by Max Boot
For his achievements in the Philippines, Lansdale was to receive the National Security Medal, a decoration created by President Truman to recognize accomplishments in intelligence. Lansdale would become only the fourth recipient, after the former CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, covert operative Kim Roosevelt, and Rear Admiral Joseph Wenger, a legendary naval cryptologist, and he won the medal before it was bestowed on J. Edgar Hoover, Wild Bill Donovan, or Allen Dulles himself. His citation commended him for “directing a brilliant campaign to arrest and reverse the spread of Communist influence,” adding that his “ingenuity in devising plans, and his perseverance in carrying them through to a successful conclusion” added “greatly to the strength of the free world in a critical area.”26 Since the medal was classified, it was locked up in a CIA safe. Lansdale could wear a ribbon on his uniform, but he could not say what it was for. When asked, he would joke, because it was blue and gold, that Ulysses S. Grant had pinned it on him for his service during the Civil War.27
Lansdale also received growing public accolades, including an article in Time magazine on November 23, 1953, which said that “the Magsaysay victory was a U.S. victory” and that “U.S. Colonel Edward Lansdale of the Air Force” had become “virtually his mentor and publicity man.” As a result of the election, Lansdale gained a new nickname, apparently invented by the Indian ambassador to Manila. He became known as Colonel Landslide, a name that would follow him, both mockingly and reverently, from Asia to America for years to come. “Big joke, huh,” Lansdale snorted.28
IN THE 1972 movie The Candidate, Robert Redford plays a handsome and privileged young candidate, Bill McKay, who, against the odds, wins a U.S. Senate race in California. In the last scene, McKay escapes his own victory party along with his chief political consultant, Marvin Lucas, played by a bearded Peter Boyle. McKay asks Lucas, with a hint of desperation in his voice, “Marvin . . . what do we do now?” A raucous press throng then invades the room, and the movie ends before Marvin can reply. Unlike the fictional Marvin Lucas, Edward Lansdale would be forced to supply an answer to that question.
Lansdale was understandably eager to move on from the Philippines after the 1953 election triumph, but his friend Monching, by now dependent on his guidance, would not let him go. A few days after the vote, Lansdale and the president-elect were aboard another ship, this time a Philippine navy patrol boat called the Bohol, trapped on the outer edge of a typhoon. As they were getting showered by the waves, Lansdale threw his blanket over Magsaysay to keep him dry and Magsaysay grabbed Lansdale’s hand and asked his American friend “to stick with him through the selection of a cabinet, making up his legislative and executive programs, dealing with [Syngman] Rhee and Chiang [Kai-shek], etc.”29 Confronted with such an emotional appeal, Lansdale had no choice but to accede.
Before long he was working as hard as he had before the election, his days often beginning at five in the morning and not ending until midnight. “Nuts,” he realized, “I’m suddenly in the middle of tough economic and other affairs with someone who suddenly feels lost and has turned to me for help, apart from all the other advisers who’ve now moved in on him.”30
INAUGURATION DAY, Wednesday, December 30, 1953, was hot and muggy, like most days in the Philippines, with the temperature soaring to nearly ninety degrees Fahrenheit.31 Magsaysay wanted to drive to the ceremony not in the black presidential Chrysler Imperial limousine used by his predecessor but in a more fun and racy Ford convertible. Elpidio Quirino persuaded him to stick with the official car. Together they rode from the Malacañang Palace to the Luneta, a waterfront park packed with at least two hundred thousand spectators. But Quirino could not persuade Magsaysay to switch clothes. Instead of a suit, the new president wore the distinctive embroidered Philippine shirt known as the barong Tagalog to take the oath of office and deliver his inaugural address. Magsaysay, sweat pouring down his face, was then borne away from the platform on the shoulders of a cheering crowd, his head bobbing up and down on the ocean of humanity, his clothes getting torn by his admirers.
