The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

Another man might have felt chastened by all these restrictions, but not Wild Bill Donovan; indeed, his ability to improvise and to maneuver around bureaucratic obstacles might have been one of the chief reasons Roosevelt chose him for the intelligence post in the first place. Both by temperament and by the ever-expanding responsibilities of his office, Roosevelt had a strong preference for subordinates who displayed personal initiative, who would operate with minimal direction or oversight, and who would not bother him with the niggling details. William Donovan certainly fit that bill. In the months after the creation of the OSS, Donovan had set out to insert himself and his organization most anywhere he could, and in whatever capacity.

developed an excellent rapport with a number of senior Red Army officers, but the topic of politics or the future of Romania rarely arose. It certainly didn’t come up with soldiers in the streets, who, rather than an army of occupation, more closely resembled a mob of pillagers and rapists. Until the Soviet high command began to impose some measure of order, members of the OSS team frequently saw Red Army transport trucks trundling down the boulevards of Bucharest laden with stolen furniture, maneuvering through an obstacle course of drunken Soviet soldiers passed out in the streets.

Not that Wisner was so naive as to be shocked by any of this. After all, maintaining the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union had already required all manner of political and moral contortions by the Roosevelt administration. There was also the basic issue of facts on the ground. The Soviets had suffered dearly at the hands of Romania’s previous, Nazi-allied regime, in a theater of the war that the Americans missed altogether. Further, in November 1944, Wisner was one of perhaps fifty American servicemen in Romania in contrast to a resident Red Army contingent of at least a half-million. Under these circumstances, joined to the need to keep the Big Three alliance functioning with a minimum of rancor, the question of who would ultimately call the shots in Bucharest was already answered.

There was one crucial feature of the POW infiltration missions that predicated all others: this was the decision that the German soldiers would go across in their own uniforms and under their own names. This negated any need for that most perilous accoutrement to a spy’s life—the creation of a false identity—and lessened any dangers from a missing documents standpoint. The typical German soldier in World War II carried a formidable array of official papers with him, but any that had gone missing since a recruit’s capture could be easily replicated in one of the OSS forgery labs. There was also little concern that a German sentry or Abwehr agent might question why a soldier whose unit had been stationed hundreds of miles away suddenly found himself on the Moselle River. The German retreat from France had been so swift and chaotic that different units were jumbled together all along the line, making a soldier’s presence in any one spot nearly as plausible as anywhere else. Of course, that still left the question of precisely how to get the spies across no-man’s-land, and how to get them back. Initially, Hyde opted for the same tactics that had been used in Italy and western France: after frontline troops had probed for a weak or unguarded spot along the enemy line, the agent would be brought up and, under the cover of darkness, slip his or her way across. Along the more tightly controlled Moselle front, however, this approach proved unworkable, with several agents paying wit...

It is one of the great ironies of history—an irony for which the world should be eternally grateful—that the malignant anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler had caused most of these German Jewish scientists to flee abroad by the mid-1930s, thus ending Germany’s lead in nuclear research and development.

Where this became quite fascinating was in how it played out on the German battlefield. If either side—and that term in itself has significance, since it points to the cleavage already forming in the alliance—was to appear overly anxious to take possession of Germany’s uranium stores, it might alert the other side that their own atomic program was sufficiently advanced as to appreciate the need for it. To forestall that, as World War II drew to a close, both the Americans and the Soviets were operating highly specialized and highly secretive search teams in a race to grab up German atomic scientists and facilities before the other could, without ever acknowledging that such a race existed.

Despite the comic book narrative of good-versus-evil that was fed to the wartime American public about Germany and Japan (perhaps due to its military incompetence, Allied propagandists could never gin up much animus for fascist Italy), one of the more extraordinary features of World War II was the ability of both Axis powers to initially generate a popular appeal beyond their own national borders. This was especially remarkable when one considered that both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were rabidly nationalistic and peddled a mythology that touted their racial and cultural superiority. Yet, in their blitzkrieg advance into the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans had been enthusiastically welcomed by many locals, with crowds lining roadways and city streets to applaud and urge them on. Largely unknown to the American public—certainly footage of it never found its way to moviehouse newsreels—the Japanese invaders met a similar reception as they marched into Saigon and Jakarta. While both fascist powers had almost instantly squandered these reservoirs of goodwill under a torrent of cruelty and mass murder, what had sparked the appeal in the first place? In a word, hatred, but hatred spawned from disparate sources. In the Soviet Union, that hatred was largely a response to the brutality of the Stalinist regime, strengthened in the “lesser” republics—in places like Latvia or Ukraine—by resentment over their domination by ethnic Russians. In Asia, what initially rallied many lo...

