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From the bestselling author, a gripping history of the early years of the cold war the cia covert battles against communism and the tragic consequences that still affect america and the world today. At the end of world war ii the United States dominated the world militarily. Economically and in the moral standing. Seen as the victor over tyranny and it was clear to some soviet union was executing a plan to expand around the world. Chronicled the exploits. Michael burke, a Charming Hotel start falling on hard times, frank weisner, from a wealthy southern family, peter is a sophisticated german jew with escaped the nazis and a brilliant ad executive. With a combination of stupidity and ideological rigidity of the highest levels of government and more profoundly the decision to abandon american ideals. By the 1950s the soviet union had a stranglehold on europe and had begun its disastrous intervention in the com. At the beacothe beacon of democs overthrowing it democratically elected governments and earning the hatred of much of the world. All of this culminated in an act of betrayal that would block the cold war into a place for decades to come. Anderson brings a deep research, skeptical eye and lively prose in a Major International bestseller. To equip the cia by the moral compromises they had to make ones that became the architect of the destructive americans by anyone he would be so heartbroken he would take his own mind. The quiet americans as th is thy of these men and of how the United States at the very pinnacle of its power managed to damage its moral standing in the world. And Patrick Okeefe the author of say nothing, in this sweeping the data beautifully observed that, Scott Anderson on earth is the devastating secret history of the United States lost during the cold war. By focusing on this twisted Colorful Life of the legendary sites can anderson does to the the larger geopolitical saga into an intimate story of the fall of the talented men of the divisive empires end of the inescapable moral hazard of the american idealism and power. It is a hell of a book with themes of the consequences of espionage on interventionism that still resonate so powerfully today. Scott anderson is the author of two novels and for works of nonfiction including lawrence of arabia a best seller which was a finalist for the National Book critics circle award and New York Times notable book. Hes a corresponding writer for the New York Times magazine and tonight Scott Anderson will be in conversation with the senior features editor at the departures magazine and worked for publications including vanity fair, esquire and Bloomberg Business week. Hes the author of the Nonfiction Book about an illfated 19th century antarctic expedition providing a link for that in the comments if you want to pre order that you can. I am so happy and thrilled to be able to welcome Scott Anderson and julie. Today is the publication date which is a very exciting day for authors when they get to see the book in a while for the first time so please celebrate that by giving a hearty round of applause wherever you are. Its such a critical period in history that youre covering both in terms of geography and time even though the couple decades that you covered, so much goes on in the period. You dont twisted by focusing on for people who were rather are r extremely influential but maybe not household names. First of all, how did you settle on this and more importantly how did you settle on those four guys . I grew up in east asia in the favor in americas pocket a sense of the cold war as a real thing i kind of grew up with that and i always wanted to explore that in writing and tried to do a little bit of research i came to the conclusion that so much of what was to come was set into place between world war ii and the mid1950s. Fdr was talking about being the end of the dismantling at the british and french empires that america was going to be this heralded democracy. Then you go 12 years to 1956 and now the United States is paying for the maintenance and overthrowing democratic surveillance study how did that happen. It also occurred to me its not just generals or states that men and women who are on the frontline and when it comes to the cold war, maybe they were the ones that infiltrated each side and helped to fuel the arms race so i felt great, i get to write about that. Then theres the process of finding these men and i would love to talk unfortunately two of the men were somewhat well wellknown and the others were not at all. I wanted to find people if this happened to during the timeframe and they left a paper trail showing that change. It was kind of the proverbial workers in the attic. Hes the last surviving member of the cia and the cold war through code and that he agreed to a whole series. Speaking of a paper trail, one challenge im sure you paste is your righfacedis directing tn agent that is dedicated to secrecy. I assume the first of this post has been hard to find people writing their rivals for a hand second of all the cia must have had a hand in reacting but they were able to put out. I know you had a story how you were able to get the unredacted memoir of michael burke. Tell us about that. Guest there is censorship but it tends to be a page redacted. You could also triangulate information necessary to men in a topsecret meeting you go to one of the memorandums and it will be almost all walked out into another barely touched. In the case of michael burke, he wrote an autobiography and because he was in the cia, he had to go in front of the board and they completely gutted the buck. All of the best parts have been excised. The i happen to know that there is