The World

* A world game of espionage was played out as each side tried to burrow agents, single, double and triple, deep into the institutions of the other. This bleak, amoral world was exquisitely rendered and turned into literature in the masterpieces of human frailty and betrayal, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by an ex-intelligence officer who became one of the great post-war novelists: John le Carré. Both sides used clandestine and kinetic methods to overthrow their rival’s proxies all over the world. Yet in both camps the control of local actors by Moscow and Washington were as exaggerated as the rare successes of the KGB and CIA. Later a myth grew up that the CIA had successfully launched multiple coups. This anti-imperialist narrative underplayed the agency of local potentates. One rare case of a CIA plot that succeeded was greenlit in June 1954 by Eisenhower in Guatemala, where US auxiliaries overthrew the socialist president.

* Housing was needed and property prices were rising in the expanding cities. In New York, Fred Trump, son of Drumpf the Bavarian gold-rush brothel-keeper, built thousands of houses and apartment, seeking government loans to offer cheap housing, often keeping much of the money. Telling his agents ‘not to rent to blacks’ and, if they were already tenants, to ‘get rid of the blacks’, he was found guilty of bias against the black tenants. He was the personification of hard-nosed American capitalism, bullying his three sons. Fred Trump left a billion-dollar fortune, a huckster flamboyance and a personal philosophy to his second son Donald, who embraced the old man’s philosophy: ‘In life there are killers and there are losers … We’re killers … you’re a king, you’re a killer.’

* A paradox of populist televised politics is that the best performer may not be good at anything else: ‘The qualities rewarded in the rise to eminence,’ wrote Henry Kissinger, ‘are less and less the qualities required once eminence is reached.’

* After Luciano’s arrest, his own organization was taken over by underboss Vito Genovese; the Five Families that dominated New York crime continued as before, as did the Mafia’s governing body, the Commission, founded by Luciano. Lansky’s partner was a cunning younger Mafioso in New York, Carlo Gambino, consigliere of the most terrifying Mafia chieftain of his day, Albert Anastasia, who ran a hit squad out of the City Democratic Club which the newspapers called Murder Inc, with Anastasia as lord high executioner. But when Anastasia tried to create his own casinos in Havana, Lansky and Gambino ordered him hit: on 25 October 1957, Anastasia was at the Park Sheraton Hotel, Manhattan, reclining in his barber’s chair, covered in warm towels, when he was shot, creating one of the famous images of a Mafia hit. Gambino took over the Family that later produced John Gotti.

* Batista was typical of the leaders backed by the US who became even more essential in the struggle against Communism. ‘He may be a bastard,’ FDR supposedly said about the US ally Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, ‘but he’s our bastard.’ Somoza and his son ruled until 1979. On the island of Hispaniola, the US backed Rafael ‘El Jefe

’ Trujillo, Dominican tyrant since 1930, who in 1937 had ordered the slaughter of thousands of black Haitians in a massacre known as El Corte. In Haiti, it tolerated the election of a popular doctor who made his name treating yaws, a common disease, then as a progressive health minister, François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. In a country long dominated by the mulatto elite, Duvalier was black, promising to protect ‘the great unacknowledged’. Distrusting the army, he created his own Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, a militia of murderous machete-wielding secret policemen nicknamed Tontons Macoutes after the bogeymen who in voodoo mythology would catch victims in a sack. Led by a henchman known as the Vampire due to his trade in blood plasma, the Macoutes burned, shot and dismembered Papa Doc’s enemies, whose remains were often displayed in trees as a warning; Washington had nonetheless initially trained them. In 1964 Duvalier declared himself president for life.

Norodoms and Kennedys, Castros, Kenyattas and Obamas

THE YOUNG KING OF CAMBODIA

Yet Zahedi and his cohorts were at large; Mosaddegh’s refusal to arm the Communists lost him their support, while his negotiations with the westerners alienated Kashani. On 19 August the ayatollah brought a mob to the city, aided by $100,000 of CIA funds, just as Zahedi re-emerged, sending troops to bombard Mosaddegh’s house. Old Bugger fled over his wall in his pyjamas, but was quickly arrested. In Rome, at the Excelsior Hotel, Soraya wept with relief. ‘I knew,’ said the shah, ‘they loved me.’^*