The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  Salvation came from Carroll Harris, president of a typographic firm that Lansdale had worked with. In 1942, Harris appeared in an army colonel’s uniform. Lansdale heard he was “connected with something very hush-hush in San Francisco,” and he asked to join up.5 A member of the Army’s Military Intelligence Service, Harris promised to see what he could do to help in Washington. Upon returning from Washington, Harris told Lansdale that while the Army could not hire a civilian, he had some “friends” who could provide him with work right away. He asked Lansdale whether he had ever heard of a fellow named Donovan, first name Bill, a swashbuckling World War I combat hero and wealthy New York lawyer who was setting up a new intelligence agency known at first as the Coordinator of Information (COI) and then, after June 1942, as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Thanks to the intervention of Harris—“a kindly liberal who wants me to infuse idealistic ethics in intelligence work,” Lansdale later wrote6—he was put under contract by the OSS in July 1942, working initially out of the Military Intelligence Service office at 74 New Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

  Many years later, Ben Lansdale remembered his older brother confiding in him “that someday he would like to become a secret agent to help our government win some future war.”7 Now Ed Lansdale would have the opportunity to realize this youthful ambition.

  THE OSS was, in many ways, an ideal organization for the neophyte operative. It was as unconventional and informal as he was. As one OSS agent later wrote, “OSS is the last refuge of men and women who want to do something but don’t fit the regulations.”8 Lansdale fit in right away. In 1943, he visited OSS headquarters in Washington, and managed to get in despite not having any of the appropriate badges or passes. The colonel he was meeting with was “quite taken” with his feat. “How did you do that?” he wanted to know. “Misdirection,” Lansdale explained. “Getting the guard interested in something else going on and a conversation we had at the time, while holding out what looks like a pass and isn’t.”

  The colonel told Lansdale that he had been working on personnel files, before exiting his office in order to check on something urgent. Left alone, Lansdale immediately opened a drawer and took out his own personnel file. The colonel came back with a stopwatch to congratulate him: “Fastest time I ever saw anybody do that. You were moving even before I had left the room.”9 By breaking the rules, paradoxically, Lansdale had passed the test for admittance into the OSS, which, like all intelligence agencies, existed to lie, cheat, and steal for its country.

  THE HEAD of the OSS office in San Francisco turned out to be Navy Commander William H. Vanderbilt III, scion of one of America’s richest families and a former governor of Rhode Island. He was typical of the upper-crust individuals whom Donovan had recruited, leading to jokes that OSS stood for “Oh So Social.” The OSS, however, did not limit itself to hiring pedigreed Wall Street bankers and lawyers. Its recruits included the Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the film director John Ford, the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Red Sox catcher Morris “Moe” Berg, as well as, in the words of one of Donovan’s agents, “safecrackers, paroled convicts, remittance men, professional wrestlers and boxers, circus stars, code experts, military characters, nightclub frequenters, and a miscellany of others.”10 Donovan’s credo was to hire anyone “of great ability” and “later on we’ll find out what they can do.”11

  Lansdale had already demonstrated a talent for getting along with people who were very different in background from himself. As was his wont, this middle-class Californian soon struck up a fast friendship with Vanderbilt, a veritable blue blood from the East. Eventually, in March 1943, Lansdale would be granted a medical waiver and accepted back into the Army as a first lieutenant working in military intelligence, but even in that new capacity he would continue to do work on the side for the OSS. “It was an unusually harmonious relationship,” he later recalled, made possible by his friendship with Vanderbilt. Lansdale’s service in World War II would anticipate his simultaneous work in the 1950s for the CIA and the Air Force.12

  The OSS was full of military personnel and it was, at least in theory, under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it was positively disdainful of military hierarchy and protocol. In the field, OSS men seldom saluted, dressed as they pleased, and often sported copious facial hair, ranging from full beards to walrus mustaches, all in violation of military regulations.13 “The OSS is the only institution that is run by its own inmates,” one of its operatives said.14 In short, it would be an ideal incubator for a maverick recruit who would become notorious for his disdain for bureaucracy.

  While the regular military had a conservative outlook typified by rock-ribbed Republicans such as Douglas MacArthur, the OSS was, at heart, a New Deal agency with a progressive, idealistic ethos that would carry over to the CIA. A war correspondent wrote that “race, color and previous condition of servitude cut no ice whatever” in the OSS “as long as one actually wanted to get into the fray and help to win it.”15 The OSS, in other words, was as color-blind as Lansdale himself, and no doubt his service reinforced his willingness to cast aside prevailing racial and ethnic prejudices.

