The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  EDWARD LANSDALE reached Manila on a typical, tropical “sun-filled day” in early September 1950 to find its one million residents blithely unaware that an insurgency was threatening their future. The streets, he noted, “were crowded.” Jeepneys—jeeps converted into buses—darted hither and yon. “People along the sidewalks were laughing and happy,” Lansdale wrote, and “everywhere radios blared at their top decibel output.” The air of unreality was further heightened when he moved, along with Charles “Bo” Bohannan and A. C. “Ace” Ellis, into a pleasant bungalow at the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG) compound. The neighborhood resembled an American-style suburb of tract houses, manicured lawns and all; Filipinos dubbed it “the country club.” The only reminder of a security imperative was a sentry box with a single bored Philippine soldier and a wire fence topped with a single strand of barbed wire.

  It did not take Lansdale long to detect an undercurrent of darkness just beneath the sunny surface. He asked one well-connected newspaper editor (probably his friend Manuel Manahan) whether people were afraid of the Huks. The newspaperman startled him by refusing to say anything until he had led Lansdale to the “farthest corner” of his garden, “a patch of darkness behind some bushes.” Here he confessed that “Hell yes, he was afraid” of “Huk trigger squads.” He was even afraid to talk to Lansdale “because the security of American offices, such as those at JUSMAG and the Embassy, was a sour joke.” Huk agents, he warned, had access to the contents of safes in both locations. This warning led Lansdale to hide his own private papers in the most secure location he knew: the tightly guarded liquor locker at JUSMAG.

  Even more baleful was the news that greeted Lansdale when he traveled to Tarlac City, eighty miles north of Manila, to spend “a night with friends”—a guarded reference to Pat Kelly, with whom he no doubt had a joyous reunion. (Within a month of his arrival, he was telegramming her: “put on coffee pot see you sunday your adobe. big hug you loving rascal.”)1 Only a few weeks before, as we have seen, a group of Huk fighters had slaughtered wounded soldiers in their hospital beds and raped military nurses in Tarlac, yet Lansdale was dismayed to hear the locals speak “of the Huks with considerable admiration.” This was because the Huks had been careful not to harm civilians. They had targeted only soldiers, who were seen as instruments “of the privileged few” rather than as “the defenders of the people.”

  On his way back to Manila the following morning, Lansdale saw another part of the problem—a traffic jam in front of a police checkpoint where “money was being handed over by the drivers, a little unofficial and illegal tribute they paid to enter the city.” He wondered, “What must the people be thinking about all those in uniform representing authority!”2

  THE NEWLY appointed defense minister, Ramon Magsaysay, had given up his predecessor’s spacious office downtown to move into a former card room above the officers’ club at Camp Murphy, the armed forces’ headquarters on the outskirts of the city. Lansdale was climbing the stairs when he heard “the thump of running feet” punctuated by “gasps and heavy breathing.” “Somebody was muttering ‘sonnamabeech’ over and over again.” He thought the defense minister “must be some sort of a nut on physical education—maybe he is running in place or something up there.” Once he walked in, he saw that the defense minister was chasing a civilian around the room, “swinging his big fist at the man every time he got close.” Though it surely must not have been the first time, Magsaysay was upset that the “sonnamabeech” had tried to bribe him.3

  Once his good humor was restored, Magsaysay invited his new American friend home for dinner in the same small house on Arellano Street, in the impoverished Singalong district, that he had built in the 1930s. Lansdale noticed there “were no street lights in his neighborhood”; the only illumination was provided by “several pungent tinghuy lamps with their wicks floating in coconut oil held in the half-shells of coconuts” hanging over a sidewalk sari-sari store, a sign that many sections of Manila had not progressed beyond the gas-lit era that America had left behind decades ago. Yet even in the dim light Lansdale could see an unusually large number of men on the sidewalk. Their hair was long, flowing down to their shoulders—the sign of a guerrilla because “haircuts are hard to come by when a man is on the run.” Magsaysay’s aides were noticing the same thing. A few of them stood guard outside his house to prevent the defense minister from being kidnapped or killed.4

  After dinner, at which Lansdale for the first time met Magsaysay’s wife, Luz, and their three children, Ed suggested that the family relocate for their own safety. The defense minister could have moved into a house at Camp Murphy, but he did not want to pull rank and bump some officer out of his home. So, for the three months until a new house was ready for him, he agreed to bunk with Lansdale at the JUSMAG compound while Luz and their children went to stay with her family in Bataan, the mountainous peninsula on Manila Bay where American and Filipino troops had held out in 1942.5

