The Quiet Americans

1

OPERATION DOGWOOD

As Frank Wisner watched from a dark corner of the nightclub, the diverted stage spotlight swept over the crowd until it found the man who had just stepped through the entranceway. He was in his mid-forties, bespectacled and wore a well-tailored suit. He was also clearly well known at the Park Hotel for, along with drawing the spotlight, his arrival caused the nightclub band to slide into a different jazzy number.

I m involved in a dangerous game,

Every other day I change my name,

The face is different, but the body s the same,

Boo boo, baby, I m a spy!

Wisner felt a growing irritation, directed less at the song than at the man being serenaded. His name was Lanning Packy Macfarland, and he was, in fact, a spy, the head of the Istanbul branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America s wartime intelligence agency. He was also the man that Frank Wisner, a fellow OSS officer, had made the 1,400-mile overland journey from Cairo to meet.

You have heard of Mata Hari,

We did business cash and carry,

Papa caught us and we had to marry,

Boo boo, baby, I m a spy!

Boo Boo, Baby, I m a Spy was a popular ditty in Istanbul in the spring of 1944, and with no group more so than the habitués of the Park Hotel bar. Located near the sprawling German consulate in neutral Turkey s largest city, the bar was the favored watering hole for officials of the Abwehr, the Nazi military intelligence agency. Naturally, that status also made it a destination spot for all the other spies circulating through wartime Istanbul, along with the assorted lowlifes con men and arms merchants, prostitutes and pimps inevitably drawn to such an underworld. Wisner had arrived early for his rendezvous with Macfarland and situated himself in a dark corner of the bar so as to avoid notice, a pointless precaution judging by the extravagant welcome given the American spy chief.

Now, as a lad, I m not so bad,

In fact, I m a darn good

Scott Anderson is the author of two novels and four works of nonfiction, including Lawrence in Arabia, an international bestseller which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. A veteran war correspondent, he is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

A New York Times Notable Book

ENTHRALLING...Lying and stealing and invading, it should be said, make for captivating reading, especially in the hands of a storyteller as skilled as Anderson...the climate of fear and intolerance that it describes in Washington also feels uncomfortably timely. "
Kevin Peraino, The New York Times Book Review
 
Anderson s look at four men who ran covert operations around the globe after World War II is AS THRILLING AS IT IS TRAGIC, as each man confronts the moral compromises he made in the name of democracy.
The Washington Post
 
A DARKLY ENTERTAINING tale about American espionage, set in an era when Washington s fear and skepticism about the agency resembles our climate today.
The New York Times

In his skillful and fascinating The Quiet Americans Mr. Anderson ingeniously tells his story through the entwined sagas of four of the secret service s most adept and intrepid operatives
Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal 

This intriguing book is an indictment. From its first page it argues that the CIA lost its way, in all senses, in the first decade of the cold war. Its witnesses are four courageous and initially idealistic patriots. Frank Wisner oversaw some of the earliest efforts to roll back communism in Europe. Michael Burke was a daredevil figure in the same game. Edward Lansdale was an éminence grise in the Far East. Peter Sichel, a German-born Jewish wine-merchant and Wunderkind and the only one of the four still alive held his nose as he co-opted former Nazis into the agency, an initiative cited as one of its original sins....Many of the CIA s failures stemmed from familiar shortcomings. We all have this tendency to look for information that confirms our beliefs and to ignore what conflicts with them, explains Mr Sichel. It s very hard to give somebody information he doesn t want to hear, and the