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

by Scott Anderson

that incident by the El Camino struck me as many others had not, and it summoned to my mind a simple question: 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?

when you really thought about it, most any right-thinking person should be anti-communist. Quite aside from its utopian pretensions in theory, what communism had displayed time and again in practice was a system tailor-made for the most cunning or vicious or depraved to prosper. Amid the blood-drenched history of the twentieth century, just two communist leaders—Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong—had, through a combination of purges and criminally incompetent economic experiments, killed off an estimated sixty million of their own countrymen. If you added in the lesser lights of the communist world, its Pol Pots and Kim Il-sungs and Haile Mengistus, one could easily add another ten or fifteen million to the body count. Given this gruesome track record, shouldn’t any right-thinking person be anti-communist in the same way that they should be anti-Nazi or anti–child molester or anti-polio?

The transformation that occurred in those twelve years of the American Century, both within the United States and in its standing in the world, is nothing short of staggering. In 1944, the United States was seen as a beacon of hope and a source of deliverance throughout the developing world, the emergent superpower that, in the postwar era envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt, would nurture democracy across the globe and dismantle the obsolete and despised rule of the European colonial powers. It was to be the end of the age of empire and, if Roosevelt’s vision was achieved, possibly the end of war itself, with countries in the future settling their differences around the conference table of a powerful and transnational forum, the United Nations.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Michael Burke was putting to the test a core conviction upon which many of his decisions in life were predicated: that bad things happened to other people, that he was going to come through all this just fine. Of course, this belief in personal immunity is one that a great many soldiers take into battle—army recruiters of the world rather count on it—and it tends to hold up well right up until the day it’s proven wrong.

Romania would formally cede the region of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, a stretch of land the two nations had contested and traded since 1812. For the duration of the war, Romania would bear the cost of hosting the Soviet Red Army on its soil—over a half-million soldiers at the time—as well as the burden of putting some 200,000 of its own soldiers into the field under Soviet command. Most punishing of all was the war reparations bill: $300 million, to be paid in goods and services to Moscow over the next six years, but enough to keep the impoverished nation in a state of indentured servitude for far longer. Of course, servitude to Moscow, in the view of some cynics, was precisely the goal.

In a few years, Hungary’s communist strongman, Mátyás Rákosi, would coin a colorful term to describe the methods used to bring him and other Soviet allies to power in Eastern Europe: “salami tactics.” 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.

Even this slaughter of his intimates doesn’t begin to capture the depths of Stalin’s murderous paranoia or the depravity of his rule. Determined to leave no potential revenge-seekers behind, after eliminating his perceived enemies the Soviet dictator often killed the dead men’s wives. After the liquidation of the wives, it might be the turn of their children, even infants, and then of his victim’s extended families. In just this way, many notable Russian families were virtually scrubbed out of existence during Stalin’s reign.

The butchery became self-perpetuating—and for simple reason. With the Terror inducing a kind of mass panic, citizens at every level of society rushed to denounce others before they themselves were denounced, with the sheer flood of those denunciations serving as “proof” in Stalin’s mind that enemies were everywhere. And for all those with the license to pass judgment, whether one of Stalin’s favored lieutenants or the headman of a provincial village, the prudent choice was to convict rather than exonerate, to kill rather than pardon, because only the living might cause problems down the road.

By entering into a nonaggression alliance with Hitler in the summer of 1939—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—Stalin was at least able to buy himself some time. Mindful that Soviet-German friendship might falter in the future, he used that time to build up buffer zones by attacking and taking control of an assortment of the Soviet Union’s neighbors: the eastern half of Poland; the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; swaths of Finland and Romania. Alas, these buffer zones proved of little help when Hitler betrayed the pact in June 1941 and launched his long-planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.

But if his pact with Hitler proved a disappointment, Stalin had been scarcely more pleased by the one that replaced it: his alliance with Great Britain and the United States. To be sure, the flood of American war matériel was critical in enabling the Red Army to withstand the German invasion and eventually reverse it, but both Britain and the United States seemed quite content to let the Soviets do the vast majority of the fighting and dying. Particularly enraging to the vozhd was what he saw as his allies’ dithering in opening a second European front against the Germans to relieve pressure on his own armies. In the spring of 1942, an overly exuberant Winston Churchill had promised Stalin that such a front would be established by the end of that year, but when the British and Americans did open a second front that November, it wasn’t in Europe at all but in the strategic backwater of North Africa. That was followed by an invasion of the almost equally inconsequential Italian island of Sicily in July 1943, and then by the unrewarding assault on the Italian mainland two months later. Indeed, it wasn’t until the D-Day landings in northern France in June 1944, after the Red Army had for three years borne the full brunt of the Nazi war machine virtually alone, that one could begin to talk of a shared military burden at all. Even then, such a description was exceedingly generous to the Americans and British, almost insulting to the Soviets. After all, the 400,000 American troops...