Back at the Malacañang Palace, a series of ornate buildings on the banks of the Pasig River that had served as the home of Philippine and American governors-general before becoming the official residence of Philippine presidents, Magsaysay threw open the doors to the public. More than fifty thousand people swarmed in during the next two days. Strangers ten deep stood around the presidential dining table to watch Magsaysay eat his inaugural lunch. A news report noted, “Whole families picnicked on the flower beds; kids shied pop bottle caps at shimmering chandeliers inside the palace; mothers nursed their babies on satin-covered furniture in the drawing rooms.”32 Lansdale was reminded of stories about Andrew Jackson’s populist inauguration in 1829, when his backwoods supporters mobbed the White House, breaking china and furniture to get at the ice cream, cake, and whisky-laced punch.
In keeping with his determination to be, as he vowed in his inaugural address, “President for the people,” Magsaysay implemented Lansdale’s suggestion that he continue his habit of soliciting complaints and suggestions by means of the ten-centavo telegrams he had introduced as defense minister. To administer this program, Magsaysay set up a new Presidential Complaints and Action Commission under Lansdale’s friend Manuel Manahan. A new day seemed to be dawning in which, as Magsaysay told the throngs assembled to watch his swearing-in, the Philippines would at last see “a government sensitive to your needs, dedicated to your best interests, and inspired by our highest ideals.”33
LUIS TARUC, the Huks’ supremo, heard of the 1953 election results while on the run in the swamps of Luzon. He and a small group of fighters had managed to evade the army dragnet, but they could not outrun their own hunger and thirst. The security forces by then were in firm control of the barrios where Huk sympathizers had once provided the guerrillas with food. Taruc wrote that the remaining Huks “came near starvation,” reduced to eating “snails and edible grasses.”34
Once he knew that Ramon Magsaysay had won the election, Taruc began to think it was time to give up the armed struggle. He was encouraged in this belief by no less than his own mother, whose appeals for his surrender were heard for months on the radio—another of Lansdale’s brainstorms. On February 10, 1954, little more than a month after Magsaysay’s inauguration, Taruc met secretly in the sugarcane fields near Clark Air Base with two emissaries of the president—Manuel Manahan, who had been secretly recruited by Lansdale eight years earlier to gain the confidence of the elusive guerrilla chief,35 and Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. of the Manila Times. “The people have spoken. They have overwhelmingly elected President Magsaysay,” Taruc told them. “It is for us to accept their verdict.”36 Aquino, a brash young reporter who had dropped out of college to become a war correspondent in Korea, later continued the talks alone on behalf of Magsaysay. Taruc wanted an unconditional amnesty for himself and his followers; Magsaysay wanted to try Taruc and his followers while holding out the possibility of executive clemency.
The negotiations between Taruc and Aquino, the forty-one-year-old peasant and the twenty-one-year-old child of privilege, culminated on May 17, 1954, in a dramatic early-morning meeting in the barrio of Santa Maria in Taruc’s native Pampanga Province. Aquino went in alone at 6:30 a.m. Army troops who had surrounded the town told him that if he did not emerge by nine they would “blow the place to smithereens.” Aquino recounted what happened next:
Taruc was waiting at the foot of Mt. Arayat, an extinct volcano. His lean figure was surrounded by the people of the barrio; like them, he wore a gray peasant shirt, brown pants, and wide-brimmed straw hat. The only question I asked was: “Do you accept the president’s terms?” Taruc said: “I accept.” He shook my hands warmly and said farewell to the barrio folk, many of them weeping. Minutes later we were speeding towards Manila, escorted by army jeeps.37
Lansdale thought that Aquino was a “pushy” upstart who had rushed in to take credit for the long, hard work that he and Manahan had put in to win over Taruc.
38 Aquino would use this feat to launch his political career, which would culminate two decades later when he became the leading dissident challenging the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Taruc, for his part, would be tried and convicted of sedition, murder, and rebellion. He would spend nearly fifteen years behind bars, claiming all the while that Magsaysay had reneged on a pledge to free him.
