The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts, Scott Anderson; copyright, September 1, 2020 -- Posted January 24, 2026

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. 

Author's note at the beginning:

• USSR: NKVD and KGB -- two successive acronyms for same agency, but the author refers to the agency across decades as the KGB
• US: OPC and CIA are two different agencies. 
• 1948 - 1950: OPC was regarded as quite separate from the CIA, even though OPC was housed withing the CIA;
• 1950: the two agencies began their integration with each other;
• 1952: full merger; the author will us the acronyms interchangeably after the 1952 merger with some attempt to explain why one acronym is used instead of the other;

Preface:

• author spent much of his formative years with his father (and family): South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia; his father was attached to the American embassy
• Korea and Taiwan were both regarded as frontline states in the Cold War;
• Indonesia was just emerging from a Cold War-inspired mass bloodletting that left t least a half-million dead;
• like everyone else in his generation, his view of the world was fundamentally shaped by the Cold War
• the first few pages: wow, so incredibly depressing; I doubt I will read much of this -- starting with the Vietnam War it seems to much was lost due to "wars" based on ideological narratives spouted by old men who simply wanted to retain power in their own countries, some by force, others by "democratic" elections. It all so seems so pointless and the best years of my life, 1964 - 1993 were overshadowed / framed / whatever you want to call it by the same Cold War.

 

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.