In light of all this, as World War II drew to a close, even a paranoid like Stalin might be reasonably forgiven for nurturing another of his conspiracy theories: that his wartime allies were holding back, nibbling away at the margins of things before swooping in to take over once an exhausted Red Army was bled dry. To forestall that, and to avoid a future catastrophe along the lines of what she had just endured, the Soviet Union needed to have full control of its frontiers, to have a defensive bulwark in Eastern Europe against its historical enemies to the west. Romania became the first potential building block of that bulwark.

By striving to keep their Soviet ally in the dark about the Manhattan Project—knowledge the Soviets were surreptitiously gleaning on their own—the Americans and British were also stoking the suspicions of their ally as to their ultimate intentions, and the longer this failed secrecy was maintained, the deeper those suspicions became. At the same time, the Soviets couldn’t protest their exclusion from the atomic club, because that would tip the Americans and British to the fact that they had already penetrated their wall of secrecy through spying.

Over the span of forty minutes on the afternoon of March 15, over six hundred American B-17 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of high explosives on the center of Oranienburg, obliterating the city and marking it as the site of one of the greatest concentrations of conventional explosives in world history. That wasn’t the worst of it, however. Most of the bombs dropped on the city were equipped with a recently developed time-delay fuse. In contrast to the traditional explode-on-impact bomb, the detonation of these depended on the speed of an internal chemical reaction that triggered their firing pins, a process that might take several minutes or hours or even days. Or decades, as it turned out. Due to a peculiarity of Oranienburg soil composition, hundreds of the bombs dropped in March 1945 failed to explode at the time, but have done so intermittently ever since, killing residents and earning Oranienburg the title of “the most dangerous city in Germany.”

also aiding Lansdale in his Philippine travels was a characteristic fairly typical of the American abroad: a certain cheerful guilelessness, an uncomplicated amiability built on the belief that, so long as one is friendly with strangers, that treatment will be reciprocated. While a Briton abroad might suspect he is loathed, and a Frenchman knows full well that he is, the very idea is so alien to many Americans as to never cross their mind. Ironically, the sheer innocence of this outlook can be quite endearing and, thus, self-fulfilling.

Over the previous five years of war, the fate of the planet had largely rested in the hands of six men gathered into two opposing camps: Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on the Allied side; Hitler, Mussolini and Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo for the Axis. This had remained true right up until April 1945. By the end of that month, however, three of those six—Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler—were dead. Now, a fourth, Churchill, had been cast from power, and in just a few more weeks, Hideki Tojo would be as well. In short, of the six men who controlled the world’s destiny in spring 1945, by that autumn only one remained: Stalin.

Over the next few days, Gouzenko laid out before astounded Canadian intelligence officers—soon joined by their American and British counterparts—the story of an elaborate Soviet spy ring that had been in operation across Canada and the United States for years. The ring involved dozens of spies and informants, and its activities ranged from industrial espionage, to monitoring émigré communities, to unlocking some of the most closely guarded military secrets the Soviet’s wartime allies possessed; as was soon determined, these spilled secrets included details on the Manhattan Project. Ultimately, the Gouzenko affair would lead to the arrest in the West of over three dozen on charges of espionage, and would be cited by many as the opening salvo of the Cold War.

Since being taken from imperial Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Philippines had existed as a de facto American colony, one maintained along the lines of the long-established European model. On the one hand, that had meant schools and hospitals and roads. On the other, it had meant rank economic exploitation and the swift crushing of any aspirations for self-determination; in the failed war for independence that followed the American takeover, some twenty thousand Filipino and four thousand American combatants were killed, figures that dwarfed the estimated quarter-million Filipino civilians who died in an attendant cholera epidemic.

Wisner’s postwar disaffection had deeper root than merely missing the action. First in Romania and then in Germany, he had been eyewitness to the Soviets’ repressive tactics in consolidating their grip over the local population. The American response, in the lawyer’s opinion, had run the gamut from energetic hand-wringing to fatalistic acceptance to tacit complicity. Like many in the intelligence community, he had been appalled by Truman’s decision to dissolve the OSS, regarding it as essentially clearing the field for the Soviets at one of history’s most crucial junctures.

