The Quiet Americans Quotes

“Bullitt was forever urging the president to take a harder stand against Stalin”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“Lansdale had been with Roxas earlier that same day, part of the president’s press corps entourage, but about all he could find to say by way of eulogizing the fallen leader was, “now that I’ve switched to Chesterfields, he didn’t bum Camels from me as he used to do.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“But from the standpoint of cold-eyed realpolitik, perhaps the greatest downside of the Guatemalan coup for the American government was that it produced more and hardier enemies. One of these was a twenty-six-year-old Argentine doctor who had been living in Guatemala City at the time of the coup, and who joined Árbenz in seeking asylum in Mexico. A few months later, the doctor would pen a vivid account of those hectic last days in Guatemala entitled “I Witnessed the Coup Against Arbenz,” in which he proclaimed that the United States had now become the enemy; as he wrote in his prophetic closing: “the struggle begins.” The doctor’s name was Ernesto Rafael Guevara, but he was soon to become better known to the world by his nom de guerre: Che.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“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.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

“[I]t isn't the considered judgments of hindsight, but actions actually taken that show the true character of a person.”
― Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts