When America’s Cold War strategy turned corrupt

Once upon a time, there was a nation that saw itself as a beacon to the world. It would lead, as John Quincy Adams put it, by the gentle power of its example. If it all sounds a bit grandiose to us now, it did, too, to Graham Greene, the English author of the 1955 spy novel The Quiet American. Greene liked to complain that Yankees were “plump, smug, sentimental, ready for the easy tear and the hearty laugh and the fraternity yell.” He was particularly galled by American pretensions to purity in foreign affairs. “Innocence,” he insisted, “is a kind of insanity.”

Scott Anderson’s enthralling new history of early Cold War espionage takes its title from Greene’s classic — and shares much of its disillusionment. Anderson, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of several books, including Lawrence in Arabia, follows the story of four CIA operatives — Michael Burke, Edward Lansdale, Peter Sichel and Frank Wisner — from their heady early exploits through their government’s ultimate betrayal of its own idealism. Anderson, whose own father once helped create foreign paramilitary squads as an adviser to the Agency for International Development, casts his characters’ narrative as a tragedy, both personal and national. After a decade of flawed postwar spy games, by the mid-1950s much of the world had come to see the United States as just “one more empire,” Anderson writes, “one that lied and stole and invaded” like the others.

Lying and stealing and invading, it should be said, make for captivating reading, especially in the hands of a storyteller as skilled as Anderson. All the characters of The Quiet Americans could have stepped from a film set — and some of them actually had. Burke, a James Bond figure “before James Bond existed,” had been working as a screenwriter before being recruited by the CIA. He could just as often be found hanging out with Ava Gardner or sharing bourbon and pancakes with Ernest Hemingway as he could be dispatching infiltrators to Eastern Europe.

Indeed, for all their ill-advised or bungled covert ops — which included coups from Tehran to Guatemala City — it is impossible not to be a little swept up in the spectacle of this bygone era when intrepid individuals actually shaped history, even if it was often for the worse. Anderson quotes an erstwhile ornithologist who had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s World War II precursor, lamenting the office’s breakup once the conflict had ended. “Jesus H Christ,” the operative griped, “I suppose this means that it’s back to those goddamned birds.”

Some of the people in this book will be familiar to students of CIA and Cold War history. The story of Wisner, the head of the early intelligence apparatus’s covert action arm, has been well told many times before. Anderson is at his best, however, when he plows fresh ground — as he does with the story of Sichel, a German émigré who signed on to help the OSS as a “special funds officer,” trading gold coins on the black market and artificially aging fresh bank notes by stomping on them. Sichel eventually rose to the position of head of CIA operations in Eastern Europe, running agents deep inside Soviet territory.

The problem, Sichel discovered, is that once these infiltrators arrived, they had almost no support system to latch onto. Often the local resistance networks were ephemeral, mere “catchment basins” for KGB counterintelligence. Sichel came to view these operations as useless at best and immoral at worst. Anderson interviewed Sichel, who is now in his late 90s, eight times, and his story sensitively and dramatically illuminates the practical and moral dilemmas of mid-20th-century spycraft.

Anderson’s book is a period piece, covering the years 1944 to 1956 — but the climate of fear and intolerance that it describes in Washington also feels uncomfortably timely. Even as the fledgling CIA was swiftly expanding its reach in Europe and Asia, domestic enemies were beginning to chip away at its political support at home. Seeing an opportunity to hobble a bureaucratic rival, the FBI director J Edgar Hoover launched his own covert war against the CIA, spreading rumors that Wisner had compromised himself by a relationship with a Romanian princess and relentlessly hounding gay intelligence officers out of the service, a purge that came to be known as the Lavender Scare.

Both these factors — creeping right-wing hysteria at home and cynical maneuvering abroad — combined to embitter Wisner’s operators. “For a man like Burke — erudite, cultured, liberal, but also engaged in a war where ideas themselves were weapons — it was all enough to call into question just what sort of nation and society he was fighting to defend,” Anderson writes. Burke ultimately quit the agency in frustration in 1955 and took a job as general manager of the Ringling Brothers circus. (“You’ve been training for it all your life,” his new boss needled him. “You just haven’t known it.”)

Anderson lays most of the blame for the misadventures he recounts at the feet of the spies’ political masters. The unacknowledged godfather of midcentury covert ops was George Kennan, President Truman’s director of policy planning. In recent years Kennan’s reputation has enjoyed something of a renaissance with the publication of his diaries and a major biography by John Lewis Gaddis that won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet Anderson refuses to see Kennan merely as a farsighted pragmatist. Kennan, he writes, for all his strengths, was also a craven dissembler, a “two-faced weasel” who disavowed his own responsibility for the collateral costs of containment once it became unfashionable.

Anderson is equally hard on another celebrated pragmatist, Dwight Eisenhower, whose New Look doctrine helped solidify the role of covert operations in postwar foreign policy. Anderson derides Ike as “an intensely ambitious creature, one willing to compromise on the most basic precepts of personal honor if it might play to his political advantage.” He faults New Look — which combined the threat of massive nuclear retaliation with under-the-radar spy games — for accelerating the arms race, dooming Europe to political stasis and turning the third world into a battleground for superpower proxy wars.

Still, Anderson’s critique raises the question: If not Eisenhower’s particular brand of containment, then what? Most of the time the book leaves this unanswered. Anderson quotes the can-do Lansdale on the imperative of some type of action: “You have to be for something.” Yet even the mildest activities — raising the hopes of insurrectionists during the Hungarian revolution, for instance — got Ike’s spies in trouble. Sichel warns that it frequently would have been better to do nothing, to “wait and let problems solve themselves.” This may be true — a kind of Cold War version of President Obama’s “don’t do stupid stuff” doctrine — but it is an answer unlikely to satisfy policymakers under political pressure to solve crises.

Anderson, however, is not a policymaker; he is a journalist and historian. In foreign affairs, furthermore, endings often tend toward the messy and unhappy — a condition, as Greene understood, that no wishful thinking or assertions of innocence are likely to alter. Greene liked to quote Chekhov’s aphorism that a writer is “not a confectioner, not a cosmetician, not an entertainer.” Anderson’s narrative is certainly entertaining, but he is no confectioner, and the dark, poignant tale he tells is far the better for it.