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

by Scott Anderson

But Allen Dulles now clearly appreciated the deepening peril the CIA faced. The perpetual scheming and backbiting of J. Edgar Hoover could be parried, but the knifework of McCarthy and his committee was having a deeply corrosive effect on the Agency, breeding intrigue and dissension. Disgruntled CIA employees or those looking to topple a bureaucratic rival had taken to secretly passing information to McCarthy’s investigators. Others were being blackmailed into doing so by the so-called McCarthy Underground. “Within the CIA,” wrote Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA inspector general at the time, “we had cases where individuals would be contacted by telephone and told it was known that they drank too much, or were having an ‘affair,’ and that the caller would make no issue of this if [the recipient] would come around [to McCarthy’s office] and tell everything they knew about the Agency.”