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

by Scott Anderson

In turn, the Agency’s budget was predicated on how many missions it was pursuing around the globe, and how effective those missions might be in undermining Soviet rule. In this, there was a natural bias for covert action.

Taken together, it suggested that the Western intelligence agencies may have had it all wrong about Kim Philby’s hidden agenda during his days in Washington: instead of reporting back to Moscow on when the next group of infiltrators was arriving so that they could be stopped, perhaps he had been monitoring the West’s reaction to the KGB’s various deception schemes in order to ensure the doomed commandos kept coming.

That assessment also underscores how one of the greatest victims of the battle against communism in the early Cold War was the cause of anti-communism itself. Invoked to prop up right-wing military dictatorships and topple democratic governments, to allow its self-appointed leaders to spout easy shibboleths about “rollback” and “liberation” but then shirk all responsibility for its consequences, anti-communism became to many just one more political hustle, a sales pitch that sold well to the gullible or frightened or overly trusting.

Ultimately, though, the endless debates over whether the CIA is to be blamed for this misjudgment or that botched mission is to miss the larger truth: one of the Agency’s primary functions is to be blamed.