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

by Scott Anderson

American ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, felt the matter was decided. Having already scandalized London society with his anti-Semitic remarks, Kennedy further outraged his hosts by suggesting the British war effort was a lost cause and that Roosevelt should seek an accommodation with Hitler.

in the spring of 1941, the United States still hadn’t a permanent agency dedicated to the gathering of foreign intelligence. Instead, in times of war this was handled by the military’s intelligence wings—the Army’s G-2 and the Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence—and in times of peace primarily by the State Department.

Secret Intelligence, or SI, was tasked to the collection and analysis of all manner of foreign intelligence with a long-range focus, while Special Operations, or SO, was to primarily operate on the battlefield, carrying out sabotage behind enemy lines, organizing and assisting partisan units, whatever the situation demanded.

“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.

As a junior member of the Seventh Army OSS unit, Jack Hemingway had been sent up to the front to assist Sichel and his partners in the infiltration operation, although what kind of assistance he might provide was subject to debate. “Jack was the most beautiful, dumbest man I have ever met,” Sichel recalled. “A very sweet guy, and not a bad bone in his body, but you wouldn’t trust him to bring in the mail.”

It wasn’t long before the Germans learned one of their captives was the son of the famous writer and, with Ernest Hemingway enjoying a surprisingly large fan base within the Nazi leadership, Jack spent the remainder of the war in the relative comfort of some of Germany’s better prisons. “I saw Jack after the war,” Sichel recalled, “and I asked him, ‘Jack, what the hell happened up there?’ He just sort of laughed about it.”

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.

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.”

Against one wall was a cloth-covered patterned couch, with a spread of blood over the armrest and cushion at one end. It was here, Wisner was told, that Hitler had shot himself in the head after he and his mistress, Eva Braun, bit into cyanide capsules. So damp was the underground lair that, even a week later, the blood on the couch was wet to the touch.

If the days of killing were now ending, those of rape and robbery were just beginning. It was a crime spree tacitly encouraged by Stalin himself, who suggested that it was quite understandable, “if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes a trifle.” By some estimates, as many as two million German women would be raped in Soviet-occupied Germany during the first three months of peace, with at least 100,000 victims in Berlin alone.

Rudyerd Boulton, a celebrated ornithologist who had been with the OSS since 1942, when he heard the news: “Jesus H. Christ, I suppose this means that it’s back to those goddamned birds.”

“On the Berlin black market ten packs of cigarettes, which an American soldier could obtain for 50 cents in a PX, had the purchasing power of $100. A cheap Mickey Mouse watch might be worth as much as $500.” One GI who served in the city in the immediate postwar period told of a comrade who bought a beautiful villa for fifty cartons of cigarettes. “The villa is still owned by his widow,” the ex-GI wrote fifty years later.

So established were American cigarettes as Berlin’s de facto currency that few people actually smoked them anymore; instead, they were traded back and forth in unopened packs or in small bundles held together with string.

Fittingly for a people inculcated with the idea that they were a superior race, time and again during World War II, German intelligence had missed security breaches on their part, blinded by an unshakable belief in their own cleverness.

(perhaps indicative of the army’s inability to catch the Huks by surprise was the code name they’d given their Mount Arayat offensive: Operation Arayat).

Among the guerrilla groups that had fought the Japanese, one of the most committed was a militia called the People’s Anti-Japanese Army, known by its Tagalog acronym of Hukbalahap, or simply the “Huks.” An avowedly leftist formation led by a charismatic former tailor named Luis Taruc,

“Gambling is against the law,” Lansdale recalled, “so I stopped and asked a few questions. The folks were sort of surprised at my questions, explaining that it was a wake and gambling was okay at wakes. I felt a little foolish when they pointed out that I was leaning on the rough, box-like coffin while talking to them.”

as spy agencies go, the OPC had a pretty discerning eye; as historian Hugh Wilford notes, “the CIA’s tastes in literature were predominantly highbrow and modernist. Much the same could be said, it seems, of the visual arts.” All the while, the OPC was also funneling money to Western European think tanks and labor unions and youth leagues, vying for influence at the leftward end of society wherever they might make inroads.

Hoover had the FBI conduct a massive surveillance operation against the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States, or CPUSA. Dispensing with such niceties as search warrants and probable cause, FBI agents compiled dossiers built on nothing more than rumors passed on by neighbors or enemies, illegally wiretapped the telephones of CPUSA leaders, and burgled their offices and homes, making any evidence gathered useless in court.

So absurdist did the phenomenon become that, by the early 1950s, a New York City resident seeking a permit to fish in the city’s reservoirs had to sign a loyalty oath.

