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

by Scott Anderson

Thus, in a mere five months, the Japanese-French colon relationship had gone from one of collaboration, to a war in which Japanese troops had suddenly either slaughtered or interned their erstwhile French allies, to a peace in which the surviving French prisoners of war were released to help round up the defeated Japanese, to another war in which the French freed their Japanese prisoners of war to fight alongside them against the Viet Minh—and 1945 wasn’t even over yet.

The first missed chance had been at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I when a young Vietnamese nationalist, taking at face value Woodrow Wilson’s grand talk of self-determination for “small nations,” beseeched the American delegation for help in gaining independence for his homeland. The Americans didn’t even dignify the petitions of twenty-nine-year-old Ho Chi Minh with a response, and Vietnam remained a French vassal.

When at last Diem’s motorcade came into view, however, it raced down the boulevard at such high speed, with the new prime minister invisible behind its tinted windows, that all was just a quick blur. As the disappointed crowds dispersed, the public relations instinct in Lansdale was aroused: “Whoever was advising him,” he wrote of Diem, “had clearly misread the mood of the people. Diem should have ridden into the city slowly in an open car, or even have walked, to provide a focus for the affection that the people so obviously had been waiting to bestow on him….I wondered aloud what further errors of judgment Diem’s advisers might be making.” Lansdale

the WiN hoax had been a playback of a wholly different order: the creation of an entire make-believe guerrilla army, a colossal deception that the enemy had managed to maintain for over two years. Given the extraordinary complexity of that con—scores, if not hundreds, of people had to have played some role in perpetuating it—how to be sure that any of the CIA’s infiltration “successes” were actually that? The lone wireless operator in Ukraine who continued to send out his optimistic reports; the partisan team still running through the forests of Lithuania; even the Albanian commando coming back across the frontier after a sabotage mission—who was to say these weren’t all KGB manufactures? And if this was paranoia, Burke had company.

quite beyond the specifics of these missions, beyond the ledger of successes matched against failures, was a nagging question that Michael Burke had never found a satisfactory answer to: just what were they meant to accomplish? In World War II, the reason behind the risks couldn’t have been plainer—to help win the war—but what was the ultimate goal in this contest? Not the high-blown, flag-waving rhetoric about freedom and liberty and enslaved nations that the politicians trotted out, but the actual nuts-and-bolts, tangible results that would show it was all worth it.

As the secretary of state explained, for quite some time the United States had been having difficulties with the elected president of the Central American nation of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. An avowed liberal, Árbenz had shaken up the almost feudalistic culture of his nation through a sweeping land reform initiative. In John Foster’s view, land reform was often the herald of communism. A proposal to overthrow the Guatemalan president had first been broached during the Truman administration, only to be quashed, but in the wake of the gladdening news from Iran, John Foster was ready to resurrect the idea. As for how such a coup might be executed, the secretary had a simple plan: Roosevelt should just do the same thing he did in Iran.

one man’s degenerate criminal, another’s invaluable sidekick. Due both to his French lineage and his brief military service under the Tricolor, Lou Conein had a natural entree to the French military and civilian communities that still dominated most every aspect of South Vietnam society, communities that despised the American interlopers in general and Ed Lansdale in particular. As a dedicated drinker, Conein’s links were especially strong with the Corsican bar owners and bartenders who presided over much of Saigon’s nightlife. Like barmen everywhere, those in Saigon had unparalleled knowledge of what was happening beneath the surface of the city, and since Corsicans tended to be regarded by their fellow Frenchmen in much the same way that Lou Conein had always been regarded—that is, as uncouth, unpleasant and primitive—a natural rapport developed. This made “The Thug” an invaluable member of Lansdale’s team, his conduit into Saigon’s extraordinarily powerful underworld. It was a status Conein didn’t hesitate to exploit.

Officially, the Army of Liberation was the handiwork of a former Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas, living in exile after attempting an earlier coup against his nation’s elected government. In reality, the “army” was a largely mercenary force of some four hundred bankrolled by the CIA, while the planning for their “invasion” had been conducted in Washington and at a secret CIA field headquarters at a military airfield in Opa-locka, Florida. Involved in every aspect of that planning had been Frank Wisner.

