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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.
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.