By some estimates, as many as two million German women would be raped in Soviet-occupied Germany during the first three months of peace, with at least 100,000 victims in Berlin alone.

Immediately after capturing the Führerbunker, a Soviet investigative team swept up the remains found in the trench—they included a sizable section of jawbone with teeth attached—and spirited them to Moscow. In short order, Hitler’s charred remains were positively and indisputably identified. Yet, for reasons clear only to him, Stalin chose to withhold this information—and not only from his American and British allies, but even from his most senior military commanders in the field. Rather than be allowed to savor their moment of victory, those commanders were exhorted to find the “fugitive” Hitler, and periodically chastised by Stalin for their continuing failure to do so.

When considering the absolutely crucial juncture of history during which this deterioration was occurring, it is an eternal mark against that circle of intimates, as against Roosevelt himself, that they steadfastly did nothing to prepare for the eventuality of his passing. Instead, all the burdens and responsibilities of the most powerful elected position in the world abruptly descended on a man who, up until then, had been so peripheral to the running of the nation that the sum total of his private meetings with President Roosevelt consisted of two chats of less than fifteen minutes each.

Across the war years, a number of tantalizing proposals had been floated to Roosevelt that promised American gain, but at the expense of the alliance—and almost invariably, at the expense of the Soviet Union in particular. These included the Hungarian government’s 1944 attempt to forge a separate peace with the United States, to the exclusion of the Soviets, and any number of overtures from different German military commands in the last days of the war with offers of a stand-down of German forces on the Western Front so that they might continue fighting on the Eastern. Each time, Roosevelt had flatly rejected these proposals, not wavering from his stance that all surrenders must be unconditional and with the concurrence of all three Allies, that there would be no repeat of the backroom dealings and betrayals that had carried Europe into two world wars.

Instead of naïveté, Roosevelt’s actions suggest that he simply hoped for the best. He tried to pin down Stalin when he could at Tehran and Yalta, but he was playing a very weak hand, and everyone—Stalin included—knew it. So, extend the game, play for time, and maybe the cards would improve.

Despite Truman’s reputation for plainspokenness and modesty—a reputation, incidentally, far more firmly affixed today than when he was alive—he was actually a complicated man. Possessed of the provincial’s acute sensitivity to perceived condescension, he had a reflexive disdain for cultural elites—he especially disliked the mostly Ivy League–educated diplomats, the “striped pants boys” he called them, he had inherited from Roosevelt—and this often manifested in obstinacy; in Truman’s world, the more his learned advisors tried to push him in one direction, the more apt he was to do the opposite. He tended to mask his insecurities behind a facade of utter certainty, so that once he made up his mind on an issue, he rarely wavered or reconsidered.

While it may seem odd to an outsider, an intelligence agency is basically a specialized service provider, its clients being the various other governmental agencies to which it passes information; indeed, the modern-day CIA uses this precise terminology of “client” and “product” in describing its function. And just as with any other kind of service provider, an intelligence agency needs to furnish those products that its clients want or think they need, or suffer the consequences. In the summer of 1945, the information most desired by the OSS client base—both governmental agencies back in Washington, and the various American military formations in Germany—tended to be of very local and immediate concern: the status of the vaunted Nazi underground diehards known as the Werewolves; the hunt for fugitive war criminals; the movement of refugees.

With the Soviet crushing of Poland’s bid for democracy, there were finally some in the American political and military hierarchy who saw the need to take a harder line against their erstwhile ally, even if they remained in the minority. Incredibly, though, even at this late hour, there were those among the “striped pants” crowd at the State Department who saw no need for intelligence work at all; as one special assistant to the secretary haughtily opined to a colleague, maintaining “clandestine operators in a foreign country against which we are not at war…would be honoring the totalitarians by imitating them.”

