The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War by Scott Anderson

 In 1944 the United States was seen as a beacon of hope and a source of deliverance throughout the developing world, the emergent superpower, that in the postwar era envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt would nurture democracy across the globe and dismantle the obsolete and depised rule of the European colonial powers.... Just twelve years later, though, the United Nations was already beginning its long slow slide into irrelevance, and rather than dismantling the European colonial empires, in many places the United States was paying for their maintenance.  Instead of fostering the spread of democracy, the United States was overthrowing democratic governments -- in Iran, in Guatemala -- that it deemed communist-tilting or otherwise unreliable.

-- The Quiet Americans by Scott Anderson (Doubleday 2020)

Anderson follows the years 1944-1956 through the lives of four "spies" for the CIA: Michael Burke, Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel, and Edward Lansdale.  Whatever good these four tried to do --in Asia, South America and Europe -- during this period was often circumvented and overruled by Allen Dulles, CIA director, and John Foster Dulles, secretary of state.  Anderson points out that intelligence gathering was neglected in order to do more infiltration and sabotage, because that was expensive and garnered more money for the Central Intelligence Agency.  And when there was the kind of attempted revolution in Hungary -- the kind of thing the CIA had been trying to do throughout Eastern Europe -- Eisenhower sat on his hands while the USSR crushed it.

Time and time again the United States totally forgot that it once fought off a colonial power  as it backed the wrong side because of the fear of communism.  Anderson's book ends about 1961, when JFK starting sending troops to Vietnam and supported a coup against South Vietnam leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and we all know what happened after that, not only in Vietnam but subsequently in Iraq and now Afghanistan, as Islam and "the war on terror"  have replace communism as our bete noire, at the cost of many lives and trillions of dollars.