The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Agents at the Dawn of the Cold War - A tragedy in Three Acts, Anderson - A*

                   This book is an attempt to pinpoint when anti-communism went from being a worthy crusade to a dictator-backing refutation of our national values. The author, who grew up in Taiwan, S. Korea and Indonesia, places his father was stationed for USAid, and who saw aspects of the Cold War in person, selects 1944-1956. America's transformation was "nothing short of staggering." We went from toppling empires and supporting democracies to bankrolling the British and French overseas, and overthrowing the left-leaning governments of Guatemala and Iran. At home, we engaged in a Red Scare that "fueled cynicism and distrust of government."  The focus of the story is four men. Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Peter Sichel and Edward Lansdale, all of whom worked for the OSS in WWII.

                    Wisner, a Wall Street lawyer, salvaged the OSS's operations in southeast Europe after they had been infiltrated by the Abwehr. Then in Bucharest, he witnessed first hand the Soviet Union's first perfidious occupation and takeover of a sovereign country. Burke, an upper-crust Ivy Leaguer, fought behind the lines with the Maquis. Sichel, a German-Jewish refugee to NY, was the OSS's blackmarket currency trader in N. Africa and Italy, and then ran agents in the Moselle region of France. Lansdale, a California advertising executive, was, because of his age, an OSS desk jockey in San Francisco, but one who had developed the ability to befriend anyone, particularly Asians, and so was assigned to be the Army's post-war deputy chief of intelligence in the Philippines. He was considered a genius in his ability to understand and observe people. The OSS, particularly Gen. Donovan, anticipated and wanted to be ready for the Cold War. Lansdale was ready in Asia and the younger three in Europe.

                 The transitioning of the OSS into a permanent peacetime foreign intelligence service was not a sure thing, in particular because it was vehemently opposed by J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, in Sept. 1945, Truman shuttered the agency and moved its functions to the Depts. of State and War. The aggressive conduct of the Soviets throughout eastern Europe eventually led to a firmer America response. The National Security Council and the CIA were established in 1947. A year later, the CIA was tasked with covert responsibilities. As the agency slowly morphed from a think tank to an active opponent of communism, Wisner was slotted in to run covert operations. Burke was hired to start a revolution in Albania. Lonsdale was just back from four years in the Philippines and was training Air Force officers in Colorado. Sichel was running agents in W. Berlin.`

                   Burke went to Rome and began working with the British on the joint effort to undermine the Albanian regime.  It was doomed to fail as the mission was an extreme long shot and his UK colleague was Kim Philby. Even before the mission was finished, Burke was sent to Germany to begin planning destabilization activities in Poland and Ukraine.  Lansdale had been recruited by the CIA, and was now working on how to counter the Huks' peasant uprising in the Philippines. He knew he had his work cut out for him because he had witnessed the landlords, who had collaborated with the Japanese, slide right back up to the top of Filipino society when the war ended. He proposed countering the Huks on the ground and in the villages. He befriended a junior politician, Raymon Magsaysay, a future Filipino president. The two men teamed up in 1951 to assure the honesty of the national election, by challenging the Huks with land reforms and financial awards. With Magasaysay now the Defense Minister, they increased the army's pay threefold and ended the it's endemic corruption. Magasaysay was on the road to the top and Lansdale was right next to him. In 1952, Sichel was sent to DC because he could no longer stay in Germany after having married a German national. And after seven years in Berlin, he was ready to leave. He felt that the US was sacrificing the lives of countless  emigres by returning them to their homes on the other side of the Iron Curtain to foment revolt in a police state, a very unlikely eventuality. Burke, Sichel and others on the front line in Europe slowly realized that they were simply and conclusively sending brave men to their graves. While these men had their doubts, Ike was elected because of his record and his promise to ratchet up the war against communism.