  Thus Lansdale became not only Magsaysay’s adviser but also his roommate. He referred to his new friend as Monching, and soon they grew as close as brothers, becoming used, as he said, “to revealing our innermost thoughts to each other.” The two men would stay up late into the night, sitting around the rattan dining table or sprawled out on the rattan couch and easy chairs, talking over the problems of the Philippines and brainstorming possible solutions. “They were learning from each other,” Magsaysay’s son would say.6 “As he would worry over an event and what he should do about it,” Lansdale recalled, “I would try to sum it up for him again. Then I would ask what it would look like to his children, and to his children’s children. This perspective often threw a clear light on the problem as he talked it back to me.”7

  So successful was Lansdale in impressing his ideas on Magsaysay that before long they talked in virtually identical terms even when apart. A group of visiting French officials, after talking to both men separately, wanted to know how Lansdale “controlled” this “native”—“by money, by blackmail, how?” Lansdale had to laugh. “I guess some people in Europe and Asia simply never will understand the very real and open friendship there was between us,” Lansdale wrote a decade later. “Neither of us ever had reason to talk differently when apart from each other. We shared a trust in each other, believed in much the same principles of life, and had warm affection for each other’s country and country-men. This plain and fundamental truth has always seemed to escape those seeking some sophisticated explanation.”8

  Because the defense minister lived there, Filipino officers would come by Lansdale’s house. While waiting to talk to Magsaysay, they would chew the fat with Lansdale or Bohannan and in the process offer insights into the country’s problems. Lansdale realized these conversations were so valuable that he began hosting regular “coffee klatsches,” which came to resemble a Filipino version of FDR’s “brain trust.” Convened in Lansdale’s cottage was a thoroughly eclectic assemblage, including, he wrote, “the most thoughtful of the staff officers and combat commanders” of the Philippine army, along with “veterans of the guerrilla resistance in World War II, journalists, civil specialists in government bureaus, and community services leaders.” Each gathering was limited to no more than a dozen participants, “so that the guests could sit comfortably close and share in the conversation.” Participants were encouraged to lean back and prop their feet up on the coffee table. “The relaxed informality helped keep the talks free and flowing,” Lansdale said. In this respect, the meetings became a perfect reflection of Lansdale’s California sensibility, far removed from the sort of rigid protocol normally found in military meetings. Lansdale was an unobtrusive, but essential, presence in these sessions, which quickly wound up catalyzing the entire counterinsurgency campaign.9

  THE VERY first night that Magsaysay moved into Lansdale’s house, he expressed his frustration, his feet jiggling and his fist pounding in frustration on a cot, with the lethargy and corruption of the “cl
ique-ridden officer corps.” Magsaysay wanted to root out the worst offenders, but he couldn’t even identify them. When he went out on an inspection tour, Lansdale recalled, “he would find that officers had been tipped off about his coming, had everything tidied up, and had their stories ready for briefing him glibly about the local situation.” Magsaysay knew he was being Potemkinized, presented with an overly “rosy picture,” but the high command told him that for security reasons he could not make unannounced inspections. Lansdale encouraged him to assert the full power of his office, noting that “as secretary of national defense, he had ample authority to visit units in any manner he personally desired, including surprise inspections if he wished.” Magsaysay’s face lit up when he heard this.

  At 4:30 the next morning, not long after Lansdale had finally gone to bed after a late-night bull session, he felt a hand shaking him awake. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked. His new roommate replied, “You’ll see. We’re going to the provinces.” Lansdale was “still half asleep” when the two of them drove over to Camp Murphy. They woke up some pilots and took off in two tiny L-5 light observation aircraft known affectionately as flying jeeps. Each of these turboprop airplanes had just two seats. With Magsaysay in one plane and Lansdale in the other, they flew off at the defense minister’s direction, finally landing in a corn field next to a highway in central Luzon. The pilots stayed behind with the aircraft while Magsaysay and Lansdale went into town, the former wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and straw hat, the latter in his khaki uniform and blue Air Force garrison cap.