The British memo had the effect of convincing Truman that the time for diplomatic protests and toothless entreaties had ended. On March 12, he gave an address to Congress in which he urged the authorization of $400 million in emergency aid for the embattled regimes in Greece and Turkey. In what would soon become known as the Truman Doctrine, he also outlined a containment policy against communist expansion, a vow that the United States would come to the defense of imperiled democracies around the world.

amid the seventeen pages of dreary bureaucratese that comprised the National Security Act, there appeared a curious subclause. It was tucked away in Subsection D of Section 102, and it noted that, in addition to its more clearly defined responsibilities, the CIA might be tasked “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence gathering affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct [emphasis added].” With no further explication of what either “other functions and duties” or “from time to time” meant, it could be construed that the new intelligence agency had the prerogative to conduct any action the NSC deemed necessary, and at any time. As history was to show, this was precisely the interpretation that the architects of Truman’s emerging Cold War policy would adopt.

Even more than Acheson’s appeal, it may have been the counsel of his old OSS colleague Allen Dulles that finally took Wisner back into public service. During one of their how-to-save-the-world conversations in New York, Dulles had advised Wisner to “find an inconspicuous slot in the government and start building up a network for political warfare from within.” As the take-charge Wisner had himself discovered, first in Romania and then in Germany, government positions were often just as big or as small as their occupant chose to make them.

On June 18, 1948, Soviet troops temporarily blocked rail and road traffic into the Western zones of Berlin. It was in retaliation for an announcement made by the Western powers earlier in the day that they would soon introduce a new deutsche mark in their German occupation zones, a move the Soviets had been fiercely opposing for months. Three days later, and despite both protests and threats from Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, the Western powers introduced the new currency anyway. On June 24, the Soviets struck back, severing all road and rail connections into western Berlin until further notice. The next day, they cut off all food and electricity supplies as well. It marked the beginning of the Berlin Blockade, a Soviet campaign months in the planning and meant to choke the Western enclaves of the city into submission.

Along with bad press, the Berlin Blockade came at enormous local cost to the Soviets, as one resident of the city at the time, Peter Sichel, quickly perceived. “Up until then, Berliners saw the Americans as occupiers,” he said. “Better behaved than the Red Army maybe, but still occupiers, and they resented us for it. The blockade changed that. They saw that we were all in this together, that we were trying to keep the city alive, and so we went from this relationship of considerable animosity to them seeing us as their allies. This was specific to Berlin—it was much less true in other parts of Germany—but this was a dramatic change. The blockade was one of the greatest mistakes the Soviets committed.”

Anxious to find some way out of the public relations disaster they had created, the Soviets finally negotiated an end to the blockade in May 1949. On the day it ended, hundreds of thousands of Berliners took to the streets of the Western sectors in celebration, while a redeemed General Lucius Clay—whatever his other shortcomings, he had been the airlift’s masterful architect—was given a hero’s welcome. For the Soviets, the repercussions were severe and lasting. That April, the United States and Canada and nine Western European nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty, a mutual defense pact that would shortly lead to the creation of NATO. Then there was Germany. Since the end of the war, the four occupation powers had endlessly wrangled over proposals to reunify the nation. With the Berlin Blockade, this notion was such a dead letter that, less than two weeks after its lifting, there came the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany—West Germany—a union of the American, British and French occupation sectors, and the exclusion of the Soviet. Faced with this fait accompli, five months later the Soviet sector was reconstituted as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. That division—it would last for the next forty-one years—was an apt symbol of the worsening Cold War.

What took place on August 6, 1948, then, was a fascinating bureaucratic shell game, one in which six government officials representing six different branches of government sought to simultaneously assert and shirk responsibility for the new covert action agency they were creating, eager on one hand to shape its charter, but even more eager to escape any fallout from its future “dirty deeds.”

Several years earlier, Allen Dulles had advised Wisner to “find an inconspicuous slot in the government and start building up a network for political warfare from within.” On August 6, 1948, Wisner went one better, not just finding that inconspicuous slot, but helping build it to his specifications. To be sure, though, there was a catch. As the cravenness of George Kennan forewarned, if and when things went wrong, Frank Wisner would be quite on his own.