Over the next few days, Gouzenko laid out before astounded Canadian intelligence officers—soon joined by their American and British counterparts—the story of an elaborate Soviet spy ring that had been in operation across Canada and the United States for years. The ring involved dozens of spies and informants, and its activities ranged from industrial espionage, to monitoring émigré communities, to unlocking some of the most closely guarded military secrets the Soviet’s wartime allies possessed; as was soon determined, these spilled secrets included details on the Manhattan Project. Ultimately, the Gouzenko affair would lead to the arrest in the West of over three dozen on charges of espionage, and would be cited by many as the opening salvo of the Cold War. For a man like Frank Wisner, here at last was prima facie evidence of the kind of Soviet skullduggery he had been warning about since Bucharest;

Despite what his detractors might claim, anti-communism was no cause of convenience for Hoover. He truly did regard it as a kind of virulent virus set loose on the land, and battling it as a primal struggle between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. Where matters get complex is in trying to gauge when Hoover’s actions were motivated by that cause and when they were spurred by baser aspects of his personality: his obsession with both secrecy and self-promotion; his grasping for ever more authority; his no-quarter attacks on those he saw as opponents or competitors. A prime and early example of that complexity was his relationship with William Donovan.

Its salacious—and in many cases, demonstrably false—charges aside, the Park Report underscored once again the irony inherent to the intelligence world, that failures become known while success remains secret.

“On the Berlin black market ten packs of cigarettes, which an American soldier could obtain for 50 cents in a PX, had the purchasing power of $100. A cheap Mickey Mouse watch might be worth as much as $500.” One GI who served in the city in the immediate postwar period told of a comrade who bought a beautiful villa for fifty cartons of cigarettes. “The villa is still owned by his widow,” the ex-GI wrote fifty years later.

The Gold Rush atmosphere also came at the cost of any respect the average Berliner may have once had for the American soldier; as a February 1946 SSU report acidly noted, to the average Berliner, “an American is just a Russian with his trousers pressed.”

employing three or four—or even a half-dozen—spies to all report back on the same matter; duplication was the easiest way to establish corroboration and, given Berlin’s black-market economy, it wasn’t as if this safeguard cost much.

Through these ministrations, by the beginning of 1946, Sichel had built up a network of well-placed informants within Berlin’s business and political communities. He had something else, as well: the Crown Jewels. This was a loosely affiliated group of anti-fascist Germans who, during the war, had schemed to either overthrow Hitler or to broker an early surrender to the Western Allies. The common bond between them was that their principal conduit to the West had been the OSS station chief in neutral Switzerland, Allen Dulles.

On December 21, 1945, for example, the wunderkind from Mainz sensed something off about the front-page article in Die Neue Zeit announcing the surprise resignation of a top conservative CDU leader; sure enough, a bit of sleuthing revealed that the awkwardly worded article had been forced on the newspaper by the Soviets with the command that it “be printed by [the] editor without change.”

Sichel’s damning report on the Soviets’ strong-arm tactics in eastern Germany had made it past Lucius Clay’s desk and been disseminated by Quinn to senior officials in Truman’s White House, as well as in the War and State Departments. Learning its author was just back in New York, the SSU chief summoned Sichel, still technically on active duty, to Washington. There he was subjected to an exhausting round-robin of interviews with some of the highest officials in the Truman administration. “I think with almost everyone, there was this initial psychological resistance to hearing it,” he remembered. “We had just finished with this awful war, we don’t have even a moment to catch our breath, and now we’re right on to the next one. Gradually, though, they came around.

Another huge Soviet advantage was that they played the long game. “They don’t think in terms of quarters, the way we do. They think in terms of years, even decades.” In testament to that approach, it wasn’t until many years later that the Western powers realized the Soviets had used the open-city status of Berlin in the early postwar years to flood the West with thousands of “sleeper agents”; some were never activated, while others remained dormant until called to service in the 1960s or even 1970s.

By early 1946, so many residents had been grabbed off the streets of the American and British sectors, wrestled by thugs into waiting sedans which then sped east, that Berlin had won the nickname “Kidnap City.”

Those caught were given a stark choice: go to prison or become spies for the Americans. That was the straightforward part. As the entrapment scheme extended, Sichel’s team discovered that some of the men they collared were already spying for the Soviets. These were carefully converted into double agents and released back onto the streets of Berlin, but now passing information to the Americans as well.

All things come with a price, though, and in Agent Savoy’s case it was a steep one. To keep the double running, it was obviously vital that Skurin maintain full confidence in Hans Kemritz, and that meant allowing Kemritz to continue to lure victims to East Berlin. While the SSU checked over Skurin’s hit list beforehand to warn off anyone they wished to protect, at least seventeen German citizens, fourteen men and three women, made the fateful trip into the city’s Soviet zone at Kemritz’s invitation and into the KGB’s hands.