The Huk Rebellion was over. The Philippines had become one of the few places in the postwar world where a major Communist uprising was defeated without intervention by foreign troops, as in Malaya, or without a bloodbath, as in Indonesia or Guatemala. The anti-Huk campaign represented one of the CIA’s biggest covert-action successes ever, and it was achieved largely by one man’s deft manipulation of local politics rather than through costly American spending or heavy-handed American military action.
It helped, of course, that the Philippines was a group of islands where the insurgents could be isolated from outside support. The Huks never received meaningful assistance from either China or the Soviet Union. But then neither did the young Fidel Castro, and he managed to take power just a few years later in another island nation. The Philippines might very well have gone the same way as Cuba if it had continued to be ruled by a corrupt and ineffectual clique. This did not happen, because Magsaysay and Lansdale worked so closely and effectively together to counter the Huks in both the military and the political realms. Some of Lansdale’s methods, such as faking vampire deaths, booby-trapping ammunition, or producing phony Huk directives, would strike critics as “dirty tricks.” On the whole, however, the campaign that Lansdale masterminded was remarkably sparing in human and financial terms compared with those being waged in other countries, including French Indochina.
Having orchestrated one of the classic counterinsurgency campaigns of the postwar world, Lansdale had secured renown as a maestro of counterguerrilla warfare and a virtuoso of nation building. Now he had to figure out what to do for an encore.
PART THREE
NATION BUILDER
(1954–1956)
Ngo Dinh Diem stands triumphantly in a South Vietnamese army jeep while touring Qui Nhon, capital of Binh Dinh Province, May 1955, after the completion of a Lansdale-directed pacification campaign. (RPPP)
11
La Guerre sans Fronts
It is a secret, hit-and-run business which bewilders the usual person used to an enemy who fights in an orthodox manner.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
“IN Indochina I drained a magic potion, a loving cup which I have shared since with many retired colons and officers of the Foreign Legion, whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.”1 So wrote the English novelist and part-time intelligence agent Graham Greene of his first visit to Vietnam, in early 1951. It was a sentiment shared by countless Westerners, including Edward Lansdale, who first arrived in French Indochina for a three-week visit with an American advisory mission in June 1953 while on a brief sabbatical from the Philippines.2
Lansdale’s letters, written both to his family and to Pat Kelly, were as rapturous as those of any tourist visiting a captivating country for the first time, and they will sound familiar to anyone who has ever been to Indochina. “For years now, I’ve been fascinated with views of the undercut islands of Cam-ranh Bay,” he wrote, “and finally saw them this morning from the air.” He found the scenery of southern Vietnam, then known as Cochin China, “much the same as the Philippines,” a “mangrove and swamp delta land from several rivers, the largest of which is the Mekong.” In the north, a region known historically as Tonkin, he observed that “the mountains are weirdly sharp and angular above the flooded and muddy rice paddies, with river channels meandering sort of aimlessly a few inches below the paddies, and with hundreds and hundreds of hamlets or villages spotting the place like islands.”
Like many other tourists, he complained about the inconveniences of travel in the tropics in these pre-air-conditioned days. He found the weather “exceptionally hot and muggy” and “gasped like a fish out of water on the bed at night.” In Hanoi he stayed at the French colonial-style Metropole Hotel, opened in 1901, where Somerset Maugham wrote one of his travelogues, Charlie Chaplin honeymooned, and Graham Greene penned part of The Quiet American. Its bartender “could produce a reasonable facsimile of almost any civilized drink except water.”3 Yet it was precisely ice-cold water that Lansdale thirsted for. The only cold drink he was offered was champagne, which was poured “whether it was 9 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon.” “Between a glass of champagne or a cold coke on a hot day,” Lansdale opined, sounding like the epitome of Homo americanus circa 1953, “I’ll take the latter any time.”
