The Quiet Americans

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts by Scott Anderson, 2020.

I read this fascinating biographical historical account of the early years of the Cold War over a three month period from October to December 2021. It was a really interesting retelling of the CIA's incredibly inept and bungling covert battle against communism and the tragic consequences for America and the world even to this day. It was a spy history.

I liked that the format of the book was biographical and focused on the personal experiences of a group of men who were spies for the US during and after World War II. It was interesting to see the initial response of America to Soviet post war aggression which was lame and inadequate. America seemed to be more interested in going after their own citizens and creating blacklist and their attempts to spy on the Russians always seemed to gone wrong through stupidity and extreme ideological rigidity. Much of what is discussed in this book only happened because of recent declassification of documents from the Cold War era.

The book was basically about four spies and the long list of mishaps and bad experiences that shaped American foreign policy during the post war years. Two of them would eventually leave the CIA in despair, one would go on to be the epitome of the bad destructive spy and the other would kill himself. It is said that this is the story of how America snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It can also be said that the Dulles brothers were largely responsible for the destruction of America's foreign policy reputation. The best part of the book is the evaluation of the lasting impacts of the decisions made by the CIA and past administrations that have had a negative effect on America's relations with it's allies and adversaries alike.

It was interesting that the biggest enemy of the CIA was not Stalin or Castro but J. Edgar Hoover and his petty, vindictive neurosis used Joseph McCarthy to wreck the careers of hundreds of CIA workers. The book showed the US to not be morally superior to their adversaries and the efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments repeatedly to install right wing dictatorships was sickening and made me ashamed to be an American.

I recently read a similar book, Zero Fail, on the bumbling efforts of the secret service too. I've read a lot of books about Vietnam over the years and this book provided some very interesting insights on that debacle too.