                             Wisner was to be the new CIA Director in 1953, but Hoover despised him, shunted him aside with innuendo and implied threats and laid the groundwork for Allen Dulles to be appointed.  Wisner wound up as number two. Dulles' older brother, John Foster, was the new rabidly anti-communist Secretary of State and looking for opportunities in the wake of Stalin's death. After the British intimated that the popularly- elected PM of Iran, who had just nationalized BP, might get friendly with the local communists, John Foster pushed to overthrow him. Wisner was opposed and thought we should be aligning ourselves with the young nationalist, not the fading empires, but was he overruled. The CIA-led coup eliminated Mohammad Mossadegh, and propped up the Shah. Almost seventy years later, the US is still suffering the consequences of that decision. John Foster squelched Ike's plans to seek some sort of rapprochment and locked in the Cold War. The early Eisenhower years also saw Joe McCarthy resuscitate his Red Scare, and in cahoots with and fed an endless supply of material by Hoover, went after the CIA. To his credit, Allen Dulles backed him down and stopped him in his tracks.

      After Lansdale helped Magsaysay win a presidential election, he returned home, where Dulles told him that "we want you to do the same thing in Vietnam that you did in the Philippines." He arrived as the French were leaving after their defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh and Diem was assuming leadership in the south. After their first meeting, Diem asked Lansdale to come to work for him. Lansdale became indispensable and helped Diem hold down a revolt by a massive crime syndicate in Saigon, eliminate the influence of the die-hard French colonials and solidify Diem's standing in Washington. However, Diem and his brother, Nhu, soon began a slow drift toward dictatorship, thrilling the US overseers and demoralizing the idealist Lansdale.

                   John Foster Dulles was so happy with the Iranian coup that he set his sights on Guatemala. He put Frank Wisner in charge. In Guatemala, the man who had won the most recent election with two-thirds of the vote had decided to end the country's feudal structure and initiate land reform. He also took on an American fruit company, represented by Dulles when he was a a lawyer in NY. He also put a few communists in his government. Unfortunately for Jacobo Arbenez, these actions spelled the end of his career. The Army of Liberation marched in, and once again the CIA had triumphed over incipient communism. Cries of 'Yankee imperialism' rang out around the globe.

                  The Eisenhower administration believed in the CIA and expanded its budget and responsibilities. For Michael Burke, it was time to go; he retired in 1955 and returned to NY.  Wisner's doubts were mounting after his role in the Guatemalan coup the previous year. Continuing to lose people behind the Iron Curtain was gnawing at his soul. And he never received a satisfactory answer to his question: if we succeed in creating an uprising in eastern Europe and the Soviets crush it, which we know they will, what are we accomplishing? His conduct became erratic, prompting one colleague to conclude that"Frank is in real rouble."

                  The year 1956 saw a breakdown in Lansdale's relationship and influence with Diem, who was now an absolute and total dictator. Lansdale came home. In Moscow, Khruschev delivered his famous de-Stalinization speech in February. The news of it shook the world.  In the US, John Foster squelched any discussion of detente and stuck to the hard line. After years of the US encouraging revolt, it finally happened in Budapest. Peaceful protest morphed into spontaneous revolution, with Hungarians shooting the soldiers of the Red Army. They succeeded in expelling the Soviets from the city and the PM, Imre Nagy, declared that he would negotiate the end of Soviet occupation. The Soviets decided to leave, but Khruschev changed his mind the next day. The Soviets responded while the Hungarians awaited an American armed effort. It never came, and the Soviets brutally crushed the rebellion. Wisner was devastated. 

                By the end of Eisenhower's second administration, the US was "now regarded as just one more imperial power bent on the  3rd world's political and economic subjugation." Being tough on communism became the mantra of US policy for the next thirty years.  Ironically, Lansdale's retirement party was  the day of the Diem coup in 1963. The US was committed to a very different path than the one he had encouraged. Wisner's deterioration continued and his career took a downward spiral after he was hospitalized for mental illness. Sichel ran the Hong Kong office for years. In the 50's, he was tasked with the new mission of sending Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan to the mainland to undermine the regime. It sounded like the pipe dream he had walked away from in Berlin a decade ago, and he retired. 

                This is a magnificent book, very well-written, an easy read and a great spotlight on challenging times. The story is much broader than the four men referenced in the book's subtitle. As I have never been much of a fan of America's messianic and interventionist foreign policies, this is right up my alley. The reviews I have seen are all positive and the Times has put the book on their Top 100 for the year.