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

by Scott Anderson

such associations had set the Agency on something of a moral slippery slope: if it was permissible to employ those Germans who knew of the Holocaust while it was occurring, what of those who played a more direct role? And if it was possible to overlook the shady background of a man like Gustav Hilger by simply not digging too deeply, what about dealing with someone whose notoriety was impossible to ignore?

The Prussian aristocrat was to spin this brief imprisonment into a very helpful postwar fiction, “proof” that he had opposed the Nazi regime and been persecuted as a result. Much to the contrary, after his Romanian hiccup, Bolschwing continued his rise in the Third Reich hierarchy, ultimately becoming a deputy to the chief logistician of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.

Sichel soon received a curious follow-up: Pullach now wanted CIA Berlin to either withhold Bolschwing’s file from the Austrian government or, in the deliciously Orwellian jargon of bureaucratese, to produce a “negative file.”

The ploy worked. For the next quarter-century, Bolschwing and his family lived quietly in a Sacramento suburb, before finally coming to the attention of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Justice Department, in the late 1970s. Destined to be the highest-ranking German war criminal ever prosecuted by the OSI, Bolschwing was stripped of his American citizenship in late 1981 for having lied on his immigration application, just weeks before his death from brain cancer.

The links that the CIA forged with former Nazis in the late 1940s were to ultimately hurt the Agency in a variety of ways. For one thing, those links played perfectly into the hands of Soviet propagandists eager to declaim their American opponent as in league with “fascists” and “Hitlerites.”

As in many other parts of Europe, World War II in Albania had been a vicious, obscene affair, with different partisan groups often switching from fighting the Axis armies to joining with them in order to attack one another. During the war, most every Albanian political faction or partisan commander—and that included Burke’s new friend, Abas Kupi—had at some point made a pact of convenience with the Axis, had murdered civilians and tortured prisoners. But just as with Peter Sichel in Berlin, none of that was important now. “Given the black-and-white definition of the Cold War,” Burke wrote, “there was no shilly-shallying about morality. Who is not with me is against me.”

In a particularly astute move, he attached himself to the Nationalist, or Francoist, side of the conflict when the vast majority of foreign journalists—then as now tending to be a liberal lot—flocked to the more sympathetic Republicans. His standing among the Nationalists had been solidified in late 1937 when the press car he was traveling in was destroyed by a Republican artillery shell; of the four journalists in the car, only Philby survived. Thus bloodied, Philby gained the acceptance and confidences of those in General Francisco Franco’s inner circle, confidences he then passed on to his government’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

Yet, even with the grim news out of China, events in Asia barely registered with the American public and little more so with the Truman administration, thoroughly preoccupied as it was with the ongoing contest with the Soviets in Eastern Europe. It was almost by default, then, that Lansdale saw Asia as where he had to be, the place where he could both make the greatest contribution to the global anti-communist effort and have the freedom of action to test some of his nascent counterrevolutionary theories. There was also a strong personal component to this wish; with his marriage to Helen now largely existing only in name, he longed for a reunion with Pat Kelly. “These months away from you seem like an unpleasant dream,” he wrote her in February 1949, “and my life has lost so much of its flavor that I’ve crawled into myself with you.”

For centuries, much of China’s best farmland had been in the hands of a small cabal of landlords and aristocratic families, with most everyone else reduced to lives of impoverishment and the indentured servitude of tenancy farming. By simply promising to dismantle this system—and never mind the practical issues involved—Mao went a long way toward winning over China’s rural peasantry, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. This same promise had a devastatingly corrosive effect on Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. Largely composed of conscripts from this same poor rural class, it didn’t take long for many Nationalist soldiers to conclude they were being asked to fight and die in the service of their oppressors, with the result that hundreds of thousands deserted at the first opportunity or switched sides when the Red Army closed in.

Incredibly, though, at the start of 1950, few American intelligence officers had read Mao’s teachings; Edward Lansdale may have been one of the very first. Even more remarkable, in light of the recent communist takeover of China, many American Cold War analysts still failed to appreciate the radically different approach to revolution-making of the Soviet and Chinese models.

The Hiss case played to the benefit of J. Edgar Hoover, as well, proving once again the utility of extralegal back channels to smite the foe when legal avenues were closed. Even the torturously slow process that led to Hiss’s fall played to the director’s advantage; the longer such cases stayed in the public eye, the more dire the perception of the communist threat, and the more secure the position of Hoover and the FBI as frontline defenders against that threat. But merely retaining power had never been enough for Hoover. It had always been about amassing more, and with the sudden rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950, Hoover was able to launch a vastly expanded attack on those he deemed enemies. Inevitably, this would include the CIA and the covert action unit housed within it, Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination.

