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

by Scott Anderson

How had it come to this? How, in the name of fighting communism—or at least what some claimed was communism—had the American government come to tacitly sanction death squads, to support governments that would so brazenly murder its own people as to toss their bodies out on sidewalks in broad daylight?

But if anti-communism itself was not the issue, just when did its image become so sullied? While impossible to isolate to any singular event, I believe the answer to that question can be found in a fairly clearly delineated and brief stretch of American history, specifically that twelve-year span from 1944 to 1956 that comprised the first years of the Cold War.

In the process, the purveyors of the Red Scare not only held up their own anti-communist cause to ridicule, but fueled a cynicism and distrust of government from which the United States has never truly recovered.

In its own way, it is also the chronicle of the greater tragedy in which they participated, of how at the very dawn of the American Century, the United States managed to snatch moral defeat from the jaws of sure victory, and be forever tarnished.

Also known by the more graphic “death by a thousand cuts,” it is the strategy of tearing away at an existing political framework from so many different and seemingly unrelated angles—the appointment of an unqualified but loyal functionary to a sub-ministry here, the annulment of a legal protection over there—that it leaves the opposition overwhelmed and flummoxed and unsure of where to make a stand.

To a degree that few Western statesmen at the time wished to acknowledge, the future dispensation of postwar Europe was not going to hinge on a philosophy or ideology or even a geopolitical strategy, so much as on the whims and fevered calculations of a single man. His name was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but he was better known by the nom de guerre he had bestowed upon himself and that derived from the Russian word for steel: Stalin.

Indeed, one of the bitterest ironies of the twentieth century is the degree to which the actions—and inactions—of the Western democracies in the 1930s and well into World War II could be seen as validating the worst fears of a paranoid sociopath like Joseph Stalin.

After all, the 400,000 American troops who would ultimately die in the Europe and Pacific theaters of World War II represented less than one-twentieth of the estimated nine million Soviet soldiers killed on the Eastern Front, which in turn was just half of the estimated eighteen million Soviet civilians who perished.

1937 Cord 812, not merely one of the most luxurious and extravagant sedans of the automobile Golden Age but, according to American Heritage magazine, “the single most beautiful American car” built in the twentieth century.

In short, of the six men who controlled the world’s destiny in spring 1945, by that autumn only one remained: Stalin.

As political scientists have pointed out, by knowing which side of the political divide a person chose during the Red Scare of the late 1940s, it’s possible to predict with near certainty their and their offspring’s political views on foreign affairs ever after: their support or opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, their children’s support or opposition to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative in the 1980s; their grandchildren’s support or opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There is very little sign that this divide, rooted in the Cold War passions of seventy years ago, will narrow anytime soon.