From the ravages of the cold war. One quick the cia in despair by the moral compromises they made on the duplicitous and distractive americans, anyone would be so heartbroken to take his own life. The quiet americans 4 cia spies at the dawn of the cold wara tragedy in 3 acts is the story of these four men and how the United States at the pinnacle of its power managed to permanently damaged moral standing in the world. The author of say nothing says in this beautifully observed book Scott Anderson unearths devastating secret of how the United States lost during the cold war. Are focusing on this Colorful Life of four legendary interesting distilled a larger geopolitical saga into internet story of flawed but talented men and the inescapable american idealism and power. It is a helluva book with scenes about the unintended consequences of espionage and intervention that still resonate today. Scott anderson is the author of two novels, lawrence in arabia, International Bestseller which was a finalist for the National Book critics circle award. A veteran war correspondent, he writes for New York Times magazine and tonight Scott Anderson will talk to julian sancton, the senior features editor at departures magazine and work that sanity fair, bloomberg businessweek, the author of the upcoming Nonfiction Book house at the end of the world. A 19thcentury antarctic expedition providing a link for that. If you want to order that you can too. I am happy and thrilled to welcome Scott Anderson and julian sancton, to reinstate the publication day which is an exciting day for authors when they get to see their book for the first time. If everyone would help me celebrate that by giving them a hearty round of applause wherever you are. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. For everybody tuning in. This is such a critical period of history, geography, and time, the couple decades you cover, so much goes on in that period, you dealt with this by focusing on four people who were extremely influential but not household names. How did you settle on this approach and how did you settle on these four guys . I was a product of the cold war. South korea, taiwan, they are military dictatorships, very anticommunist. The sense of the cold war as a real thing, i grew up with that and i wanted to explore that. And do a little bit of research and came to the conclusion so much over the cold war, almost 50 years, so much was put in place by the end of world war ii in 1950s. In 1944, fdr talked about world war ii as the british and french empire and america was this harold of democracy and you go 12 years on, 1956, now the United States is paying for the maintenance of the british and french empires. They are not freeing democracy but overturning democratic institutions. How did that happen . What also occurred to me, the kind of history i like to write and read, people on the front lines, not generals or statesmen, men and women on the front lines. When it comes to the cold war the front line soldiers were the ones who infiltrated each side. So great, i get to write about that but the process, i would love to do that but in the time frame i am writing about all the operatives, two men, frank wisner and Edward Lansdale are some was wellknown. Michael burke and peter sichel not at all. I wanted to find people who had big stuff that happened to them during this timeframe and were changed by it and left the paper trail showing that change. Looking at 25 different potential people to focus on i ended up with these four. Last thing i will say, the proverbial chest of letters in the attic that i found on this, peter sichel is 97 years old, the last surviving member of the cia in this period, completely lucid and agreed to a series of things. Speaking of the paper trail, one challenge you faced, you are writing a history of an agency dedicated to secrecy and deception. You are not going must have been hard to find a reliable story of any length and second of all how the cia, must have had a hand in rejecting the words that were put out. You had a story of getting unredacted memoir of Michael Burke. There is censorship but in the United States the censorship is fairly incompetent. There is a page that remains redacted. I could pick out the name through the black chart, or counting letters that are mainly redirected and triangulate information. This happens all the time. They wrote memorandums of the meeting. You go to one of their memorandums and it is all blacked out. In the case of Michael Burke, he wrote an autobiography. Because he was in the cia, had to go in front of the cia review board. All the best parts had been excised. The cia official says i have been to know him censored manuscript at boston university, sure enough, went to boston university. I could fill in all the details that were taken out. There are a few others could have made for great characters to focus on. In the case of peter sichel, he spoke to one other 90yearold but to get him to agree to talk about this or was he waiting for somebody to ask . Probably somewhere in between. Guys who are still around live under a lifelong, not a band but until the day they die, they cant talk about it but what i wanted to talk with peter sichel about was he was the station chief from the end of world war ii to 1952. Berlin was ground 0 of the confrontation during those years. I wanted him to tell me war stories. What was it like . He told me amazing stories. One thing he was clear about was how clueless americans were going against the soviets, deception and disinformation down to a fine art. The other thing i should add is how out to lunch, when peter showed up in west berlin to become covert operations chief, there were hundreds if not thousands of soviet spies operating, he had just turned 24 and that is what he was up against, the soviet monolith and he told his story in 1936 that they were running chains of informants in east germany are being run by former German Military officers and they were not concerned how long they were involved. And talked about how one night when the guy disappeared and within 24, 48 hours, 300 people had their