![]() ![]() If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. The onset of the Cold War made that position untenable, and in 1947 Truman acceded to the creation of the CIA, part of a major national security restructuring that effectively put the United States on a permanent wartime footing. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project. Even after the war, Harry Truman’s first instinct was to return to the earlier status quo he shut down the Office of Strategic Services, the country’s fledgling intelligence/clandestine-operations agency, as soon as he could. ![]() Though it can be hard to remember in 2020, when the Department of Homeland Security boasts almost a quarter of a million employees, before World War II the United States maintained no substantive foreign intelligence service. He also admires their seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, as they attempted to conduct near-impossible missions with little guidance or experience. Phuong Hei is a young, beautiful Vietnamese woman, for whom Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle compete throughout The Quiet American. Anderson enjoys his characters and brings the reader in on their jokes, such as Burke’s cover as a producer for the fictitious “Imperial Pictures” or Lansdale’s fake job as an “assistant historian” of the Thirteenth Air Force, the lowest of the low. ![]()
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