an unscripted it coat manuscript at boston university. So they went and did there was an unredacted manuscript. Host there were a few others that could have made for great characters to focus on. But in the cases i believe you spoke to one another. Was it tough to get him to agree to talk about this or was he just sort of waiting for somebody to ask and . Guest those that are still around, they live under a lifelong, told muntil the day te there are certain things they cannot talk about legally. Thats what i really wanted to talk about was what it was like diliketo keep the station chiefn berlin from the end of world war ii to 1952. Berlin was the ground zero. I wanted him to tell me war stories. Whatever the pressures you faced. And he told me early on, and they know he was very clear about this, how they were going up against the soviets down to a fine art. When peter showed up to become the covert operations chief in 1945 ther1945, there were hundrt thousands operating in the world. Thats what happened in the soviet monolith and he told the story that they were running a chance to go through eastern germany and they wer into favorn German Military officers. They were not concerned about how long the chains were runni running. He talked about how one night within 24 to 48 hours there were probably like 300 people. Years later he still got emotional. It seems throughout the period that you talk about, they had their act together in that america never did whereas they have these almost get smart levels. Is that still the case that . Are they now living through the consequences of the continuation of the period that they were talking about in both agencies . Guest i think so. Certainly from the dave world war ii, the soviets understood the next was absolutely going to be adversary and now we see that all the way down. For a couple of years he kind of imagined the Wartime Alliance with. Thats one thing. The second thing is the things they would do in the field. It is a cost to the west is that he wilaspeople come across an ey will build up and rat out other russian or soviet agents in the field. Sometimes if it is important enough, they could rat out a dozen of his own colleagues. So this is the cool part of th this, you dont sacrifice. You make thas timothy mcveigt mentality. Is that an exaggeration to say that ruthlessness at the beginning is an extension of his own ruthlessness and paranoia . Guest it absolutely added to the paranoia and panic. Already they had no pity reporting what was going on there. Not even in the fifth layer. On top of that we have a figure like stalin and what hes capable of doing next. It sounds kind of silly but if anybody has seen the movie far fargo, its this kind of gardenvariety plant of a crime where no one is supposed to get hurt. It revolved around this unpredictable character. One area where it seems as far as i can sulfated and hide behind is the psychological warfare. They were not getting it on the level of the americans in the second of all, tell me about this sort of event particularly the story of edward lansdale. Guest he was operating in asia and he was an ad executive before the war and came to asia at a time when a lot just started up. He just has this simple concept that if you want to win over the populists it for decades by a corrupt oligarchy into his idea was you need to reform the government and as far as actual fighting against the insurgency they need to get them out of their barracks and into the field to be seen as a force thats good among the people and rebuild schools and bridges. It was so successful that by 1954 vietnam was starting to perk up and the cia and others famously do the same thing so he goes out there and actually tries it comes close. Like he did in the philippines where he kind of handpicked a president and a minister in vietnam. The eventually it was a hearts and minds by us of the huge military drop coming in so 1964 he headed up the First Mission to South Vietnam into the seinen and 12 other guys individually they would be followed. You talk about that intervention and how that led out of the crisis. You mentioned several other possible exit ramps that could have diffused the cold war. Tell us a little bit about those in these moments where things could have gone much better could have gone differently and ended the war. I mentioned roosevelt and his idea was that the resolution is supposed to bring. Truman comes in and is in way over his head. He first meets stalin in the summer of 1945. He has this kind of selfassuredness and his wrong on all accounts so thats where he seized this moment. It was in this kind of awful fork in the road. He would have reacted differently if in a way where to truman was kind of a deer in the headlights. The other great turning point there is a spontaneous resolution people rose up from the streets and there was this key moment they simply have to let them go we cant is bound militarily. So they were leaving hungary into the next day november 1, 1966 over the course of the night, he changes his mind and thinks the american that the ame to do anything to help, they would have done it by now. It will spread and we will lose all of Eastern Europe as though they were trying to go back in the. The. Incredibly sad thing is the Eisenhower Administration had been talking about rolling back against communism and encouraging people to go and finally this happened. And so they were crushed. All of the guys you talk about started out with such an idea is the postwar savior and then all of a sudden they ended up participating in a pretty horrible thing backing up dictators and letting down legitimate movements. Did you end up judging the amendment that you write about . I dont. I mean i see