Scott Anderson - The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts

When I was a very young boy, my favorite day of the year was October 10. It was the mid-1960s and my family and I were living in Taiwan, where my father was attached to the American embassy. October 10 was the anniversary of an uprising in 1911 that led to the creation of the Republic of China, and it was celebrated in Taiwan by a massive military parade through the streets of the capital, Taipei. By great good luck, my fathers office overlooked one of the main parade routes, as well as the vast square in front of the Presidential Palace that was the marchers final destination. From his office window, I would watch transfixed as the square below gradually filled with soldiers wearing a riotous array of different-colored uniforms and standing at rigid attention. The highlight was when Chiang Kai-shek emerged onto a balcony of the palace to give a speech. It always ended with the same exhortation: Back to the Mainland! At this, artillery would thunder, a hundred thousand soldiers cheered as one, and great billows of propaganda balloons and homing pigeons carrying anti-communist messages rose into the sky, theoretically on their way to the enemy, Red China, just eighty miles away across the Formosa Strait. For a bloody-minded young boy, all of this was terrific stuff, better than Christmas. It took me a long time to realize that my father didnt actually enjoy these annual outings.

Like everyone else of my generation, my view of the world was fundamentally shaped by the Cold War. This shaping may have been more acute in my case due to the places where I grew up: South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. Korea and Taiwan were both regarded as frontline states in the Cold War, while by the time my family moved there, Indonesia was just emerging from a Cold Warinspired mass bloodletting that left at least a half-million dead.

One of the things I remember most from my childhood is that the threat of war, of a sudden attack by the communists, was always in the air. In South Korea, the government ruled under martial law, its army forever vigilant against the North Korean communists, massed just thirty-five miles up the road from the capital of Seoul. In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek went one better than martial law and declared a permanent state of siege. The entranceway to my elementary school was dominated by a large antiaircraft gun on a swivel platform, two Republic of China soldiers constantly scanning the skies with binoculars for first sign of an incoming Red Chinese squadron. The result in both countries was soldiers everywhere: in the marketplaces, in the parks, passing by in long convoys of transport trucks during school field trips or family drives. Whenever I conjure an image from my childhood, there are usually soldiers somewhere in the frame.

I was alternately thrilled and terrified by all this. Once in Taiwan, when in the grip of the latter state of mind, when I couldnt sleep at night for fear that the communists might come before morning, I sought reassurance from my godfather, a tough-as-nails lieutenant colonel in Air Force Intelligence. When I asked how much advance warning we would have if the Red Chinese did attack, my godfather lit one of the sixty or seventy Camels he would smoke that day and gazed thoughtfully up at its coil of smoke. About nine minutes, he said finally. Why do you ask?

I was too young to appreciate the cynicism of all this, to understand that much of what I was seeing was just so much political theater. The North Koreans werent going to stream across the DMZ again, and the Red Chinese werent going to invade Taiwan; by the 1960s, the East Asia front of the Cold War had long since settled into watchful stasis. Instead, what upholding the banner of anti-communism now meant in these places was that their military dictators need brook no opposition, could summarily crush even the slightest sign of domestic dissent. And so they did. In April 1960, my parents watched from a hillside above downtown Seoul as students protesting the dictatorship were machine-gunned by police. During the time we lived in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-sheks prisons were filled to bursting with tens of thousands of political prisoners. In the so-called Indonesian civil war, virtually all the killing had been done by one side, all the dying by the other, and rather than the advertised communist conspirators, the vigilante squads set loose by the military junta often found their victims among Indonesias ethnic Chinese minority, the backbone of the nations merchant class. In each one of these countries, the dictators chief benefactor, the United States, could be counted on to steadfastly look the other way.