The sleight of hand didn’t fool many people in the bureau, and it caused a good deal of resentment among some senior officials. To Robert Lamphere, one of the bureau’s chief specialists on espionage cases, feeding information to McCarthy undercut the legitimate hunt for communist spies in the government because “McCarthy lied about his information and figures. He made charges against people that weren’t true.” This served to discredit the counterintelligence effort by inviting ridicule, a point that seemed lost on McCarthy’s most powerful patron. “All along,” Lamphere noted, “Hoover was helping him.”

The OPC director was also enough of a bureaucratic infighter to divine that Offie was only the surface target of McCarthy’s attack. The real target was himself and the OPC, the move against Offie the opening gambit in an effort by McCarthy and Hoover and whoever else rallied to their flag to cut away at the Office of Policy Coordination in any way they could. Today it was Offie’s reputation and loyalty that was being besmirched, but in the guilt-by-association strategy that was already a McCarthy trademark, it would next be the people who had worked with Offie, and then the coworkers of the coworkers. If ground was ceded at the beginning, Wisner believed, the capitulations might never stop.

This outlook generally held throughout the upper reaches of both the CIA and the State Department, composed as they were largely of men—and in 1950, it was still almost all men—of socially tolerant backgrounds who had been educated at Ivy League schools grown increasingly inclusive. As such they had little in common with the kind of nativist reactionaries, most from the South or Midwest, who rallied to Joe McCarthy’s side. Indeed, from top to bottom, Washington’s so-called Georgetown set of well-heeled socialites and policy wonks, and of which Frank Wisner was a standing member, was almost universally appalled by McCarthy’s bombastic and cruel methods, and regarded him as both a buffoon and national embarrassment. This was certainly Wisner’s view, and he was determined not to knuckle under to such a man.

the extraordinary restrictions Hoover imposed on who should know about Venona in its early days, this select group managed to include at least two Soviet spies, both of whom alerted Moscow to the breach no later than the autumn of 1949. In sum, when it came to the greatest American counterintelligence coup of the early Cold War, the KGB learned of it at least three years before the CIA and forty-six years before the American public.

MacArthur in Japan had fiercely resisted allowing the CIA to operate within his domain—and with similarly disastrous results. It also ignored the fact that the CIA actually had raised the alarm about Korea.

Frank Wisner and his OPC were simultaneously a power unto themselves without precedent in the American government but also, should matters go awry, everyone’s patsy. Not that the finger-pointing stopped there; given how Washington politics worked, blame naturally floated up the chain of command to the CIA director.

in the four-week period surrounding Beetle Smith’s assumption of the CIA directorship, U.N. forces poured across the 38th parallel in pursuit of a now routed North Korean army; communist China invaded Tibet; a French garrison of six thousand troops was virtually wiped out by Viet Minh guerrillas in Vietnam; and the Polish government arrested some five thousand dissidents for anti-state activities in a twenty-four-hour dragnet. As Frank Wisner surely appreciated as he tried to keep track of the hailstorm of events occurring around the globe, the era of covert operations and proxy war wasn’t likely to end anytime soon, and having a degree of direction from above might allow him to more tightly focus his energies.

Building on the incompetence he’d displayed in the Philippines in World War II, MacArthur had managed to escape blame for being caught out by the North Korean invasion courtesy of the bold flanking attack he had launched against the communist invaders three months later. Just like that, the landing at Inchon had shifted the tide of the war and recast MacArthur as the savior of Korea, a standing only slightly tarnished by his continuing bungling in the conflict. The most catastrophic of these was his blithe disregard of warnings in late 1950 that Chinese forces were massing on the North Korean border for a counterattack, an assault that abruptly shifted the fortunes of war yet again and led to the deaths of thousands of American troops.

In less than a decade, the United States military had been disastrously blindsided in Asia on four occasions: the 1941 Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines; the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950, followed by the Chinese military intervention there of five months later. Save for Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had been the on-site commanding officer for all of them.