it as it is easy to do the. I think what happened to all of these it is very gradual. Its a very gradual process. So say in germany right after the war they start working with the Intelligence Officers because they know whats happening and you go on and on but it doesnt start out that way. Its a gradual process. The other thing is cataclysmic stuff if. These were old world war ii veteran. So to come into this new concept the end justify the means. If they all reached the point it would be wonderful if we could foster them all that its crashing so fast we dont have the luxury of time. They have to claim to be front of us. I try to resist passing judgment on them and i think all of them were kind of tamed by the moral positiondecisions they have to. One thing you talk about is the home fron homefront reactioe red scare and the perpetual enemy of the cia was j. Edgar for assisting mccarthy and ended up just leading nowhere. But you do mention the in the moment they are still seeing now. You make the case that sure there might have been democrat and republicans before, but where you stood on this question of for example the altered this case alger hiss case and soviet spies in america, where you stood on that determines whether your kids and their kids would be more liberal or conservative. Its true. Basically the whole red scare where people if you bought into this idea the state department was riddled by a calming your politics and a certai find a ce. And if you thought joe mccarthy was a puppet of it, then your politics went another way. Its largely inherited. So from that you can kind of march along in time. They were the same whose children were against the iraq war and probably were voting democratic in this election into the opposite is true on the other side. This was the great schism in politics that started and the then number three in the cia was in charge of the covert operations all over the world. There was a time it looked like he was going to become the next cia director. Right at the moment it looked like he was going to be the protector, j. Edgar hoover launched another round of investigations. This was a reoccurring pattern. He was in a position almost all of them were disastrous for he reached the point he started struggling with his observations because the success rate was zero. The more he canceled, the more they wanted to go forward the more they got angry and when he was investigating a there were all these things that could be investigated. But the irony is a. In 19351945 the fbi had a real dress code back then. Suits and ties. They realized they were being tailed. To get back to the failed attempts at nationbuilding you mentioned what happened in the philippines. Were there any successful interventions in the nationbuilding across the world . Its a great question tha bui would say and they south korea today. It didnt become a democracy to for any pressure. It works against the in all the places they infuriated the vocal people if you want to add one more question. That is a great question. Its a dramatic story because of the disillusionment. That is a tragedy. Michael berg is kind of a come comedy. An extraordinarily handsome guy running this Program Operating out of rome that he was hanging out with the italian film and would sneak off at night to meet with conspirators did. Those stories leave together some interactions between them. Its just so put together is a fantastic book. The thought occurred to me i wish they would keep going and provide a history. We have the postworld war ii decades and theres like eight left. I want to remind the audience if you have any questions you can type those up and we will ask those of scott an in the remainr of the book is available for sale in your support is what keeps this year he is going but i want to ask a question. If i wonder if there are any pages in the playbook from that time that maybe shouldnt be in the playbook still that you think are. Do you know anything more about that that might be still tactics that the cia are using today . Not so much a cia come up with the russians, yes. What is kind of amusing is watching the how much theyve taken up the playbook of the old kgb and deception that americans have been bombarded with for the past years. One thing that i would say talking with people in spite of the cia, theres been talk of the Trump Administration the kind of understand that based on what we see as an adversarial nation everyone i talk to this post deeply concerned and suspicious as to why a big refused. So ive kind of answered the question in a roundabout way that that is what really jumps out at me seeing the parallel. I listened to the interview today and if it didnt come up, there was a story about a woman getting killed told, i forget we they were. I wondered if you could tell that story as well. In the el salvador in 1984 i was an aspiring journalist just starting out. In both of the countries there were ultra rightwing governments supported by the Reagan Administration and basically they were being sold directly that they had to maintain that somehow they were two separate entities. The pay was walking down the kind of boulevard in downtown ability of a young woman was thrown out on the sidewalk. Hands tied together in front of her and the body just thrown out. But then pulled back into traffic and drives away. I started walking towards coming up before i got there, a military example of, three or four soldiers jump out, the other two grab the body, for that in the van and drive off. So ten seconds later the military comes along to collect. This is happening routinely and there is some thing about the incident that struck me as other things happened. And i remember thinking how is it the America