The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA

The Very Best Men chronicles four key figures in the early Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s: Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald. These men, from privileged East Coast backgrounds and elite universities, helped shape American intelligence operations during the Cold War. The book follows their parallel paths from World War II service through their rise in the CIA, where they directed covert operations across the globe. Tobin draws from declassified documents and interviews with family members to reconstruct their professional and personal lives during this pivotal era in U.S. intelligence history. Their missions took them from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia as they worked to implement American foreign policy through clandestine means. The narrative tracks how these men navigated both field operations and Washington politics while building the CIA's capabilities. The book raises enduring questions about patriotism, power, and the moral complexities faced by those who operate in the shadows of national security. Through these four interconnected biographies, Tobin examines how personal idealism intersected with the realities of Cold War intelligence work.

Readers describe this book as an engaging look at four key CIA operatives during the agency's early Cold War period. Multiple reviews note the balance between professional exploits and personal details that humanize these historical figures. Likes: - Clear, accessible writing style for a complex topic - Depth of research and use of declassified documents - Insight into personalities behind operations - Balanced portrayal of successes and failures Dislikes: - Some readers wanted more operational details - A few found the multiple biographical threads hard to follow - Limited coverage of later CIA years - Some felt it understated negative aspects of CIA actions Ratings: Goodreads: 4.0/5 (328 ratings) Amazon: 4.4/5 (89 reviews) Notable reader comment: "Tells the human story behind the headlines - these weren't movie spies but complex men trying to serve their country, sometimes successfully and sometimes not." - Amazon reviewer

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🔸 The book follows four legendary CIA operatives - Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald - who came from elite Eastern establishments and helped shape the agency's early Cold War operations. 🔸 Author Evan Thomas gained unprecedented access to previously classified CIA files and conducted over 150 interviews with agency veterans and family members to write this account. 🔸 Frank Wisner, one of the book's central figures, tragically died by suicide in 1965 after suffering from depression, which many attributed to the pressures and moral compromises of his CIA career. 🔸 The four men featured in the book were responsible for some of the CIA's most ambitious (and controversial) operations, including the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. 🔸 Despite their privileged backgrounds at schools like Groton and Yale, these operatives often worked undercover in dangerous conditions - FitzGerald once posed as a birdwatcher while running operations in Vietnam, and Barnes conducted missions behind enemy lines in WWII before joining the CIA.