50 when your specific would like to thank all of our supporters, supporters of Scott Anderson and Julian Sancton and everyone for their pouring of love for our bookstore. We had to adapt again so we are bringing you the things you love the most about Left Bank Books with these virtual events. Also our operating Curbside Pickup which is scheduled to resume this coming saturday seek an order scotts book and pick it up and started again on saturday or if you were anywhere in the country you can have it mailed to you. We offer a variety of mailing options and we can get the book in the mail to you where ever you are. We are happy to be able to bring ive been series personal. We believe its a way to expand your mind and make the world a better place. We hope you enjoy this event and we hope you support Scott Anderson and Left Bank Books by purchasing a copy for you and for all of your friends on a website. Which think a cop with the book is what keeps our events series door and keeps our doors, weather they are open or you know, its what keeps us getting you books is whats most important. When you buy books you keep your money here in st. Louis and it helps up as he better book store. Im the Events Coordinator and help produce our hundred offer this feature was a fantastic team. In st. Louis. We will be taking questions from the audience so be sure to type your questions as as a commentd well get to those at the end of the day. You sure to follow Left Bank Books on facebook to be notified about all of our fantastic virtual events. From the bestselling author of lawrence n arabia, a gripping history of early years of the cold war the cias covert battle against communism and the tragic consequences which still affect america and the world today. At the end of world war ii the United States dominate the world militarily, economically and immoral standing. Seeing as the victor over tire in the and to champion the freedom, but it was clear to some of the soviet union was already executing a plan to expand implement revolution around the world. The American Governments strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly formed cia. The quiet americans chronicles the exploits of four, Michael Burke, a charming former football star falling on hard times, frank weiser, the science of a wealthy southern family. Peter, a sophisticated german jew escape the nazis come and edward lansdale, brilliant ad executive. They ran operation around the globe trying to outwit the kgb in berlin, parachuting command in Eastern Europe, plotting coups and directing wars against communists insurgence in asia. A time and again the effort went awry. Forded by, nation of stupidity and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government and more profoundly, the decision to abandon american ideals. By the mid1950s the soviet union had a stranglehold on Eastern Europe, the u. S. Had begun its disastrous intervention in vietnam and america the beacon of democracy was overthrowing it democratically elected government and earning the hatred of much of the world. All of this culminated in an act of betrayal and cowardice that would lock the cold war into place for decades to come. Anderson brings to the telling of this story all the narrative deep Research Come skeptical eye and lively prose a Major International bestseller. In intertwined lives of these bn begin in in a, purse of defendg freedom by the ravages of the cold war led them to different fates. To equip the cia in despair stricken by the moral compromises they had to make, one weekend architect of the duplicitous and distracted americans by edwin would be so heartbreaking he would take a selectric to quite american system of these four men confessed with how the United States at the very pinnacle of its power managed to permanently damaged its moral standing in the world. And patrick okeefe, the author of say nothing, says in this sweeping vivid beautifully observed book Scott Anderson unearths the devastating secret history of how the United States lost the plot during the cold war. Its a hell of a book with themes about the unintended consequences of interventionism that still resonate powerfully today. Scott anderson is the author of two novels and for works of nonfiction including one on radium and International Bestseller which was a finalist for the National Book critics circle award and a New York Times notable book. He is a poor writer for the New York Times magazine and tonight Scott Anderson will be in conversation with Julian Sancton. Julian is a Senior Editor at parker magazine and has worked at publications including vanity fair, esquire and bloomberg. He is author of the upcoming Nonfiction Book the end of the world about an illfated 19th century antarctic expedition and i will be providing a link to that in the comments so if you want to preorder that you can too. I am so happy and thrilled to be able to welcome Scott Anderson and Julian Sancton to lefthand books, today is publication day which is a very important day for officers authors when they get to see their book in the wild for the first time so if everyone at home would help me in celebrating by giving both scott and julian are hearty round of applause wherever you are loud enough so we can allhear it. Thank you so much thank you so much. And for everybody tuning in. Scott, this is such a critical training of history youre covering, such as brawling book in terms of geography even though it is a couple decades that you cover, its so much about that period. You dealt with sprawl by focusing on 4 people who are extremely influential though maybe not household names. First of all, how did you settle on thisapproach and more importantly how did you settle on those four guys . I was a product of the cold war. I grew up in east asia in south