During the Cold War’s first decades, the CIA’s version of these men on the spot produced a succession of seemingly stunning covert victories that created a pantheon of putative American heroes. Presidential grandson Kermit Roosevelt Jr. conducted a daring coup that secured Iran’s oil industry for the West. Simultaneously, as the French retreated in defeat from South Vietnam, the “Quiet American” Edward Lansdale preempted a communist takeover by installing a pro-American leader in Saigon.
A decade later, Lansdale’s CIA comrade Lucien Conein fomented a coup to kill that same president, inadvertently plunging Saigon into a sustained political crisis that precipitated American military intervention. On another continent, CIA station chief Larry Devlin formed a pliable if kleptocratic regime out of the chaos in postcolonial Congo. In the Cold War’s final phase, CIA officer John Stockwell went from commanding the Agency’s clandestine intervention in Angola to becoming his country’s foremost critic of covert operations.
By acting as what one US president called “the guy on the ground,” these individual CIA operatives had both the adaptability and local knowledge to carry out their covert missions with consistent success—in contrast with recurring debacles by the Agency’s bureaucracy, whether in Cuba, Indonesia, or South Vietnam.
While American agents, armed with the peerless power of their country’s global hegemony and countless millions in cash, were the most successful, they were by no means alone in this shadowy interstice of international politics. Only a month after Indonesia won independence from the Netherlands in 1949, Dutch operative Raymond “the Turk” Westerling launched an abortive plot to slaughter the new nation’s cabinet and bring Indonesia back within Amsterdam’s ambit.
As superpower rivalry over Southeast Asia intensified in the 1960s, British psywar expert Norman Reddaway disseminated sordidly skillful propaganda that facilitated the Indonesian military’s slaughter of a million suspected subversives, thereby destroying that country’s massive communist party. In wartime Saigon, communist spy Pham Xuan An used his cover as a Time magazine reporter for espionage seminal to a succession of US defeats during the Vietnam War. In Angola, the Cuban revolutionary Jorge Risquet spent several years coordinating Cuban and Soviet support for the country’s Marxist government fighting, and defeating, a formidable tandem of CIA cash and South African firepower.
That experience left me with an indelible lesson about the overweening willpower that carried otherwise ordinary men to such heights, or depths, of achievement.