“So, being Germans, the agents running these chains were just very confident,” Sichel explained. “Maybe they would have been more careful if they had been working against us or the British, races they respected, but against the Russians?”

From his office at military intelligence headquarters in Manila, Major Lansdale had cast an increasingly jaundiced eye on all this. While he had come to know Roxas quite well, he was little impressed with the man—although his opinion may have been colored by Roxas’s irksome habit of bumming cigarettes from him. More to the point, Lansdale felt the United States stood poised to squander an enormous reservoir of goodwill among the Filipino population if it ignored the legitimate grievances and worsening conditions of the poorer classes.

“I was one person sitting there and they were an armed group. I would smile and give them something else to think of fast.” Two items he always remembered to bring were drinks and cigarettes; in the Philippine heat, everyone was always thirsty and, like soldiers the world over in the 1940s, most every Huk smoked. “They’d come up and say, ‘yeah, I’d like a cigarette’ instead of shooting me. You don’t kill a guy laughing, being nice to you.”

he transformed the Public Information Office from a career-hobbling Siberia into one of the most vital and visible components of the American military presence in the Philippines. He did so by moving his office from American military headquarters to downtown Manila, where he organized regular breakfast meetings with local newspaper and magazine editors, most of whom had never even met the previous PIO. This was joined to a charm offensive in which he got to know most every journalist assigned to cover American military- or policy-related issues. In short order, coverage of the American presence in the country, once largely restricted to crime-beat accounts of off-duty GIs drinking and whoring in Manila’s red-light district, expanded into flattering accounts of the work the American military was doing in the areas of postwar reconstruction and civil engineering.

Not that the president’s political opponents seemed any wiser to the situation; in fact, the Republican Party appeared to be falling even more under the sway of isolationists and America Firsters.

But of all the newly muscular steps taken by the Truman administration to confront the Soviets, none were to have such a direct effect on Frank Wisner as the National Security Act of 1947.

This bureau, directly answerable to the president and his or her National Security Council, was to be named the Central Intelligence Agency. All quite straightforward thus far, but amid the seventeen pages of dreary bureaucratese that comprised the National Security Act, there appeared a curious subclause. It was tucked away in Subsection D of Section 102, and it noted that, in addition to its more clearly defined responsibilities, the CIA might be tasked “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence gathering affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct [emphasis added].” With no further explication of what either “other functions and duties” or “from time to time” meant, it could be construed that the new intelligence agency had the prerogative to conduct any action the NSC deemed necessary, and at any time. As history was to show, this was precisely the interpretation that the architects of Truman’s emerging Cold War policy would adopt. As

it’s very hard to give somebody information he doesn’t want to hear, and the more senior they are, the worse it is. This was General Clay’s problem. He was a very bright man, but he wished so much to be able to run Germany with the Four Powers in agreement, that his wish became his thought. It was almost an ideology.” The old spymaster gave a wry smile. “And what happens to ideologues when they finally see they were wrong? They go completely the other way. That always happens, you know.”

That decision followed on an earlier pact—“a gentlemen’s agreement” it was called—that Clay had made with his Soviet counterpart to promptly hand over to the Soviets any of their “delinquent” citizens found in the American zone. With the Stalin regime already in the process of executing or sending to the gulags many of the hundreds of thousands of its citizens who had been repatriated at the end of the war, the Clay-Sokolovsky agreement was obviously a virtual death sentence for any Soviet deserter handed over. Peter Sichel and his team flouted the edict whenever they could, hiding Soviet deserters from Clay’s minions until they could be interrogated and smuggled out of West Berlin, but it naturally served as a massive impediment in trying to entice Soviet officials to defect.

The coup in Prague, just two hundred miles south of Berlin, marked the end of democratic rule in the last of those Eastern European nations liberated by the Red Army; from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, all were now Soviet satellites.

the beginning of the Berlin Blockade, a Soviet campaign months in the planning and meant to choke the Western enclaves of the city into submission. For at least the first few weeks, it seemed the Soviet gambit might work, with the rest of the world watching and waiting for Berlin to capitulate. Instead, Western air force commanders hastily organized an extraordinary airlift effort. Over the next eleven months, the three airfields in Berlin’s western sectors became the busiest air terminus in the world as American and British military transport planes flew over a quarter of a million relief flights into the city, bringing food, clothing, even milk and coal, to ensure the survival of its two million residents.

