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

by Scott Anderson

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...