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

by Scott Anderson

Moving into our small American housing enclave above the city were the families of American officers stationed in Saigon, and the free-ranging game of Cowboys and Indians that we boys in the neighborhood had previously played was renamed Green Berets and Viet Cong. It didn’t actually change the game that much, except that in the past the Indians sometimes won, and in the new version the Viet Cong never did.

For his part, Frank Wisner never truly regarded himself as a Southerner except, his middle son, Ellis, recalled, on those occasions when outsiders denigrated the region. “That’s when he got his back up,” Ellis Wisner recalled. “If people made fun of it, that’s when he became a Southerner.”

He found Frank Wisner much harder to read. “He was extremely polite, and obviously very intelligent, but there was a kind of tension, a nervousness, about him. And he was a Southerner, of course. I hadn’t really been around many Southerners at that point, so it was hard for me to square his energy level, his dynamism, with this soft accent, this gracious quality of his.”

Burke was also gripped by a more generalized melancholy, one familiar to many who return from war, but which can’t be easily explained to civilians, let alone to home-front loved ones. Along with its horrors, war is thrilling, exhilarating, it propels the prosaic concerns and nagging chores of everyday life into inconsequence.

Burke had meticulously plotted and committed to memory every aspect of his cover story, quite conscious that “half-covers” like his, in which one’s real name was retained but attached to a false biography, were often far easier to slip up on than a “full-cover.” He had also been leery of drawing too close to the Rome film crowd, worried over potential questions about his ties to a production company no one had ever heard of, and which didn’t seem to actually produce anything. Fortunately, though, Burke discovered the Roman cinéastes were, much like their Hollywood counterparts, a profoundly self-absorbed lot. “I was mildly surprised at how incurious people were and how very easy it was, when it suited my purpose, to direct attention away from myself simply by asking the right question of other persons and being a good listener, or at least appearing to be.”

the war in Vietnam their way.

shutting down an operation was at least as delicate as initiating one, for it required coming up with just the right combination of rewards and threats to ensure a cashiered agent’s silence. Far easier, in fact, to simply let a dead-end mission limp along indefinitely. “They should have made it a rule at the outset,” Sichel said, “that if you propose an operation, you also have to explain how you’re going to shut it down.” He gave a sardonic smile. “Oh, how we envied the Russians; when they were done with their agents, they could just shoot them.”

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. “It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen.” But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.