  THE OSS bore the unmistakable personal imprint of “a short man with mild blue eyes,” “a soft Irish voice,” “pudgy hands,” a “thick-set neck,” and an “easy slow-going manner” that concealed reservoirs of “enormous energy.”16 His name was William J. Donovan, but he was invariably known as Wild Bill. An inveterate risk taker, he had risen from an impoverished Irish Catholic background in Buffalo to graduate from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, where one of his classmates was a seemingly indolent patrician from Hyde Park named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Donovan had then earned the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and a Purple Heart, among other decorations, while exhibiting near-suicidal bravery as an officer with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918. After the war, he served as a federal prosecutor in western New York and, harboring dreams of becoming the first Catholic president, ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and governor. He then moved to New York City, where he established himself as one of the preeminent lawyers on Wall Street. Donovan married the daughter of one of the richest men in Buffalo, but he cheated on her compulsively with a long line of lovers, and he spent so extravagantly that he was in constant financial difficulties in spite of his substantial income.

  Despite their political differences, Roosevelt in 1941 acceded to his old law school classmate’s request that he be allowed to establish America’s first civilian intelligence agency. Running a growing government bureaucracy, which eventually came to number twelve thousand employees, did nothing to curb Donovan’s disdain for established procedures or the dictates of prudence and safety. He often said, “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.”17 Lansdale would certainly never hesitate to disobey an order.

  Donovan was famous for his receptivity to unconventional ideas. Stanley P. Lovell, a chemist who headed the OSS’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, and whom Donovan referred to as his own Professor Moriarty, wanted to lace Hitler’s food with estrogen to make his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano. Lovell also developed a chemical dubbed “Who? Me?” that replicated the “revolting odor of a very loose bowel movement.” His madcap idea was to distribute it to children in Japanese-occupied cities of China so that they could squirt “Who? Me?” on the trouser seats of Japanese officers who happened to walk by. The theory was that this would cost the Japanese, who valued cleanliness, “a world of ‘face.’ ”18

  It is important to keep such outlandish schemes in mind to understand how Lansdale could later entertain seemingly madcap ideas for undermining the Communist leaders Luis Taruc, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro. David Bruce, who was to become a distinguished diplomat after his OSS service, wrote, “Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face,
it seemed ridiculous, or at least unusual.”19 Bruce himself had to spend weeks investigating the possibility of attacking Tokyo with bats that had incendiary bombs strapped to their backs.20 If it did nothing else, Lansdale’s OSS service reinforced his openness to projects that seemed ridiculous to outsiders.

  Another Donovan characteristic, which Lansdale later exhibited all too well, was a tendency to pick counterproductive bureaucratic fights. As a new agency, the OSS threatened existing competitors such as the Army’s Military Intelligence Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Donovan feuded incessantly with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only over which agency would operate intelligence networks in Latin America but also over which one would have the right to burgle foreign embassies in Washington. (The FBI won both battles.) Their internecine battle could become brutal: Hoover accused the OSS of harboring Communist and Fascist spies and compiled a dossier on Donovan that included details of his numerous extramarital liaisons. Donovan retaliated by putting together his own file on the FBI, including rumors that its director was a homosexual or, in the argot of the day, a “fairy.”21

  The OSS also fought with the State Department, in part because its operatives abroad developed a habit, which would carry over to the CIA, of disregarding American ambassadors and deciding on their own what actions to take. A classic example was the actions of the OSS officer Beverly Bowie, formerly an editor at National Geographic, in Bucharest in 1944. One of the first Americans in liberated Romania, he became a regular guest at meetings of the newly established cabinet. “Before they vote on anything,” he explained, “they ask me what I think. I go into a trance and figure out what Franklin D. Roosevelt would do, then give ’em the answer. They pass all my laws unanimously. I never thought running a country was so easy.”22 Bowie was exaggerating for comic effect, but Lansdale would operate in somewhat similar fashion. He too would find it easy to virtually run the countries where he would be assigned, even while grappling with the kind of bureaucratic disputes that also bedeviled Wild Bill Donovan.

  THE OSS became legendary for the work of its operatives behind enemy lines—daring commandos such as the three-man Jedburgh teams that parachuted into occupied Europe in June 1944 to prepare for D-Day. This was not, however, the kind of work that Lansdale did; he labored for Research & Analysis (known as “the Chairborne Division”)23 and Secret Intelligence, not the more glamorous Special Operations division and the Operational Groups, which carried out sabotage in occupied lands. His war was spent operating out of San Francisco and later New York, gathering intelligence and recruiting agents. “Not much in the way of heroics,” Lansdale commented, “but it was truly fascinating work for me.”24

  Much of Lansdale’s time was spent trying to expand the government’s scant knowledge of, in his words, “the vast and hitherto almost unknown places where we were putting forces.” These included such unfamiliar destinations as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Aitape, and that was simply in the Pacific theater. The United States, Lansdale noted, lacked “very basic information on geography, terrain, man-made features on the terrain, [and] the people involved.” He filled in some of the blanks.25

  Lansdale did not just gather information but also offered suggestions on how to turn it into a weapon. In 1943, for example, he circulated a memorandum on Japanese proverbs. “The Japanese, like all Orientals, love proverbs,” he wrote, and then went on to argue that “a surprising number of these sayings—clothed with credibility by centuries of usage—can be made applicable to modern events and can be, in the opinion of this section, used effectively against the Japanese.” For instance, he suggested, the Japanese saying “The biggest serpent has no terrors for the eagle” could be “startlingly pertinent” if “Japan is portrayed as the serpent and growing United Nations air power as the eagle.”26 It was an early sign of the interest in folklore that would become a hallmark of his later assignments in the Philippines and Vietnam.