But how to get Hilger into the country with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head? The CIA’s answer was to just play dumb, to avoid learning those unpleasant details of a person’s life that might undermine the concept of plausible deniability.

like a thief who admits to having robbed dozens of people, but certainly not hundreds, so an institution arguing it employed “only a handful” of Nazis is already playing a losing hand. As CIA historian Kevin Ruffner has noted, “In its quest for information on the USSR, the United States became indelibly linked to the Third Reich.”

as the CIA and other Western spy agencies set to do battle against the Soviets in Central and Eastern Europe, could they really be expected to refuse the services of the former Nazi enemy who also happened to know the new enemy best? Again, all but the most pious would probably support their hiring, even if it meant enjoining the services of a man like Gustav Hilger, one of the paper pushers of the Holocaust. But what of the next step, of working with someone like Otto von Bolschwing, a man who didn’t just move paper but who devoted his energies to making the Final Solution happen?

A decidedly relative command considering their mode of transportation. In a scene bearing scant resemblance to its rendering in countless thriller movies, the old truck gradually picked up some faint semblance of speed, enough to roll through the flimsy barrier and trundle on into the night, but all performed so slowly that the Greek soldiers looking on reacted more with puzzlement than alarm, the destruction of their barrier leaving them “shouting and confused” rather than reaching for weapons.

remarkable pattern in the career of Douglas MacArthur. In less than a decade, the United States military had been disastrously blindsided in Asia on four occasions: the 1941 Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines; the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950, followed by the Chinese military intervention there of five months later. Save for Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had been the on-site commanding officer for all of them.

There was often a comic aspect to these trips, stemming from Magsaysay’s fondness for loud aloha shirts and floppy sun hats; as a result, the uniformed Lansdale often had to vouch for the defense secretary’s bona fides at entrance gates. Once that confusion was cleared up, however, these spot inspections had a bracing effect, with Magsaysay prone to summarily dismissing any officer he deemed lax or corrupt.

Adding to Lansdale’s disquiet on that particular morning was the impossibility of determining if the closest gunfire was friendly or hostile, since both sides were firing American weapons.

vampire-like creature who lives in the mountains and attacks its human prey at night. In one Luzon village where a Huk unit was firmly ensconced on an adjacent mountain, an army psy-ops team was brought in to spread rumors that an asuang lived on that same mountain. “Two nights later,” Lansdale recalled, “after giving the stories time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.”

Most every wireless radio operator develops his or her own distinctive transmission style, called “fisting,” so that a very alert recipient of those transmissions can detect if another person has assumed the operator’s identity.

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.”

To Peter Sichel, John Foster was a figure of pure malevolence. “He was a terrible man. Evil, totally evil.” The old spymaster lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, he went to church every Sunday. Never trust a religious man.”

“I went around to people in the Agency that I suspected were homosexual—no one talked about it openly back then, but you usually knew—and I told them very diplomatically, ‘I don’t think you have the chance of a long-range career at CIA, better to do something different and get out now.’ Because with the lie detectors, even if they got past the first test, they were eventually going to be caught, so why waste the next four or five years of their lives before being forced out or never promoted? I didn’t mention homosexuality. I didn’t mention anything. I just spoke to them as a friend, and I think most were very grateful for what I said.”

even before coming into office, some of Eisenhower’s closest advisors were looking to bring down one of Latin America’s remaining democracies, that in Guatemala. Urging them on was the United Fruit Company of Boston. Over the previous half-century, United Fruit had turned vast tracts of Guatemala into essentially a privately owned plantation, one worked by landless peasants. The company orchestrated a bitter political and legal counterattack when President Árbenz initiated agrarian reform in 1951, largely spearheaded by their onetime legal counsel in New York, John Foster Dulles.

By then, an estimated 25,000 Hungarians had been arrested for their role in the revolution, with some 300 of them ultimately executed. Those executions continued until 1960 since some of the condemned were as young as fourteen at the time of their “crimes” and couldn’t be legally put to death until they reached adulthood.

Paradoxically, those Americans who manned the front lines of the early Cold War, the intelligence gatherers and covert action specialists of the CIA, was one group that largely bridged this schism. Most early CIA officers were politically and socially liberal, while fiercely anti-communist. Most regarded the spread of communism as a clear and present danger, fully believed that the Kremlin sought world domination, yet also loathed Joe McCarthy and regarded the domestic Red Scare that he and others traded in as a destructive sideshow.

In a moment of dark comedy, when Conein was instructed to deliver $70,000 in cash to the generals on the eve of the coup, he couldn’t find a case large enough to hold it all so the plotters had to make do with the $42,000 he could carry.