Despite their shaky start, recent trends in Latin America seemed to favor the rebels. Since the end of World War II, one democratically elected government after another in the region had been overthrown, with autocratic—and in some cases, murderous—right-wing dictatorships taking their place. So sweeping was this march into totalitarianism that, by 1954, fully eleven of the eighteen independent nations comprising South and Central America were under military rule.

Quite aside from all this planning, what the CIA still needed was some sort of pretext to launch the attack on Árbenz. They finally found one in the spring of 1954 when the Guatemalan president, his military withering from an ongoing American arms boycott, arranged to buy a shipment of light weapons from communist Czechoslovakia. As John Foster Dulles and others loudly proclaimed, here was final proof that Árbenz intended to create a Red fortress in Central America. Amid the increasingly energetic hand-wringing, even liberal media outlets like The New York Times clamored for the administration to do more to meet the communist threat in America’s backyard. On June 15, Eisenhower obliged by giving final approval for the launch of PBSuccess and, right on cue, there materialized Castillo Armas’s Army of Liberation on Guatemala’s frontier.

to remain in this state of exultancy required overlooking several crucial details. Foremost among them was the fact that neither Iran nor Guatemala had been communist states, let alone likely candidates for joining the Soviet bloc. Much to the contrary; just as they took little notice of Mossadegh before his fall, so the Soviets were so oblivious to their alleged Guatemalan fellow traveler that they didn’t even have diplomatic relations with Árbenz.

With more resonance than Soviet propaganda could ever muster, by its own hand the United States had cast herself into the role of imperial and antidemocratic power in the eyes of much of the Third World.

from the standpoint of cold-eyed realpolitik, perhaps the greatest downside of the Guatemalan coup for the American government was that it produced more and hardier enemies. One of these was a twenty-six-year-old Argentine doctor who had been living in Guatemala City at the time of the coup, and who joined Árbenz in seeking asylum in Mexico. A few months later, the doctor would pen a vivid account of those hectic last days in Guatemala entitled “I Witnessed the Coup Against Arbenz,” in which he proclaimed that the United States had now become the enemy; as he wrote in his prophetic closing: “the struggle begins.” The doctor’s name was Ernesto Rafael Guevara, but he was soon to become better known to the world by his nom de guerre: Che.

This new directive had a problem as well, however, for it presupposed that an indigenous South Vietnamese government actually existed. It did not. Instead, virtually every function of the civil administration in Vietnam’s southern half was still officiated over by the French. Lansdale was given a stark illustration of this when, shortly after his arrival, he convened a meeting of provincial Vietnamese officials to discuss security issues. “They were practically all Frenchmen as [sic] province and district chiefs,”

Instead, Lansdale saw the opportunity to both bolster Diem’s fledgling government by increasing the South’s anti-communist population, and to score a propaganda victory by showing the world a people voting against communism with their feet.

The relocation effort also enabled Lansdale to put his adman talents to use. With Vietnam being a highly superstitious society, Rufus Phillips was put in charge of commissioning a mass-market astrological almanac that would tell of the good times lying ahead in the South, and of the much bleaker tidings in the North. Especially targeted was the large Catholic community centered in the Red River Delta below Hanoi. Through coordinating with local priests, natural opponents of atheistic communism, whole communities of northern Catholics were convinced to pack up and leave, answering the exhortation that “the Virgin Mary has gone south.” On the flip side, southerners contemplating a move north were liable to come across a flyer reminding them to bring all their jewelry and anything transportable of material value to their embarkation point; there it would be confiscated by North Vietnam officials as payment for their voyage north. Such travelers also needed to prepare for a stressful journey. A leaflet purportedly produced by a Viet Minh relief agency—it didn’t actually exist—assured prospective émigrés that they would be locked in the ships’ holds during the entirety

But here, too, were some troublesome details to overlook. While the addition of one million anti-communist northerners might help bolster the Diem regime, it also meant Ho Chi Minh’s regime had shed itself of one million potential dissidents; neither development seemed an aid toward reunification. And just as Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission had used the population transfer to establish stay-behinds—about three hundred operatives by best estimate, almost all of whom either quickly defected or were captured—so the Viet Minh laced the refugees heading south with communist sleeper agents, there to join thousands of Viet Minh stay-behinds. Most ominously, during their official withdrawal from the South, Viet Minh forces had taken—kidnapped, in the eyes of many—some ten thousand boys between the ages of eight and twelve to be trained as future cadre. In a few years’ time, the first of these “lost boys of Vietnam” would return to their home villages as the vanguard of a new guerrilla formation: the Viet Cong.

