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

by Scott Anderson

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.