korea, taiwan and indonesia and theyre all military dictatorships in americas pocket so the defense of the cold war was inexorable and i grew up with that. I always wanted to explore that in writing and in doing a Little Research i came to the conclusion that so much of what was to come over the span of the cold war of almost 50 years, so much of what was to come was set into place at the end of world war ii and the 1950s. And in 1944, fdr was talking about world war ii being that end of populism with the british and french and america was going to be this herald of democracy around the world and from 12 years on say from 1956 and now the United States is paying for the maintenance of the British Empire and theyre not raining democracy, their overthrowing democrats so i wanted to understand how that happened but also what occurred to me was in my reading people on the front lines. Its not generals or statesmen sitting behind a desk its men who are really on the front lines. And when it comes tothe cold war , these frontline soldiers were stuck by both sides. Each side fueled the race and uncovered spying so i guess youre right about spies. And theres a process of finding these four men and i sort of love to establish narrative unfortunately, about all the operatives. Two of the men frank wisner and sichel were wellknown. The other two were not at all. And it took a lot of, i wanted to find some people who had things that happened to them during this time. And also who left a paper trail showing that change and really looking at dates, i got 25 different potential people to focus on. I ended up with these four and the last thing ill say is on the proverbial shaft of letters and attic. But sichel is still alive, the last surviving member of the cia of the early postwar period and hes completely lucid and even better he agreed to do this so i think he was excited bythe book. Speaking of the paper trail, one challenge im sure you face that you are writing a history that is dedicated to secrecy and deception. So i assume that first of all youre not going to, it must have been hard to find people writing reliablestories. And second of all, how did that, how did the cia must have had a hand in redacting whatever they were able to put out. I understood how you were able to get the unredacted memoir of Michael Burke in particular, tell us about that. Yes, theres this censorship but fortunately in the United States, the censorship tends to befairly compact. Literally, i found theres a page thathad been redacted it was that. Sometimes you could take up the name and with a black chart. With these names that the redacted and you also triangulate information. This happens all the time so too were in the topsecret meeting , wrote memorandums of that meeting. Goes to one of their memorandums and it would almost be all blackout andthe other would be barely touched. And 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 cia board and they completely gutted the book. It was published, but all the best parts have been excised. But funnily enough it was a cia official who said i happen to know theres an uncensored manuscript at boston university. And so sure enough, there it was. And unredacted manuscript that i could fill in all the details. In the case of peterson shell and there were a few other groups thatstruck me as people , that could have made for a great character to focus on. Phillips would have been a great one or anyway, in the case of peter sichel, you spoke to one other 90yearold guy, i forget what his name is but what did it take to get him to agree to talk about this or was he just sort of waiting for somebody to happen. Probably somewhere in between. Guys who were still around. They live under a lifelong, not a band but there are certain things they can talk about. But what i really wanted to talk with peter sichel about was he was the station chief in berlin. Thats from the end of world war ii to 1952 so he been in ground zero of the competition. During those years. So i wanted to tell these were stories and what was it like or what werethe pressures he faced. These people have amazing stories, early on one thing there were clear about is how clueless the americans were going up against the soviets and deception and disinformation , down to a fine art. And the other thing i should add is a sign of just how clueless the americans were on this, when peter showed up in west berlin to become covert operations chief, there were certainly thousands of soviet spies operating in berlin and peter headed up a nine man career and he had just turned24 and thats what was coming next. The soviet model. And he told his story in 1936 that they were all from east germany area and they were all being run by former German Militaryofficers. And will talk about with german arrogance they were concerned about how long these were running and how many people were involved. And he talked about how one night, one who appeared in 40 hours, everybody got rest and there were probably about 300 people, they had had their chains completely wired whole time. And i tell the story, 67 years later he got emotional about it,. It just seems the kgb that you talk about just had their act togetherin a way that america never did. It sounds like america is sort of waiting at the entire time but the kgb is almost gets smart little sting operation and there is this elaborate poster. Has that always, is that still the case that there, they just have their ducks in a row and there the internet and herders of the katie vieira. We are prettily to allthis in our elections. Are there consequences for the continuation of the period youre talking about. I think so. Two things, one and i think you can see it today but certainly from the date world war ii ended even before world war ii ends, the