An American embassy official recounted how Diem’s Doc Lap telephone was tapped by so many different third-party spy agencies that it often interfered with transmission.

Walter Kopp’s tenure with the CIA at last came to an end, but not the headaches he would cause the Agency. In 1953, Sichel had noted that Kopp’s neo-Nazi sympathies posed “a distinct and continuing hazard to American interests in Germany if Kubark [CIA] sponsorship of his activities should ever be subject to publicity,” a warning that was borne out in 2006 when the CIA was made to declassify documents detailing the Agency’s links with alleged Nazi war criminals in the postwar era. Among the nearly thirty thousand pages released, the name of Walter Kopp figured prominently.

The meeting with the fugitive Thé was only the most dramatic of a number of such clandestine meetings Lansdale held in the closing months of 1954. Both in quiet backrooms in Saigon and during quick forays into the countryside, the SMM commander met with an array of local warlords, as well as militia leaders from both the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects, part of a concerted effort to wean the private armies away from their French paymasters and to Diem’s side.

With the successful coup in Guatemala building on that in Iran, the CIA now entered what has been called the “golden age” of covert operations. As noted by historian John Ranelagh, “using the total arsenal of the Directorate of Plans—sabotage, propaganda, paramilitary actions, political action,” the Agency had proven itself to be “the most effective instrument in the secret brinkmanship of the cold war.”

There was an air of inevitability about this expansion, and much of it could be attributed to President Eisenhower’s personal preferences. In contrast to many of his more tradition-minded colleagues in the American military, Eisenhower had been a strong advocate of covert operations throughout World War II, and saw even greater application for them in the postwar era. Part of the lure was simple economics. When compared to conventional war, engaging the enemy through covert action cost a pittance—the coups in Iraq and Guatemala had amply proved that—which meant the CIA could pursue many more such missions at a fraction of the cost. Such operations also offered plausible deniability. While Eisenhower personally approved every major CIA covert operation conducted during his administration, he was careful to stay ignorant of their details—at least until after the fact.

according to NIE 11-4-54, even the most conciliatory of gestures by the Soviets were really just further proof of their ultimate world-conquering intent, an intent that showed no signs of abating (although it might be asked just what signs were possible within such circular reasoning)

To those at the meeting who hadn’t recently observed Wisner at close quarters, that statement surely registered as shocking; the deputy director had once been regarded as a virtual rubber stamp for most any covert action proposal that crossed his desk. This was no longer true, though. In the last two years, there had been the WiN hoax in Poland, the disappearance of agents in Romania and Estonia and Lithuania. These were joined to the earlier deaths or disappearance of agents in Albania and Korea and Byelorussia and most anywhere else the CIA tried to pierce the Iron Curtain. All this changed Wisner.

In May 1955, over a year after the FBI had reopened its investigation, Wisner was finally cleared of all twenty-one accusations made against him. As the CIA security chief noted in an eleven-page report to Hoover, most all the claims had been “based on fabrication, distortion of fact and Rumanian refugee gossip,” and this included the charges leveled by Joe McCarthy’s toady.

For Lansdale, one of the first signs that he was losing influence came when Diem announced that he wouldn’t abide by the Geneva Accords proviso on the holding of national elections in the summer of 1956. In the cynical political circles in which he traveled, Ed Lansdale may have been the only person left in either Saigon or Washington to believe that those elections could and should be held. This was rooted in his belief—and again, Lansdale appeared to be a quorum of one on this point—that Diem could actually beat Ho Chi Minh at the ballot box, an argument he pressed on the prime minister. “I started to describe the improving factors that could mean a victory for the free Vietnamese nationalists in the plebiscite,” Lansdale wrote, “but Diem admonished me for underrating the dirty-trick capability of the Communists.” What the SMM commander apparently didn’t grasp was that in rejecting elections, Diem was heeding the counsel of Nhu’s CIA advisor, Harwood, as well as most every American diplomat up to and including John Foster Dulles with an opinion on the matter.