But even though their pasts often caught up to them, most of the Americans and Britons who had passed secrets to the Soviets during the war quit in its aftermath, and especially once the Cold War set in. Not so the Cambridgean with the charming stammer. Instead, Philby redoubled his efforts, as did most of the other four members of the British spy ring that would come to be known as the Cambridge Five.

The incident in Makabulos exemplified the vicious cycle now playing out across Luzon and, increasingly, across the Philippines as a whole. Due to the corruption of the government and abuses by its soldiers, a civilian population had stood by as rebels prepared an assault. Having been caught off guard and badly beaten in that assault, the surviving soldiers knew it could only have been launched with the connivance of the local civilians. Now, the soldiers would regard those locals as enemy supporters, spurring the next round of abuse, which would then ensure the success of the next insurgent attack.

But perhaps the greatest innovation was also the simplest: the payment of a living wage. For years, the starting salary for a Filipino soldier had been 30 centavos a day, about 15 U.S. cents at the official exchange rate, a slave wage that all but required him to “forage.” That meant demanding or stealing food from civilians or falling onto the payroll of the local oligarch. By raising the soldiers’ salary over threefold, and simultaneously letting it be known that the days of robbing from the citizenry were over, Magsaysay raised both the morale of his army and its image in the court of public opinion.

But a war in which it appeared the United States was doomed to stumble in the dark, forever caught by surprise so long as it stayed on defense and tried to predict what the Soviets might do next. This had everything to do with the nature of their foe—and specifically, with the personality of Joseph Stalin. In the case of the other great belligerent of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, there had at least been a method to his madness; in Mein Kampf, Hitler had outlined many of his plans for European conquest and then pursued them. With Stalin, by contrast, there was no blueprint. If there was a discernible pattern at all to his actions it was that he would take whatever path might amass even more power to himself, to grab whatever he thought he could get away with.

the Resistance was little more than an intermittent and low-grade pest to the Nazis until their numbers suddenly swelled in June 1944. What happened that June? D-Day happened. A similar phenomenon occurred with partisan groups in Denmark, Holland and Czechoslovakia. If thoroughly understandable, the reticence of subdued populations to rise up against their subjugators before tangible help is near at hand didn’t bode well for those partisan groups hoping to spark a popular uprising in the Soviet bloc, when their Western benefactors were not promising or even contemplating such help.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. In almost every Nazi-occupied country that broke with this pattern in World War II, where partisans proved a formidable fighting force without substantial outside assistance, a very different pattern had emerged: communist leadership. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s communist partisans proved a far more effective fighting force than their non-communist colleagues, even with minimal supplies or logistical support coming from the West.

Clearly, the communist partisans had been able to develop and rely on a grassroots infrastructure that their non-communist competitors lacked, and it begged the question of why the opposition should fare any better now in those places where the former communist partisans were in power. To Michael Burke’s knowledge, this was a question never asked about Albania, and it wasn’t being asked now about the rest of Eastern Europe.

It also had to do with the company the CIA now kept. Sichel found particularly repellent the Agency’s embrace of Ukrainian exiles joined under the banner of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN. Sichel was not some pious naïf. He had understood the need to work in Germany with former members of the Nazi regime. He had even accepted the need to work with some of the more unsavory émigré leaders, men who had embraced fascism and collaborated with the Germans in the war. But the OUN was a step too far, its past crimes too well documented, its plans for a future “liberated” Ukraine sure to include more of them. “They were Nazis, pure and simple,” Sichel explained. “Worse than that, because a lot of them did the Nazis’ dirty work for them.”

In the émigré’s estimation, it would take the ideally situated and perfectly trained undercover agent five years to build up a ten-person cell, at which point there was a fifty-fifty chance he had been compromised. It would then take five more years to double the size of his cell, whereupon his odds of being uncovered would rise to 75 percent. With each subsequent ten-person, five-year interval, his chances of survival were halved again until, well before his group could even form a platoon—about forty-five men—those chances were approaching zero. Of course, the agent could decide to speed things along by having his original ten conspirators each go out and recruit ten more, but here the odds became even more dismal, exactly the same as flipping a coin and having it come up heads ten times in a row.