The reason for the gathering was a top secret directive formulated by the National Security Council seven weeks earlier. Known as NSC 10/2, the directive stated that, in recognition of “the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups” in attacking American interests, the NSC had concluded that “the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations.” As to what sort of activities fell under the covert operations rubric, NSC 10/2 was expansive: “propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” If any of the very small handful of government officials given access to NSC 10/2 found it overly aggressive, their dissent was soon overwhelmed;

And the CIA beckoned with another highly attractive feature: unvouchered funds. “Because the CIA’s work was highly classified,” Peter Sichel explained, “it bypassed all the usual financial oversight mechanisms of Congress. So, by being placed within the CIA, OPC was able to both hide its own funding and siphon money off from the parent organization. Kennan was smart: ‘follow the money.’

from a standpoint of bureaucratic smoke-screening, the formulation of OPC was a feat of sheer magnificence. As outlined in NSC 10/2, this new covert action unit would be “created within” the CIA, but would “operate independently of other [CIA] components.” Further, while the CIA director would be “responsible” for this addition to his agency, he wouldn’t have actual control over it; instead, he would share authority with representatives from the departments of State and Defense in a kind of consultative triumvirate. Just in case this wasn’t slippery enough, it was further decreed that in times of war—“or when the President directs”—the OPC would sidestep this overseeing triumvirate, and instead answer to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and their war theater commanders. Somehow meant to keep track of all this was the man Kennan had chosen to head the OPC, Frank Wisner.

Kennan’s slipperiness would only grow in the years ahead, especially once the OPC became a source of controversy. In fact, so energetically would Kennan seek to disassociate himself from his own creation that, years later, he would shamelessly tell a biographer that when it came to the OPC, “I scarcely paid any attention to it.” As Wisner’s eldest son and namesake, Frank Wisner Jr., charitably put it, Kennan possessed “at best, a mixed memory” of that period in his life. Indeed; in penning his sprawling, two-volume memoir, Kennan, the architect of “plausible deniability,” evidently chose to put that precept into practice when it came to his stewardship of the OPC and his long association and friendship with Frank Wisner; over the span of nine hundred pages, neither OPC nor Wisner are ever mentioned.

in the Soviet government—and by extension, in her Eastern European satellites—information could be quarantined to a degree unimaginable in the West. To cite one example, even though the deployment of American Jupiter nuclear missiles to Turkey in 1961 was a state secret of the highest order, certainly scores, and probably hundreds, of American officials were involved in some aspect of the mission. By contrast, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev chose to install nuclear missiles in Cuba the following year, the group tasked to prepare the groundwork consisted of precisely four Soviet generals and a colonel. “Throughout the early planning stage, no secretaries were used to prepare final typed texts. A colonel with good penmanship wrote the proposal that the Defense Council adopted.” Even when that proposal was forwarded on to the Soviet defense minister and Khrushchev for final approval, it remained in its handwritten form.

If the distinguishing characteristic of Nazi Germany’s intelligence agencies was institutional arrogance, the chief characteristic of Soviet intelligence would seem to be the precise opposite, an inferiority complex so deep-rooted as to fuel an unslakable paranoia.

It would be little exaggeration to say that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, one of the principal sources of funding for cultural and artistic projects in an economically prostrate Western Europe was the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination.

Truman had created the autonomous Central Intelligence Agency, and then ordered the FBI to relinquish its Latin American intelligence operations to the new agency. So enraged was Hoover and his bureau loyalists by the move that many FBI field offices in Latin America destroyed their intelligence files rather than hand them over to their CIA successors.

Executive Order 9835. While he would later call it one of his biggest regrets, Truman signed 9835—better known as the Loyalty Order—in March 1947 to try to forestall an even harsher measure from being enacted by the newly seated Republican Congress. Meant to expose “subversives”—shorthand for communists—in the federal government, the order called for an initial screening of all federal workers in a joint effort by the FBI and the Civil Service Commission.

Incredibly, under the rewritten Loyalty Order those accused of being security risks would have no intrinsic right to confront their accusers, or even to necessarily know the specific charges leveled against them.

The clash would give rise to another great irony in the life of J. Edgar Hoover. In the late 1940s, legal overreach by his bureau had prevented the prosecution of a vast and very real Soviet spy ring; among the scores of bona fide spies identified by Bentley, only two would ever face trial, and on charges that had nothing to do with spying. On the heels of that fiasco, Hoover had redirected the Red Scare to focus on domestic communist party members, almost none of whom would ever be linked to actual espionage. That’s because the KGB had taken the obvious precaution of ordering its actual spies to stay well clear of the party.