  The bizarre-looking duo must have seemed as out of place as Martians, thumbing down a truck and riding as hitchhikers to the local constabulary headquarters. Here they found a sergeant asleep at his desk. Magsaysay woke him and demanded to be taken to his commanding officer. The sergeant was dubious until Lansdale stepped forward to inform him “that the sport-shirted civilian was the new secretary of national defense.” As if this were a Filipino forerunner of Hogan’s Heroes, the sergeant saluted and dashed out. Looking around, the visitors saw that a gun cabinet was unlocked; the rifles inside were “a tempting target for Huk guerrillas in the neighborhood.” Magsaysay grabbed a couple of rifles and told Lansdale to hide behind the door. As the captain in command barged in, “Magsaysay thrust the muzzle of his rifle into the captain’s back,” and shouted, “Stick ’em up!” The surprised officer’s hands shot into the air. “Boys, I don’t know how you’ve managed to stay alive so long,” the dismayed defense minister said.

  Magsaysay was determined to relieve the slovenly captain, but back in Manila he learned that General Mariano Castañeda, the armed forces chief of staff, didn’t want some politician meddling in personnel matters. The chief only grudgingly agreed to transfer the captain after the defense minister lost his temper on the telephone. This brought home to Magsaysay the importance of being able to relieve—and promote—officers. Both areas were problematic, because officers were being advanced on the basis of seniority rather than combat performance and then kept in their jobs no matter how corrupt or incompetent they were. To fix this problem, Lansdale interceded directly with Elpidio Quirino, persuading the president to issue a memorandum making clear that the defense minister had the right to promote and demote for just cause. The next year, with Lansdale’s help, Magsaysay would even succeed in getting rid of the politically well-connected but ineffectual Castañeda. “I got the president to empower the secretary of national defense . . . to permit him to be the real leader of the military effort,” Lansdale recalled.

  Armed with this authority, Magsaysay, along with Lansdale, kept up a frenetic pace of field inspections. “I learned to stick a toothbrush and razor in my pocket,” Lansdale wrote, “since often days would pass before we returned to Manila again.” It is hard to imagine the more rank-conscious and aloof George C. Marshall, who as U.S. defense secretary was then Magsaysay’s counterpart, undertaking such flying visits devoid of any trappings of office. But Magsaysay, as relaxed and unpretentious as Lansdale, was right at home. On these expeditions, he invariably carried his favorite weapon—a .30-caliber paratrooper’s carbine with a folding stock. A crack shot, he would practice by hitting beer bottles. When Magsaysay would get hungry on the road, his favorite foods were canned corn (“the big kernel type”) and canned corned beef, which he would split with Lansdale. “But what he really enjoyed,” Lansdale later said, “was a fish-fry up along a mountain stream in the foothills of the Zambales, with the fish roasted over hot coals, rice heaped up on banana leaves on the ground for everyone to dig into with their fingers, and all his local pals from his old guerrilla band . . . reminiscing about the days of the Japanese occupation; everyone with shoes off, happy in the shade of the trees.”

  With astonishing alacrity, the odd couple of Magsaysay and Lansdale began to change the mindset of the armed forces. Bo Bohannan and Napoleon Valeriano of the Philippine army later wrote, “No commander, even in the most isolated outpost, could go to bed at night sure that he would not be awakened before dawn by an irate Secretary of National Defense. . . . And the commander could also be sure of a personally administered ‘shampoo,’ a sort of verbal but violent Dutch rub, if he didn’t know the answers [to Magsaysay’s questions]; it would be twice as severe if he tried to bluff.” Thus troops began to act more diligently for fear of the consequences if they were caught napping.10

  MAGSAYSAY TOOK considerable personal risk on these forays into areas where the Huks were active, but then no one ever doubted his courage. His bravery helped make possible the first big coup of the anti-Huk campaign. On the very day that he was sworn into office, Magsaysay had been told by President Quirino that a senior Huk leader known as Comandante Arthur was disaffected and wanted to meet with a senior government official. Magsaysay’s aides feared a trap, but the defense minister insisted on going. “Arthur” turned out to be Taciano Rizal, a member of the Hukbalahap politburo and grandnephew of the Philippine national hero José Rizal, a poet and revolutionary who had been executed by a Spanish firing squad in 1896. Over a series of meetings, Magsaysay persuaded Rizal to surrender and to provide information about the location of Huk politburo members, divided between the “ins” who lived in Manila and the “outs” in the countryside.

