

Such blunders, Anderson writes, recast the U.S. threw its support behind autocratic leaders and missed opportunities to aid legitimate liberation movements such as the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Anderson notes the harrowing emotional cost on his subjects (Wisner committed suicide Burke and Sichel ultimately left the CIA “in despair”) as the U.S. Tracking the careers of CIA agents Michael Burke, Edward Lansdale, Peter Sichel, and Frank Wisner from the late 1940s through the 1950s, as the focus of their work shifted from Europe to Asia and Central America, Anderson documents clandestine operations in Albania and the Vietnamese jungle meetings with increasingly hawkish American officials, in particular Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and FBI director J. The roots of America’s decline in international reputation since WWII lie in the government’s confused and hypocritical actions during the first decade of the Cold War, according to this fascinating history by journalist Anderson ( Fractured Lands).