soviets understood the next enemy was the west and specifically the United States and we were absolutely goingto be adversaries. You see that from stalin all the way down. And the americans werevery slow to understand that. Truman just came in right as the world was ending area and for a couple of crucial years he couldnt imagine the Wartime Alliance might be saved. And these were two crucial years where conceptually they were demilitarized while the soviets were takingover all of Eastern Europe. Thats one thing. The secondthing is the soviets , the thing they do in the field is to western mines, one thing i note quite frequently is will dangle across the west so youll come across and say to build up his own units he will grant out other russian or soviet agents inthe field. These are his colleagues and these guys would get arrested and thrown in prison and sometimes one guy could write out a dozen of his own colleagues. But theres this coldblooded is that that that the cia couldnt see it in another way but this is something that western Intelligence Agency could see, you dont sacrifice one of your levels of 12 in order to help. You make the case that that mentality stems openly from the analogyof one man. That this whole idea is first of the paranoia basically to behave that way and is that an exaggeration to say that he kgb mo and the ruthlessness of the soviets at the beginning is an extension of his own ruthlessness and paranoia . I think it adds to this feeling of paranoia and even panic on the west. Already we had no look behind the iron curtain. I was stunned by that, i had no idea that in the 1950s the cia didnt have a mold anywherenear. Not even in the fifth layer of the ministry of agriculture let alone the kremlin. Everything was in the dark. On top of that you got a figure like stalin who is essentially a paranoid sociopath and how do you ever predictwhat hes capable of doing next . It sounds kind of silly but it reminds me of fargo. The geopolitics immediately after the war, i havent seen it and its been a long time but part of the story is this gardenvariety crime where no ones supposed to get hurt but this hapless person get throwninto the middle of it and all hell breaks loose as a result. So much of whats coming next in world war ii revolved around stalin was this utterly unpredictable character. In one way it seems like the cia had some success and that the soviets as far as i can tell right behind the idea of psychological warfare. First of all, is it correctto say they were doing on the level of the americans and the second of all , tell me about the sort of story of edward lansdale. Lansdale is one of the four i saw he was operating in asia, hes was an ad executive and he came out to asia with just this at the time when a lot of common uncertainties werejust starting up in the philippines , malaysia and he just kind of had thissimilar concept that if you want to be a communist , if you want to be popular you have to give this population of government a different system and how thats really what lansdalefirst day. And the country have been ruled for a decades by a corrupt oligarchy. And great things are happening now and his idea was you need to reform the government, you need to put in somebody thats not to rob the country. As far as like actual fighting against communist insurgency, you need to get them out of their barracks and not just to fight the communist but to be seen as a source of good. Rebuild schools, build bridges and actually bring in a harbor. And lansdale, he had a huge role in defeating the communist insurgency in the 1950s. He was so successful that by 1954 when vietnam was occurring, the cia sent an up famously and the cia director said just go do the same thing youdid. So he goes out there and he actually tries and he comes close to being successful. Like he did in the soviets, the kind of handpicked the president to come in. He had a Prime Minister in vietnam and he kind of had his whisper and stuff like how to be a communist, how do the bureaucracy and unfortunately it got to be in vietnam it was this kind of small hearts and minds psions idea that got stuck away by this huge military and military drop. So in 1954 he had it up the First American military mission to south vietnam. And as they were fully in balance of power for two years. That course eventually would be followed by aryan culture. You talk about that as sort of a an intervention of what could have been an intervention in vietnam and how that might have led out of the crisis. You mentioned several other possible exit plans that could have used the coldwar , tell us about those. These moments where things could have gone much better or could have done differently and they didnt work. Ill mention two, oneof them i mentioned early on was 1944. His idea was the resolution of world war ii was supposed to be. He died three weeks before. And truman comes in and truman is just way in over his head. And he first meets stalin and he famously at his first meeting with stalin 1945, he said to stalin, hes honest. Hes smart as hell but hes honest. He was sort of had this selfassured and hes pretty much so i think thats where he sees stalin, fdr is his depth when it came was in this kind of he had this president longer, he was over a year, he didnt know how to deal with stalin. He was reacting to the soviets usurping of Eastern Europe. That in a way where truman was a deer in headlights. The other great turning point was the book on hungary and revolution. Theres this spontaneous revolution as people rose up in the, the hungarian government and military joined the revolutionaries and there was this key moment where chris jeff one night said you know what, we have to let somebody go. We cant do this to stalin momentarily so the tanks were leaving and l