  When Magsaysay told Lansdale of his talks with Rizal, the American suggested a typically offbeat idea—either bold or bizarre, depending on one’s perspective—to capture the entire Huk high command. “I recalled the Filipino guerrillas of World War II and the compelling attraction the arrival of a U.S. submarine held for them,” Lansdale said. “Perhaps the Huk guerrilla leaders would find the reputed arrival of a Soviet submarine equally irresistible. Through Rizal, we could get credible word to the Huks of the arrival of such a submarine and use it as the magnet to draw Huk leaders to a rendezvous, where we could capture them.” Bohannan and Lansdale even began practicing Russian phrases so that they could impersonate Russian naval officers, Lansdale wrote, but “my pleas to U.S. officials to lend me a submarine for a couple of days seemed only to arouse their suspicions that I had gone insane.” Magsaysay and a sobered Lansdale had to scale back their ambitious plans to focus on capturing only the politburo members living in Manila. Rizal identified a female courier who delivered to them baskets of fruits and vegetables containing hidden messages. In the early morning hours of October 18, 1950, twenty-one strike teams from the Military Intelligence Service fanned out to stage simultaneous raids on Huk hideouts throughout Manila. They arrested 105 suspects, of whom six were identified as politburo members. Just as important, they seized tons of documents, cash, weapons, and radios.11

  “Comrades, I have bad news, very bad news.” Thus did a Huk officer deliver tidings of the politburo raids to a group of insurgents hiding in the jungle, among them William J. Pomeroy, an American Communist and former GI who had married a Filipina. The news left the guerrillas, Pomeroy was to write, feeling like miners “when the tunnel behind them caves in and the choking dust rushes through the dark hole undergroun
d” or like divers “when their air hoses are cut deep down in the jagged caverned coral reefs.” But bad as this blow was, it was far from fatal. Few insurgent movements have ever been defeated by having their leaders captured or killed—especially when, as in the case of the Huks, that leadership was collective and not based around a cult of personality. As Pomeroy noted, “Our movement is not a mortal creature with a head that dies when severed at the neck. It is a living organism that grows and multiplies, by fusion and by fission, closing over its wounds and continually reshaping itself.”12

  Undaunted, the Huks struck back on November 25, 1950. One hundred of their fighters attacked Barrio Aglao in Zambales Province, where Magsaysay had lived as a youth; they killed twenty-two people, kidnapped ten more, and burned down thirty-four houses. As soon as he heard of the attack, Magsaysay rushed to Aglao with Lansdale. They arrived, Lansdale wrote, to find smoke still rising “from the burned houses” and bodies lying “strewn over the ground.” Magsaysay was so enraged that he personally led the pursuit of the Huk raiders, accompanied by his former World War II fighters “armed with shotguns, knives, and pistols.” When it became apparent that the attackers were not going to be caught, Magsaysay was forced to return to Manila, “heartsore and weary,” in Lansdale’s words. “The memory of Aglao stayed with Magsaysay. In the nights immediately following, vivid nightmares would tear him from his sleep.”13

  Such a searing assault might have led another leader to resort to the kind of heavy-handed repression that would have generated greater support for the rebels. Magsaysay avoided this trap. Under Lansdale’s guidance, he pushed a strategy heavy on psychological warfare and “civic action”—a term that Lansdale plausibly claimed to have coined.14

  ED LANSDALE, along with many other OSS and OPC operatives, had long been fascinated by “psywar,” a discipline that had grown concurrently with the advertising industry. In World War II, President Roosevelt had assigned “white” propaganda operations—those openly attributable to the U.S. government—to the Office of War Information, while “black” operations, whose true source was not revealed, were the responsibility of the OSS’s Morale Operations branch. The Office of War Information did everything from dropping leaflets on Axis soldiers urging them to surrender to setting up the Voice of America to bolster morale at home and abroad. Its output, though often bombastic, was essentially factual. Morale Operations, by contrast, specialized in spreading false rumors through covert radio stations, leaflets, newspapers, and other means. Typical rumors included claims that, in the words of one historian, “Luftwaffe pilots were refusing to fly . . . , former Nazi leader Rudolf Hess was leading a detachment of Allied troops in France, and Wehrmacht rations had been found to have been poisoned.”15 In the postwar world, a similar division between white and black propaganda was maintained. The new U.S. Information Agency, in whose Manila office Pat Kelly worked, took responsibility for the white side, the OPC and then the CIA for the dark side. Frank Wisner was particularly fascinated with propaganda, which he promulgated through such sources as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the National Student Association. He likened this information operation to a “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ that could play any tune he desired.16