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CIA spies lose faith

20 February 2021

9:00 AM

20 February 2021

9:00 AM

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

Picador, pp.576, 20

With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The Estonian capital of Tallinn crawled with Russian money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’). The television in my hotel room was detuned from capitalist Finnish to Soviet channels, but I was able to pick up Miami Vice from across the Gulf of Finland.

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