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

by Scott Anderson

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...