  Lansdale proved relentless and creative in finding new sources of information. He not only interviewed foreign-born students at thirty-seven different universities to obtain information about their homelands;27 he also talked to a couple of Sufi murshids (or teachers), practitioners of a mystical sect of Islam, to learn “about social structures of South Asian and Middle Eastern countries.” One of them “submitted his thoughts on the nature of the war then going on in the deserts of North Africa” in blank verse. Lansdale passed along this epic poem to Washington for further “study.”28

  “Each individual” he interviewed “was a gold mine,” Lansdale later said—“if the interviewer was a good miner.”29 Lansdale was. Such was his reputation for “industry, tact, ingenuity and good judgment” (in the words of a fellow officer) that he was assigned in 1944–45 to an intelligence post with the Army Transportation Corps in New York City, where he became “responsible for the quality and quantity of work produced by hundreds of interrogators at eight Ports of Embarkation.”30 The interrogators would interview sailors and other travelers about what they had seen while abroad and pass some of them along for recruitment as intelligence agents. A small sign of Lansdale’s success can be glimpsed in his record of promotions: having been commissioned a first lieutenant in February 1943, he advanced to captain in December of that year and to major in January 1945.31 “They kept using me to go out, getting new information and meeting new people all the time, which seemed to be my forte,” he recalled.32

  Lansdale was developing a reputation not only as a savvy interviewer and skilled intelligence gatherer—Lansdale the listener—but also as someone who “seemed to get along very well with Asians.” For that reason he was called upon in 1942 by the Office of Naval Intelligence to help quell a potential mutiny among Sumatran sailors aboard Dutch merchant ships in West Coast ports. Some of the Sumatrans—Sumatra, then part of the Dutch East Indies, is today part of Indonesia—had heard Queen Wilhelmina’s radio broadcast in support of FDR’s Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, freedom from want). They “decided that they were part of the Four Freedoms,” Lansdale recalled, “and they were all going to go home and have their own freedom.” Lansdale was a fervent supporter of the Four Freedoms himself, but he believed that the exigencies of wartime took precedence over all else. In this particular case, it was important to keep Allied supplies moving on Dutch ships. To head off a strike, Lansdale said, “I managed to meet various seamen in port and I had drinking bouts with them. At one of those I was rather exuberantly made a member of the Batak tribe of Sumatra. The Bataks among the seamen from then on kept me very well advised on what their plans were and also listened to me as I talked them out of having a strike and to continue on in the war effort until the day of victory.”33

  Such rapport building soon would be reprised in the Philippines and later in Vietnam.

  EDWARD LANSDALE’S record during World War II suggests that he could have become a successful case officer for what is today known as the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the unit charged with recruiting and running spies. But that is not the direction in which his postwar career was to take him. He was to become a covert warrior, not an intelligence gatherer. His focus would be on changing the facts on the ground rather than merely ferreting them out.

  That transformation began in the late summer of 1945 amid events so consequential that their ripples continue to buffet the world to this day. On August 6, a B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima and, in a blinding flash and mushroom cloud, killed more than 130,000 people. On August 9, another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing at least 60,000 more people. Five days later, at 7:03 p.m. on August 14, the moving electric sign on the New York Times Building flashed the welcome news: “Official—Truman announces Japanese surrender.” While the vanquished Japanese succored the wounded and buried the dead in two of their major cities, half a million celebrants packed into Times Square responded with a “victory roar” that “beat upon the eardrums
until it numbed the senses,” the Times reported. “For twenty minutes, wave after wave of that joyous roar surged forth.”34

  The revelry in Times Square, and all across the country, had barely ended when portents of troubles to come began to appear like storm clouds on the far Pacific horizon. On August 17, 1945, Indonesian nationalists led by Sukarno declared independence from the Netherlands—a declaration that Dutch leaders were intent on resisting by force. On August 25, an American intelligence officer named John Birch was shot and killed in a confrontation with Chinese Red Army troops. (His death would later be commemorated by some conservatives as the first casualty of the Cold War.) On September 2, the veteran revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, speaking to cheering throngs in Hanoi, proclaimed a new republic. The French did not recognize this new state and vowed to keep control of Indochina by any means necessary. And then, on September 8, American troops in “full battle array”35 landed at Inchon, the port of Seoul, to accept the surrender of Japanese troops in Korea—but only in the south. The northern half of Korea was occupied by Soviet troops. Before long, the Korean Peninsula would be cleaved, just like Germany, into two antagonistic states, one pro-Soviet, the other pro-Western. Such events would make a mockery of the whimsical headline the New York Times had run on August 15, 1945, the day after Japan’s surrender, above a picture of four young WACs (Women’s Auxiliary Corps) in Guam: “The Outlook in the Pacific is Bright and Pretty.” In truth, the outlook was decidedly cloudy with political tsunamis in the forecast.