CIA's tragic miscalculations in formative years

Dave Davies (Fresh Air WWNO, 6/25/21); Pfc. Sandoval, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Quiet Americans examines tragic miscalculations in the CIA's formative years

HOST DAVE DAVIES: This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in today for Terry Gross.

We're used to a world in which American intelligence services operate with enormous power and reach. Our guest today, writer Scott Anderson, has written a book about the early years of the CIA, when America was victorious in World War II and former soldiers were improvising a campaign of spying and covert operations to contain and undermine the nation's new adversary, the Soviet Union (USSR).

It was a time, Anderson writes, when Americans wielded great moral authority in the world, and nations struggling to throw off colonial rule looked to the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

Anderson concludes that the CIA's rigid commitment to anti-communism and willingness to topple democratically-elected governments squandered the goodwill the U.S. held in the developing world and led to a disastrous war [on] Vietnam.

Anderson tells the story through the lives of four young men who played important roles in the CIA in his book, The Quiet Americans. I interviewed him last year when the book was published. It's just come out in paperback. Transcripts + AUDIO

• AUDIO: CIA's [crimes during its] formative years | WWNO

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn

ANDERSON: Sure. It was in 1984. I was an aspiring journalist at that point. I had gone down to El Salvador. And in 1984, the so-called dirty war in El Salvador was really starting to wind down a bit. And perhaps over the previous four years, something like 60,000 people died in this war, and the vast majority of them killed by -- not in combat, but by right-wing death squads that were part of the government.

DAVIES: You know, it was a leftist insurgency against a right-wing government, right? Yeah.

ANDERSON: That's right, and a right-wing government being supported by the Reagan administration. But by 1984, the Reagan administration's whole attitude was, well, the war is winding down. You know, the death squads are, you know, are not nearly as active as they once were. And, you know, they're really not part of the government. And so it was -- this fiction had been going on for quite some time.

And so this one day I was in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, and I was walking along a downtown street, and a van passed me. It pulled to a stop maybe -- I don't know -- a hundred feet ahead of me. And out came a body of a dead woman. Her thumbs were tied in front of her. And just -- the body was just tossed out on the street. And as -- I was the only person on this street. And as I kind of tentatively walked towards this woman who I, you know, clearly knew was dead, even before I got to her, a matter of maybe 10 seconds after the first van had pulled away, a military van pulls up. Three soldiers get out. One points a gun at my feet, kind of the universal, you know, stay back symbol, and the other two men -- the other two soldiers pick up the body, throw it in their van. They all get back in the van and drive away.

So it was this very kind of -- very seamless sleight of hand idea where the, you know, the so-called anonymous death squad has dumped this body, and literally 10 seconds later, the government has come to collect it. And there was something in that moment that just, for me, it just really brought home this idea of, you know, what has the American government come to that we are supporting governments who will murder their own citizens and just throw their bodies out in broad daylight? And so that was really kind of a turning point for me of just how squalid had our foreign policy become.

DAVIES: So this book is about the early years of the CIA kind of from the end of World War II through the mid-'50s and when the CIA had sort of become a primary instrument of policy in fighting the Cold War. You know, we're used to the American intelligence community being huge. But before World War II, the Soviets had - they had a huge intelligence operation. They'd been spying for a long time -- not so much the United States. Why?

ANDERSON: You know, America was really -- up until we came into World War II, we were still a deeply isolationist country, I think, at our core to the point where we had no permanent foreign intelligence agency. It wasn't until World War II with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services that there was any kind of foreign intelligence office. So the four men I profile were all in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during the war.

And then President Truman shut down the OSS in the immediate aftermath of the war. And it was this idea that, okay, the war is over; we're all going home. The American military was demobilizing at the rate of 15,000 soldiers a day. And it was like, our job is done, and we're just -- we're going back home to, you know, our American way of life -- so utterly unprepared for what was coming.

There was an interim organization started that was kind of the bridge between the OSS and the CIA....

DAVIES: Well, it's quite a story. Scott Anderson, thank you so much for speaking with us again.

ANDERSON: Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate being on.

DAVIES: Scott Anderson is the author of The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War: A Tragedy in Three Acts, which is now out in paperback.

(Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR)