The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts, Scott Anderson (b. 1959); copyright, September 1, 2020 by Scott Anderson.
Act 1: This Sad And Breathless Moment
- WWII
- 1944
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Lanning "Packy" Macfarland -- the spy; the head of the Istanbul branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's wartime intelligence agency.
- Frank Wisner, also OSS, on the trail of Macfarland
Act 2: Hearts And Minds And Dirty Secrets
- 1948
- Czech engineer Jan Prosvic, Prague
- Johnny: an agent of the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, or CIC
- it had been just seven weeks since the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia
- Prosvic needed to escape to the American sector; Johnny was there to help
Act 3: Crowding The Enemy
- 1952
- FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a top secret memorandum to his counterpart at the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith
- the memo concerned the CIA deputy director for plans, Frank Wisner
- questions rising again: about Wisner's wartime association with Princess Tanda Caragea of Romania.
- began with a lengthy report out of Austria updating the situation of the exiled Princess Tanda. Caragea had led a most checkered life since the end of World War II, trading out husbands and lovers with some regularity as she flitted between various exile homes in Western Europe. Long rumored to have been a spy for a variety of intelligence agencies, both communist and non-, Tanda and her mother were now reputedly running an "intelligence shop" outof their latest exile home in the Austrian town of Dornbirn.
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