the entire system of patronage and cronyism initiated by Nhu’s Can Lao, once isolated to political circles in Saigon, would now permeate all the way down to the village level. As Lansdale pointed out, this change also gave communist propagandists “a highly effective argument to turn villagers against the Diem regime,” since now “everything that went wrong in a village could be blamed upon the Diem-appointed officials, whether they were responsible for it or not.”

breaking away of those satellite nations in its thrall. Rather it was to be the fall of the United States’ moral standing in the world, the extinguishing of whatever claim to a higher degree of honor or altruism it still enjoyed. It was to be the final laying bare of the myth of America as the herald of freedom.

For John Foster Dulles, the matter couldn’t be any simpler. Viewed with the moral certitude of the devout Presbyterian that he was, the Cold War was a titanic struggle between good and evil, between godless communism and the Free World, between the enslavers and the liberators. Granted, “Free World” had a fairly broad definition, what with all the right-wing dictatorships in the American camp, but at least their hearts were in the right place and their people were allowed to worship.

John Foster Dulles had taken special umbrage at a paragraph calling for “the satellite peoples” to engage in passive resistance, and for the United States to “avoid incitements to violence” that might lead to the kind of brutal Soviet reprisals that had so recently occurred in Poznań, Poland. The secretary of state found this proposal “rather too negative in character” and offered his version of a more positive one, suggesting the administration “not discourage” such violent actions if they increased pressure on Moscow. As recorded in the top secret minutes of the meeting, John Foster further opined that “we shouldn’t necessarily be appalled by the fact that if such uprisings occurred a certain number of people would be killed. After all, one cannot defend or regain liberty without some inevitable loss of life.” Among those attendees in strong agreement with the secretary’s lawyerly construction—the administration wasn’t encouraging mayhem but they weren’t discouraging it either—had been Vice President Nixon, and it was duly inserted into the NSC directive that President Eisenhower signed a week later. As a historian for the Department of Defense, Ronald Landa, pointed out, this rider to NSC 5608/1 underscored “a greater willingness to view bloodshed in the satellites as desirable,” and, in certain circumstances, “to undertake actions that might precipitate violence.” But now, just three months later, the administration had crashed up against the precise situation it had e...

What Wisner surely didn’t know at this stage, though, was that his advocacy of Nagy was being systematically undercut by an arm of the CIA he’d helped create: the Mighty Wurlitzer’s Radio Free Europe. With its Hungarian broadcasting staff largely composed of right-wing Hungarian exiles, RFE was not only the principal source of information on the revolution for most Hungarians, but a cheerleader for the insurrectionists to demand ever more, to not seek compromise but to hold out for the tearing down of Hungary’s political structure altogether. To this end, Imre Nagy was not the solution, but the problem. Day after day, and speaker after speaker, RFE Hungary bombarded its listeners with excoriations of the new prime minister.

As Khrushchev explained to his startled colleagues, he now saw that letting Hungary go would be perceived as weakness by the West, and could mean losing all of Eastern Europe. Just yesterday, he noted, there had been demonstrations in support of the Hungarian counterrevolutionaries in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, a sign the erosion was likely to spread there, and what had been granted to the Hungarians would be demanded by the others. If the Soviet Union ceded ground now, the ceding would never stop. Instead, the Hungarian Revolution had to be crushed—decisively and with severity.

Khrushchev’s reversal was undoubtedly also influenced by the American response to Hungary—or, rather, the lack thereof. Despite Soviet propaganda to the contrary, the United States had done nothing to aid the revolutionaries, and if they hadn’t done so by now, a week into the troubles, it seemed a safe bet that they never would. Instead, other than a few feeble denunciations on the Soviets’ use of force, the Eisenhower administration had foisted the Hungarian issue on the United Nations, where it had to know nothing would be done. It all pointed to the Americans’ tacit understanding that Hungary was in the Soviet sphere, and that to intervene raised the specter of wider, much deadlier, war.