While Michael Burke and Peter Sichel and Frank Lindsay had all soured on the CIA’s infiltration schemes for a rather similar constellation of reasons, it was Sichel’s theory—that the Soviets were tacitly allowing the guerrilla groups to operate—that was the most conspiratorial. Even he, though, didn’t appear to carry his suspicions to the ultimate, most disturbing, possibility: what if the guerrilla groups didn’t actually exist at all?

as the Radio Warsaw broadcasts over the next several days made clear, there never had been a WiN—at least not in recent memory. In actual fact, the Polish resistance group had been eliminated as a fighting force some five years earlier, its few remaining members reduced to fugitives hiding out in the forests. As for Stefan Sieńko, the WiN commander who in 1948 had put the word out to the West that the insurgency was alive and well, he had been an agent of Polish intelligence from the beginning, as were the WiN “volunteers” lamenting their past criminality on Radio Warsaw. This meant that all the airdrops into Poland that Michael Burke had approved over the past two years, all the volunteer commandos with all the weapons and the gold and the eavesdropping equipment that had accompanied them, had floated directly down into a trap, their arrival on the ground met by teams of KGB officers and Polish security forces.

As would gradually come to light, almost all the resistance groups in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were either hoaxes or thoroughly controlled by the KGB, their actual members long since dead or captured or turned.

While it was true that a very large and powerful anti-communist insurgency had fought Soviet forces in Ukraine to a near standstill, that had been in 1947. In the intervening years, the KGB and the Red Army had steadily annihilated the Ukrainian Insurgent Army through ambushes, infiltration schemes and collective punishment search-and-destroy missions. In March 1950, with the UPA already decimated, the KGB had tracked down and killed its fugitive leader, leaving the group rudderless.

Taken together, it suggested that the Western intelligence agencies may have had it all wrong about Kim Philby’s hidden agenda during his days in Washington: instead of reporting back to Moscow on when the next group of infiltrators was arriving so that they could be stopped, perhaps he had been monitoring the West’s reaction to the KGB’s various deception schemes in order to ensure the doomed commandos kept coming.

It marked the beginning of the end for Coffin. He had joined the CIA at least in part to atone for his role in the shameful 1946 incident at Plattling, but instead had found only further tragedy, been complicit in operations all but certain to fail. A year earlier, his favorite volunteer, Serge, had gone off on his mission to Russia, never to be heard from again, and now four more men Coffin regarded as friends were gone, too, bound for the gulags or the KGB execution rooms. Shortly after, he abruptly resigned from the CIA. “It destroyed him,” Sichel recalled of Coffin’s tour in Germany, “just totally destroyed him. When I next saw him, he was a changed man.” Returning to the United States, Coffin enrolled at Yale Divinity School, and eventually became the university’s chaplain. An avowed liberal and social activist, he was to become famous as an early and highly passionate critic of American involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as of the CIA.

While Hoover’s poison-pen correspondence was almost surely enough to scuttle Wisner by itself, his deviousness didn’t end there; by getting Smith to agree to secrecy, Hoover both concealed his role as dagger-wielder and denied Wisner any chance to defend himself. It was essentially a variation of the FBI-administered loyalty board investigations in which the accused were denied the right to face their accusers—and just as effective.

“Premature action by us in that direction might have the effect of giving the Soviets an easy way out of the position in which I think they are now placed.” Churchill was flabbergasted. While there was no more devout anti-communist than the British prime minister, there had always been a tactical suppleness to Churchill’s dealings with the Soviets, and he had perceived the same in his first conversations with Eisenhower. What had happened since then? In brief, John Foster Dulles happened. Since Stalin’s death, the secretary of state had vehemently opposed extending any kind of peace feeler to the Soviets, insisting that they make the first move. Somehow Malenkov’s repeated calls for negotiations didn’t qualify. “I can say we have evaluated these speeches,” John Foster sniffed at a March 20 press conference, “but we do not receive any great comfort.” While steadily paring back most every olive branch contained in the proposed “Chance for Peace” speech, Dulles had then replaced them with ever more aggressive demands, leading at least one biographer to conclude that his ultimate purpose was “to foreclose any possibility of serious negotiation” with the new Soviet regime. That suggestion was reinforced when, two days after Eisenhower delivered his revised “Chance for Peace” speech, John Foster appeared before the same audience of newspaper editors to declaim that the only way to deal with the Kremlin was to apply more pressure. For the first time, though certainly not for the ...

degree to which Eisenhower submitted to John Foster’s counsel, the alacrity with which he would reverse course on the advice of his secretary of state. In the estimation of a disgusted Winston Churchill, who positively loathed Dulles, “it appears the president is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll.” An alternate theory holds that the famously cautious Eisenhower knew exactly what he was doing, but used Dulles as a foil.