As far back as the 1920s, and continuing into the 1980s, the KGB and its precursors routinely sent across to the West “dangles,” or false defectors, and then meticulously built out their bona fides. One technique they often used to accomplish this was to have the “defector” betray some of his spy colleagues in the field. For a regime that, during Stalin’s reign, routinely recalled and executed its own intelligence officers for no other cause than their “Western taint,” it was a small step to sacrifice a batch of their less-important operatives in the West if it helped cover the tracks or burnish the credentials of a more important one.

If the distinguishing characteristic of Nazi Germany’s intelligence agencies was institutional arrogance, the chief characteristic of Soviet intelligence would seem to be the precise opposite, an inferiority complex so deep-rooted as to fuel an unslakable paranoia. Of course, the perils of arrogance are clear if one’s goal is world domination, but if one’s goal is to maintain a police state, paranoia would hardly seem a handicap at all.

One of the OPC’s more enduring contributions was its involvement in the founding of The Paris Review in 1953. Destined to become one of the leading literary quarterlies in the Western world over the next half-century, few of the writers who appeared in the Review’s pages—a list that included the likes of Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet—might have guessed that two of its three founding editors, writers George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, were on the OPC payroll. It would be little exaggeration to say that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, one of the principal sources of funding for cultural and artistic projects in an economically prostrate Western Europe was the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination.

Carmel Offie. If largely unknown today, Offie remains one of the most unlikely and intriguing figures ever to reach a position of prominence in the American government, a consummate charmer, schemer and scoundrel who earned the nickname the Royal Dwarf for the behind-the-scenes power he wielded. Making his modern-day anonymity more surprising is that most everyone even peripherally connected to the American intelligence world of the late 1940s seemed to have a favorite Carmel Offie story, a distinct Offie memory.

Above all else, Carmel Offie was a consummate collector of favors, an opportunist who seemed to possess a preternatural skill for gaming the system and knowing just whom to flatter. During his tour in Moscow, he reportedly used embassy funds to buy expensive Russian fur coats, then used the diplomatic pouch to distribute them to senior State Department officials in Washington. In Paris in the late 1930s, he lined up attractive women as “dates” for the visiting sons of Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador to Great Britain, Joe Jr. and Jack. Especially frequent recipients of Offie’s attentions were President Roosevelt’s personal secretaries, Missy LeHand and Grace Tully.

Of course, such sway has a way of becoming noticed, and of fostering enemies. Of Offie, an awed observer once remarked that “either he was going to be Secretary of State some day or his body was going to be found floating down the Potomac river.” Within a very short time of his arrival at OPC, an ever-growing number of people were determined to see that, at least figuratively, he suffered the latter fate. One such nemesis was to be found in an office a mere stone’s throw away from the Rat Palace, in the Department of Justice building at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Hoover had redirected the Red Scare to focus on domestic communist party members, almost none of whom would ever be linked to actual espionage. That’s because the KGB had taken the obvious precaution of ordering its actual spies to stay well clear of the party.

And then on to the next step, not just accepting intelligence gathered by such triggermen—a shameful endeavor perhaps, but at least a rather passive one—but now going into direct alliance with them, now actively enlisting them to carry out operations against the new enemy? In just this way, the crossing of one moral threshold, often for the most practical of reasons, can ease the crossing of the next, and what becomes exceedingly difficult when one is living in the midst of it all is to determine just where lies the line not to be crossed. A simple matter to determine in hindsight, perhaps—at least so the sanctimonious believe—but not at all at the time, and this was the path, more an erosion, where the CIA found itself at the end of the 1940s. It was an erosion that would accelerate and take on new forms in the years ahead, but it began in the late 1940s amid the ashes of the Third Reich.

One detail he didn’t spend much time pondering was any issue of the morality of the enterprise he had joined, either of the plot to subvert a foreign government or of the backgrounds of the men he was now in alliance with. 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.

While there is probably never a good time to become entangled in the notoriously slow Italian legal system, it would seem especially important to avoid when one is in the final planning stages of a complex and top secret commando operation to subvert a foreign government.

Whereas the Missouri-born Hillenkoetter had been unfailingly polite to subordinates, those calling on Smith were apt to be met by a glowering stare and the general’s preferred form of greeting: “What’s your problem?”

But the general, most recently the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, had come to the CIA with the express mandate of knocking the Agency into shape, and that’s what he set out to do; as he told Truman upon accepting the post, “I expect the worst, and I am sure I won’t be disappointed.”