chains wired so in the story, 67 years later throughout the period you talk about they have their act together in a way america never did. It seems americans are winking at the entire time whereas the kgb almost has a get smart level sting operation, elaborate hoaxes. Has that always, is it still the case they have their ducks in a row . Privy to all this, are we living rules of consequences of a continuation of the period we are talking about in the agencies . I think so. Two things. You still see it today, the day world war ii ends and even before, the soviets understood that the next enemy was the west specifically the United States, we were going to be adversaries. You see that from stalin all the way down and the americans were slow to understand that. Truman a man as the war was ending and for crucial years he imagined the Wartime Alliance might be safe and two crucial years in which americans were demilitarized while the soviets were taking over eastern europe. The second thing, the soviets, the thing they would do in the field of espionage to the western mind was illegal. One thing they would do quite frequently, they did this very recently was a dangle, essentially a false effect. They would come across and say i want to defect. And he will rat out other russian or soviet agents, his colleagues, they are arrested and thrown in prison. Sometimes an important enough operation, one guy could rat out a dozen of his colleagues from the top. This is a coldblooded nurse coldbloodediness, but something no western intelligence agency, you dont sacrifice one of your men let alone 12 in order to help one. You make the case that stems from the path knowledge of one man, joseph stalin. The paranoia it takes to behave that way, the human lives are extendable. Is it an exaggeration to say the kgb memo and the ruthlessness of the soviet beginning is an extension of his own ruthlessness and paranoia . The figure of stalin added to the feeling of paranoia and panic but already they have nobody behind the iron curtain worried about what was going on. I was stunned by that. In the 1950s they didnt have a mole not even in the fifth layer let alone high up where everything was parked. On top of that you have a figure like stalin who is a paranoid sociopath. How do you predict what hes capable of doing next . It sounds kind of silly but in the movie fargo the geopolitics remind me of that. Fargo is a story of a gardenvariety crime where no one is supposed to get hurt but a sociopath is thrown in and all hell breaks loose and i think so much of trying to figure out what comes next revolved around this unpredictable character. One area where it seems the cia has some success and the soviets as far as i can tell didnt lag behind his psychological warfare. Is it correct that they werent doing it on the level of the americans and second of all tell me the origins of that. One of the four i call, operating in asia, and at executive came out to asia at a time when a lot were starting up in the philippines. A simple concept, if you wanted to defeat communism, you had to give the local population a government that could lead it in a place like the philippines. The country had been ruled for decades by our corrupt oligarchy, same thing that is happening now and his idea was you need to reform the government, someone who was not out to rob the country. As far as actual fighting against the communist insurgency you had to get them in the field and not just fight the communists but see the good in other people, rebuild schools, bridges, bring in harvest and not singlehandedly but a huge role in defeating the communist insurgency in the philippines, he was so successful that by 1954 vietnam was threatened, the cia, famously the cia director, just go to the same thing. He goes out and tries and comes close. Lake he did in the philippines where he hand picked a president and Prime Minister in vietnam, how are you defeat communism and bureaucracy and it got so big, vietnam, hearts and minds, ideas but got swept away by huge military bureaucracy coming in. So headed up the First American military mission to South Vietnam with 12 other guys and only in town for two years and eventually followed by 3 million soldiers. That is near intervention or what could have been intervention that led out of the crisis. You mentioned several other epigrams that could have defused the cold war, moments were things could have gone differently and ended the war. I mentioned roosevelt in 1934, his idea what the resolution of world war ii was supposed to bring, the spread of democracy. He died three weeks before the end of the war in europe. Truman is way over his head. He first meets stalin, his first meeting with stalin in summer of 1935 he says to stalin he is honest, smart as hell but i can deal with it. The selfassuredness he was wrong on all counts. That is where you see fdrs death when it came was an awful fork in the road. If he had been president longer he would have known how to deal with stalin. He would have reacted to soviet usurping in a way that truman was a deer in headlights. The other great turning point, the hungarian revolution, spontaneous revolution, people rose up in the streets, the hungary and military joined the revolutionary and a key moment, one night, we have to let hungary go. We cant put it down militarily. The tanks were leaving hungary and the next day november 1st, 1956, over the course of the night, the americans do anything to help the hungary and revolutionaries, the revolution, they are not coming. If we let hungary go we are going the cancer will spread and we. Eastern europe. The incredibly sad thing, the Eisenhower Administration was talking about rolling back against communism and all of a sudden we cant do anything. All the guys you talk about started with good intentions, living up to americas morally right upstanding postwar savior and it went pearshaped after a while and they ended up participating through pretty horrible things, backing up dictators and letting down legitimate movements. You end of judging the men you write about . Know i dont. I see it, it is easy to do that, to stand