Relations between Mossadegh and Tudeh, the Iranian communist party, had never been good, with Tudeh having once accused Mossadegh of being “an agent of American imperialism.” That was before they had thrown their support to him during the oil nationalization showdown. Since the American government regarded Tudeh as little more than a Soviet fifth column, the British reasoned that perhaps a more effective strategy for getting Washington on board the anti-Mossadegh train was to suggest the Iranian leader was falling under Tudeh’s sway. If that seemed a bit farfetched—Mossadegh had long since gone on record as an anti-communist—the British put forward the notion that Tudeh would take the country into the Soviet bloc once Iran’s economy ran aground and Mossadegh lost power. While these arguments had induced little more than yawns from the Truman administration, they worked wonders on its replacement.

was this core tenet of massive retaliation in the event of war—a nuclear strike in other words—upon which everything else in New Look rested.

From Iran came the simplest, most pleasing lesson of all, that by lending support to the right foreign leader and by working through the right proxy forces, the United States could bolster those regimes it regarded as allies, and be rid of those it didn’t. For the first time, the United States had wrested back control of a nation falling into the Soviet camp, and it had done so for what, in the greater scheme of things, amounted to pocket change.

By failing to appreciate the intense competition taking place between Kremlin moderates and hard-liners—and there weren’t just four men who counted in this calculus, but at least seven or eight and arguably as many as twenty—the hawks around Eisenhower robbed the administration of having much influence over the eventual outcome.

As incredible as it might seem—and completely unthinkable to a man like John Foster Dulles—it suggested there was a faction within the new Kremlin leadership ready to not only act as a liberalizing force in the Soviet Union but across the greater Soviet bloc, a profoundly important development should Washington take notice.

More immediately, the coup in Iran was to trigger a quick and disastrous boomerang effect on American policy in the region. Far from Mohammad Mossadegh grooming his nation as a Soviet satellite-in-the-making, a CIA after-action report would conclude that Moscow actually had no appreciable relations with the deposed Iranian prime minister at all. Instead, it was only after Operation Ajax that the Kremlin fully keyed to the idea that a whole new East-West playing field lay in the Middle East, and began jockeying for influence there. In a fitting irony, one of the first Arab leaders they would woo away from the American camp was Kim Roosevelt’s friend in Cairo, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Also shattered was Eisenhower’s theory that, as a deterrent, nuclear weapons somehow offered a cheaper alternative to the traditional standing army of the past. To the contrary, New Look helped spur a nuclear arms race between the superpowers that would culminate in a stockpile of atomic weapons enough to annihilate the world many times over, and nearly bankrupt both countries in the process.

What Eisenhower’s conduct revealed was that, for all his carefully honed image of humility and integrity, the future president was an intensely ambitious creature, one willing to compromise on the most basic precepts of personal honor if it might play to his political advantage.

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.”

Burke still didn’t fully grasp where all this was going. “Are you suggesting a city-wide riot?” he asked. “Or some local disturbance? I’m trying to get a fix on the dimension, so I can give you an accurate answer.” Dulles was growing impatient. “What could you do?” he snapped. “In what space of time, sir?” “While the conference is on. While we’re sitting with the Soviets. Say in the next two or three days.” It now dawned on the CIA officer exactly what Dulles wanted. Seven months earlier, East Berliners had marched through the streets asking for free elections and better living standards, and been machine-gunned for their trouble. Now, the American secretary of state was fantasizing about provoking another demonstration, one sure to draw another violent response from the state, as a way to embarrass the Soviets at the CFM meeting.

With the collusion of Lucian Truscott, Burke simply played beat-the-clock for the next several days, steering clear of the secretary of state and his retinue until it was safe to report back that there wasn’t enough time to organize a riot. But that encounter with John Foster proved a kind of breaking point for the CIA man. Shortly after the close of the ministers’ meeting, Burke was the apparent author of a secret cable sent to the director of the CIA, John Foster Dulles’s brother, Allen. Even in an agency where candor was theoretically welcomed, the critique of John Foster’s thwarted scheme was blunt, bordering on contemptuous.

Following France’s surrender to Germany in 1940, her beleaguered colonies in Indochina swiftly came to terms with Germany’s Asian ally, an advancing imperial Japan. In return for making Indochina’s natural resources available to the Japanese war machine, the French colonialists, or colons, were allowed to maintain a collaborationist government similar to that established by Vichy France.