So forceful was Smith’s presentation—because he also made clear that he neither needed nor wanted this goddamned job anyway—that Truman ordered an immediate restructuring along the lines Smith demanded.

There was a glibness and superficiality to Dulles very much in contrast to Wisner’s passionate and emotional nature. And whereas Wisner had a circle of close friends to whom he was fiercely loyal, the professorial Dulles was far more aloof, a man with “a million warm acquaintances,” as a colleague would put it, but no real friends. Put in the starkest terms, those who knew Wisner felt his actions were dictated by a sense of honor and fairness, even if they didn’t always trust his judgment. By contrast, as biographer Peter Grose would memorably put it, Allen Dulles “learned to deal comfortably in perfectly bad faith.”

Unlike the affable and morally agile Allen, however, John Foster seemed to have inherited the severe, absolutist sensibility of their Presbyterian minister father. Ponderous in manner and given to self-satisfied pronouncements, both American and foreign officials tended to find a conversation with John Foster a tedious and one-sided exercise; as British statesman Harold Macmillan acidly quipped of him, “his speech was slow, but it easily kept pace with his thoughts.”

Over the previous five years, the CIA deputy director had watched as the Middle East region, once a geopolitical backwater, had mushroomed in importance. Part of that was oil, of course, but with the steady diminishing of the French and British imperial powers that had long held sway there, a power vacuum was developing—and all vacuums are eventually filled by something. Across the region, Western-accommodationist monarchies were under threat from a younger generation of Arab nationalists and it behooved the United States, Wisner believed, to make connections and win these emerging leaders to the Western camp. That was already complicated by American support for the state of Israel, declared in 1948 over the ferocious opposition of most all the Arab world, but to even begin to counteract that, it was vital for the United States and the CIA to be on “the right side” of larger historical currents. This meant keeping a certain distance from Britain and France as they desperately tried to cling to their colonial prerogatives, and aligning as much as possible with the voices of change. That had been achieved in supporting the Free Officers in Egypt, but the proposed coup in Iran was in pursuit of the precise opposite. Wisner had opposed anti-Mossadegh schemes when they had come up in the past, fearing they would fan anti-American sentiment in the region, and he saw nothing in the revamped Operation Ajax to change his mind.

Of course, given the tit-for-tat nature of the Cold War arms race, once Eisenhower started talking about massive retaliation and first-strike options, it was inevitable that Soviet leaders would do likewise—but what could possibly go wrong with that?

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. When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, the supply of American nuclear weapons numbered about 1,100; by the end of his presidency, it had grown twenty times over to approach 22,000. The absurdist end result, noted military analyst and historian Townsend Hoopes, “was to make the United States progressively more dependent on a nuclear capability it could not safely or rationally use.”

As he campaigned for the presidency in the summer of 1952, Eisenhower made no secret of his contempt for McCarthy to his inner circle, especially when the Wisconsin senator began excoriating General George Marshall. Marshall had quite literally made Eisenhower’s military career, plucking him from the oblivion of being a fifty-one-year-old barracks officer when the United States entered World War II, to engineering his appointment as commander of the European theater of operations less than two years later. Yet, Eisenhower did not publicly defend Marshall against McCarthy’s attacks during the 1952 campaign, heeding the advice of Republican Party advisors that to do so might cause a rift within the party. On several later occasions, Eisenhower was to say he deeply regretted his decision, but it isn’t the considered judgments of hindsight, but actions actually taken that show the true character of a person. 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.

For his part, Roy Cohn would be memorably credited in a Broadway play as being “the worst human being who ever lived.”

every society has its would-be demagogues; in Burke’s view, what made matters infinitely worse in this instance were those powerful government officials who, whether due to cowardice or because they saw the Wisconsin senator as a useful fool, were enabling McCarthy to do his worst, men like John Foster Dulles.

But as dictatorships throughout history have discovered, reform, once set in motion, is a difficult thing to harness.

But there was another strategy that could be tried, one simultaneously quite clever and profoundly cynical: kick the whole matter over to the United Nations. With that institution already gaining a reputation for toothlessness, its inaction could serve as a shield to mask the administration’s own indolence. Better yet, by working through the U.N., the United States could give the appearance of trying to address the Hungarian issue, with the confidence that any resolution taken to the Security Council would be vetoed by the Soviets. In just this way, while the United States did nothing to help the Hungarian revolutionaries—their fate rested solely in the hands of Moscow—the administration stood to reap a propaganda bonanza if and when Moscow moved to crush them.