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

by Scott Anderson

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.