-escalating global tensions. That leads me to wonder – does the thesis depend on the four main characters at all? The driving forces in the story appear to be all the expected names, being the Presidents, George Kennan, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. There are also plenty of other characters who rotate in and out to move on key points (e.g. Senator McCarthy). Other than maybe Lansdale, who’s story has been told many many (many) times before, the characters that make up the title are kinda… …quiet.

Once again, though, the secretary of state urged the president to stand back. Now wasn’t the time to extend an olive branch or search for common ground with the Kremlin, but rather to wait and let the erosion continue, to keep up the pressure until the whole Soviet system cracked and then crumbled beneath its own weight.

I do not need a character in a story to have a major impact in the world they are in. However, I tend to prefer that they have an impact on the story being told or that their character demonstrate something interesting (whether good or bad, and even if it is their puniness). In The Quiet Americans, nothing really depends on them, and it’s a little on the borderline what they demonstrate. Wisner is a suitably tragic figure and the others have their ups and downs but I felt the book crawled over the line in terms of characterisation, when the title suggests a different intent.

As a “popular” history book, it is a good introduction to the time-period. It’s not overly academic, but it is easier going than, for example, Legacy of Ashes (which covers the same stuff more carefully). I would probably want to then dig deeper if you were interested in this time period.

[Emmet Sullivan]

I didn’t finish it. I’ve started this book twice, and having read up to the halfway point this go around, I don’t think I’ll ever finish it. Cold War spy books have never been my cup of tea, but this came highly recommended by a number of people. I just can’t get into it. The writing is fine, but every chapter is plagued by gross amounts of unnecessary detail and rambling tangents. Having read about half of it, I can confidently say I have absolutely no idea what the main storyline is or where the plot is supposed to end up. Many of the characters are interesting, but it’s not at all obvious to me how the author plans to connect them all. I’m not necessarily mad that I started this, but I’m definitely not sad to be leaving it behind.

[Jared Scherrman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book, I really enjoyed the various stories and perspectives about this era in our history. I really enjoyed the information on the red scare and how it’s lead to the messed up political landscape that we live in today.

[David Billow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anderson is a baffling author. Here, as in Lawrence in Arabia, he goes to great lengths to spice up history with dramatic set-the-scene chapter openers, and ABCDABCD POV switching. But then, he spends an inordinate amount of space and focus on the most mundane aspects of his stories, here being the organizational formation of the CIA and the various bureaucratic entanglements of his spies.

[Zella Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Interesting look at the early days of the CIA and the Cold War, with a focus on 4 different employees/covert operatives whose stories provide a pathway into the larger institutional narrative and context.

The book is well written and well researched, providing a searing indictment of the organization's hypocrisy in its quest to battle communism, which caused the four men profiled to either quit in disgust, fade into obscurity, or go insane (literally).

However, as intriguing as the various storylines are (and they all are quite fascinating), they aren't often stitched together in the most effective way. The structure is cumbersome, which is true of some of the sentences too. Anderson isn't a bad prose stylist at all, but sometimes his sentences almost succumb under the weight of the murky complexities he's trying to cover, and that reflects the book's larger structural issues. It seemed like, with both, he was trying to do too much, though the results are still well worth reading.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focusing on four men who held influential positions in the CIA from its transition from the World War II OSS, Anderson shows the development of The Agency's tactics as the Cold War began. Through repeated missions attempting to subvert the Soviet Union's influence in Eastern Europe and, later, Southeast Asia, each of the four became disillusioned and convinced that what they were, in fact, doing was sending patriots to near-certain torture and death in communist-dominated nations. One, Peter Sichel in Hong Kong in the late 1950's, said they should just shoot the spies the CIA planned to parachute into Mao's China themselves, as it would be cheaper and more humane. A sobering look at the failure of US rhetoric to match actions, we live with the results even today.

[Larry Schroepfer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the CIA immediately following WW2 in the early days of the Cold War and some of the foibles of American policy. After reading about the influence of the Dulles boys (John Foster at State and Allen at CIA), the whole sorry saga made Eisenhower go down a couple notches in my book.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply elegant and amazing book. It has a personal feel while sharing the lack of appreciation for people when it comes to governments in general. Our over fascination in statistics and good versus evil prevents our governments from making a true difference.

Well worth reading to get a glimpse into the real machinations of America's migration pre-WWII to today.