The Quiet Americans

The author was fortunate in having a surviving spook to consult about OSS and CIA history. However, the volume is a hash of quasi-related events that do not hold together. The author’s purpose was to diminish the US efforts to confront Communism. Little mention is made of the reasons the US acted so nor of the horrors of soviet rule since 1919. The book is unbalanced and overly accusatory.

I can’t say enough good things about this book to possibly convey the pleasure that reading it has given me.

Very interesting historical perspective, through the lens of four men I didn’t really know much about, and enlightening all the more for it.

Anderson’s not on a crusade here, he’s telling an important story from a different point of view, and it’s enthralling. I had a hard time putting this book down. An appreciation for the Red and Lavender Scares, the machinations of Allen and John Foster Dulles, a renewed stoking for a dislike that I have long had for J. Edgar Hoover, all of this and so much more was an outcome of reading this book.

Entertaining, very well-written, a total pleasure to read and absorb, this book will get me looking into things that have niggled at the back of my head for a while, and now I’ll have renewed reason to chase them.

If you want to better understand where this country came from, how it’s attained the reputation it has in the world that’s not the positive love story too many of us think it is (and I have news for those who think otherwise – no, they’re not envious of us), how the Red and Lavender scares warped this country and its government, and how a man like Donald Trump came to be (you have to infer the latter from reading this, but in my mind the trail is there), this is a must-read tome – I was sorry to have to finish it.

(Warning) a certain amount of spoiler alert, but in a book this length, you can’t have that much of a spoiler in a review.

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.

What Scott cleverly cherry-picks from the experiences of four cherry-picked avatars to make his pre-determined point about how bad/evil the CIA has been.
No doubt he worked backwards from his premise. True, he presents some riveting case studies in a factual manner but layers them with his leftward-leaning opinions.
No GOP character in the book is seen as “good” including Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, MacArthur , a young Nixon and other highly dedicated Americans. While the book clearly shows how inept FDR (in his closing days) and Truman throughout his 7 years were , the author doesn’t tar them with the same negative adjectives as he does with the GOP. And he especially glosses over glibly near the end the terrible mistakes JFK and LBJ made in taking a Vietnamese situation under control during Eisenhower’s reign into one of the worst blunders in US history.

The author shows developments in the early years of the CIA, using four key players. A few of them had served in the OSS during WWII. The CIA tried covert actions in Poland, but withoutr much success. A number of these programs were started from german soil. The government in Bonn sometimes did not know what the CIA was trying to achieve.
A interesting book, bringing light to an era when the cold ware was still hot.