in judgment of people. Also what happened to almost all of these, it is very gradual. A gradual surface in germany, right after the war, former the literary intelligence officers, they know what is happening. Then it becomes members of the nazi party and you go on and on, working with bona fide nazi war criminals but it doesnt start out that way. It is a gradual process. The other thing, for all of these men they saw the cold war, every other day cataclysmic stuff happening all the time. This was an x essential crisis 6 essential is in clearly. Having come at this, world war ii veterans, a new contest, the ends justify the means and all four that i write about were very as far as theing messaging of social issues but it would be wonderful if we could do that but things are crashing so fast we dont have the luxury of time. We have to find the allies that are in front of us so i try to resist passing judgment. All four of them were pained by the moral decisions they had to make. You talk about what is going on on the home front, the reaction to the red scare and perpetual enemy of the cia was j edgar hoover, assisting mccarthy in his witchhunts to source out communists and it led nowhere. That was the origin of the schism in American Society that we are still seeing now. You make the case there might of democrats and republicans before but where you stood on this question of the alger his case and existence of this column of soviet spies, determine whether your kids and their kids would be liberal or conservative. It is very true. The first great schism in this country domestically, the whole red scare, where people, if you bought into the idea there was a vast communist conspiracy and the state department was riddled with red spies your politics went a certain way and if you thought joe mccarthy was full of it and a puppet of j edgar hoover, then your politics went another way, politics are largely inherited. You tend to be close to what your parents believe in general. It wasnt called red and blue, you could large along time. Whose children were against the vietnam war, or against the iraq war voting democratic in this election on the other side. The great schism in american politics starting within this period and had a direct effect that i wrote about. The grand wizard in covert operations throughout the world. And that the moment, he felt he was going to become the director, and and the remaining 7 years earlier, and the fbi, in the investigation, virtually his entire life, he has seen so many positions, what was behind the lines, and scrubbing these operations and the more operations he canceled, field officers sponsoring the program allowing him to go forward, and wondering about the operations investigated for being kgb. Along with what was happening in front of him, over a shoulder investigated as an american. Despite all that, spies that were certainly operating on our cords and most notorious one what he trusted the most. What hoover would do, a genuine spire, in 1945 this woman career came in and and on this case, and had a real dress code and and and tracking bona fide they realized they were being tailed in eight seconds. And stop all this, no convictions out of this. That was a pattern we see going through the 1970s. To get to the failed attempt at nationbuilding and interfering with communist dictators, you mentioned lansdale and what happened in the philippines, was there any successful American Intervention in politics or nationbuilding around the world . Great question. At the end of the day some of the countries of east asia, they have democracy, these were very much american states but during the years i was there, they were hardcore dictatorships. Any pressure the americans put on was very organic. I think you would find a few around the world that were successful at nationbuilding but what works against that are places, certainly didnt do successful nationbuilding job, the coup of 1954 is triggered an awful war afterwords, didnt do a great job in iraq and we are living with that today. If a movie were made of one of your four characters who would you prefer it be about . That is a good question. Frank wisner has a dramatic story. Peter sichel is a great story. Michael burke is kind of a comity. I describe him as james bond, extraordinarily handsome guy running this program in our bay area operating out of rome and as his cover, he was hanging out with cafes, meeting with albanian coconspirators. Got a tragedy, drama, comedy. All those stories weaved to gather, perfectly put together, fantastic book and the thought occurred to me, i wish there was a prequel, the history of the twentieth century. I was looking up here. You have world war i and the postwar decade and only eight left. Thanks. Know problem. I want to remind the audience if you have questions you can type of those after the comments. A reminder the book is availableforsale, your support keeps the series going. Ask a question about you did mention the continuation where we are now a little bit i wondered if there are pages in the playbook from that time that may be shouldnt be in the playbook but they are. Do you know anything more about the dastardly things that might be tactics using today . Not so much the cia, the russians, what was amazing, watching what Vladimir Putins government, how much they have taken the playbook of the old kgb, america has had for the past 45 years. One thing i will say talking to people in the cia they are annoyed with the trump administrations parts and understand they fundamentally see russia as an adversarial nation and a, everyone i talk to is deeply concerned as to why our president seems to insist on that. I kind of answered your question in a round about way. That to my mind jumped out at me, really the russians. I listened to the interview. If it didnt come up, the woman getting killed, i forget where you were, i wondered if you could tell that story here. In el salvador i was an aspiring journalist, by 1984 about four years and by the reagan administration, by rightwing despots, but the reagan administration, they have to maintain the somehow the death squad in t