Eisenhower expressed his “inexpressible shock” at the Soviets’ actions. For sheer cynicism, however, it was hard to compete with the words of Henry Cabot Lodge. With the Soviet attack under way, he rushed into an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, the same body that he’d blocked from taking up the Hungarian crisis less than twelve hours earlier, to declare: “If ever there was a time when the action of the U.N. could literally be a matter of life and death for a whole nation, this is that time.”

By the end of Eisenhower’s second term, the geographical spread of governments that his administration had undertaken to overthrow or otherwise subvert suggested an almost purposeful design, as if it sought to alienate the citizenry of most every region and subregion of the globe: Guatemala, Cuba and British Guiana in Latin America; Egypt and Congo in Africa; Syria, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon in the Middle East; Indonesia and Laos in Asia. In 1944, the people in many of these regions had been stirred by President Roosevelt’s talk of an end to the colonial era, of the United States as the deliverer of self-determination and democracy. By 1960, such rhetoric seemed risible to these same people, with the United States now regarded as just one more imperial power bent on their political and economic subjugation. In vast swaths of the world, that estimation remains unchanged today.

While not a blanket pardon for the many excesses and lapses of the CIA over the years, much of this criticism requires overlooking the very nature of how a government bureaucracy—indeed, how any office of any kind—actually functions. Despite a mandate to analyze and report without fear or favor, to “speak truth to power” as the tired phrase goes, CIA analysts very quickly figure out that what viewpoints or ideas get promoted tend to be those that most closely conform to the wishes or preconceptions of one’s higher-ups, while contrarian analysis and ideas get pushed to the margins. Similarly, covert action specialists get noticed for conducting operations, not for canceling them. If variations of this phenomenon are apparent in any office, it’s especially burdensome when those calling for action or cherry-picking information are the president or his senior advisors.

The events in Nghe An cast a light—or, at least, should have, had anyone paid attention—on what was perhaps America’s first great mistake in Vietnam. Two years earlier, the Geneva Accords had mandated that, although temporarily partitioning the nation, elections would be held in 1956 leading to its reunification. In the interim, most every American advisor and visiting politician had advised President Diem to renounce the elections, sure that he would be crushed at the ballot box by Ho Chi Minh. Practically the only advisor who argued otherwise, who suggested Diem’s star was on the rise and Ho’s on the wane, was CIA contract officer Edward Lansdale. The news out of Nghe An in the autumn of 1956 suggested that Lansdale may well have been right, that those under communist rule would have chosen otherwise if ever given the chance to vote. At American insistence, they were not.

Lansdale’s involvement with Mongoose remains the most mystifying chapter in his career. The man who had always advocated policies designed to empower locals, who urged armies to engage in hearts-and-minds campaigns to win over the populace, and who argued that fostering democratic governments responsive to people’s needs was the best way to defeat communist insurgencies, was now running an operation designed to murder a foreign leader that Lansdale himself recognized had broad popular support. One explanation for this turnaround is that Lansdale was simply being “a good soldier,” that issued an order, he felt duty-bound to carry it out. This explanation doesn’t quite square, though, with his long record of bucking both military and civilian authority, and letting his own opinions on matters be loudly known.

The coup got under way on the early afternoon of November 1, 1963, just two days after Phillips’s last meeting with Diem. After initially escaping the presidential palace, the two Ngo brothers, Diem and Nhu, arranged to surrender the next day in return for safe passage from the country. Instead, the brothers were led into an armored car, where both were shot to death. Sent to verify their deaths was Lucien Conein. Less than three weeks later, President Kennedy would also be assassinated. By bizarre coincidence, Edward Lansdale had retired from the United States military on the very day the coup against Diem got under way. In fact, his retirement party at the Pentagon had only just ended when the first news flashes out of Saigon came in.

so overwhelming was the U.S. advantage, and so limitless its resources, that it never bothered to try to be smart.

Graham Wisner identified a different culprit: Hungary. “I’ve always thought that his suicide was directly related to his disappointment—and some would say betrayal—over Hungary. I think he felt betrayed. He loved the depths of this country, and 100 percent believed in our protecting democracy against the Soviets, so to have been there and seen what was happening to the Hungarians—not just to the CIA operatives and his people, but all of them….Well, I think it cast a shadow over the rest of his days.”