Lansdale noted, in common with many other visitors, that Saigon to the south was often compared to “a big French provincial town.” “I’ve never seen France,” he admitted, “so I don’t know.” (One of Lansdale’s quirks was that he would never visit Europe.) He was charmed by the “sidewalk cafes, broad boulevards, and lots of trees.” He noted that “Little Renaults shoot around with horns blowing,” but the rest of the city was distinctly Asian: “ ‘Cyclos’ are the main transport, a tricycle rickshaw with the passenger out in front where the Renaults can hit him first.” Like Graham Greene, who developed a taste for the local prostitutes, Lansdale took notice of the beautiful women: “Most of the folks in the street are Vietnamese women in sleazy Chinese satin pajamas, all white or black. They sweep the streets, dig ditches, drive cattle, lay bricks or pour concrete; the men are either away fighting or tending shop (or, as I suspect, loafing at home).”
Lansdale found Hue, in central Vietnam, to be “a sleepy little place of rice paddies where irrigation is run by foot-pedal pumps (folks sitting on a contraption which looks like a one-wheeled bicycle on stilts) and where [Emperor] Bao Dai has his palace, an old replica of the Palace at Peking, with miles of outer walls and whole villages inside.” When he visited the coastal city of Nha Trang, which reminded him of “Santa Barbara with big mountains just behind the town and a beautiful beach,” he jumped into the ocean to go swimming.
It would have been easy for Helen or Pat reading his missives to miss the fact that he was traveling in a war zone and not on an ordinary sightseeing trip. That, indeed, may have been the point: not wanting to worry his family, Lansdale typically played up the comic and innocuous aspects of his travels. He dismissed a small wound he received, “to the great glee of the French with me,” when a hand grenade went off too close to him: “A scratch on the finger from a grenade fragment which healed so well that I can’t even find it now to show anyone if I felt like it.” In fact, hand grenades tossed by the Vietminh were a danger even in Saigon, where cafés had erected nets to protect their outdoor tables.
In his typical sardonic style, Lansdale made light of the war raging around him: “Aside from forts and barbed wire,” he wrote, “this is a beautiful place.” No doubt Lansdale shared with Graham Greene that “feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket.”4 It was a rather more serious matter for ordinary Vietnamese, who had no way out. They were trapped in a war that would continue, on and off, for more than twenty years and that would claim millions of casualties.5
BY THE time Edward Lansdale appeared on the scene, the French Indochina War was already more than seven years old and the American war had not yet begun, but signs that the first war might be ending and the second about to start were already becoming clear to astute observers. A battered France, in the final throes of losing its last colonial possessions, was fighting an increasingly futile struggle against a movement known as the Vietminh, an abbreviation for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam), which, like the Huks in the Philippines, had been founded as a nationalist movement resisting foreign rule during World War II. Originally pledged to fight both the French and the Japanese, the Vietminh was ostensibly a coalition of nationalist groups, but it was dominated by the Workers Party of Vietnam, as the Communist
Party had renamed itself. Its charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh, had already established himself as the most famous Vietnamese in the world—a distinction he holds to this day.
Debate has often swirled about whether Ho was a communist or a nationalist. The evidence shows that, like many other insurgents, he saw no contradiction between the two convictions. “The two,” wrote a French diplomat who knew him well, “complemented each other, merged.”6 Ho handled the dual identities, nationalist and communist, as adroitly as he handled his many aliases.
The man who would become Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890, three years before the birth of Mao Zedong, as Nguyen Sinh Cung in the central Tonkin province of Nghe An, long known for its stubborn and rebellious people—“the buffaloes of Nghe An,” they were called.7 When he reached age ten, his name was changed, in conformity with Vietnamese custom, to Nguyen Tat Thanh (He Who Will Succeed). The son of a Confucian scholar and part-time farmer, Nguyen Tat Thanh attended a prestigious French school in Hue. He was, however, expelled in 1908 for joining demonstrations by peasants upset at their high tax burden—a sign of the growing opposition to France’s colonial rule, which had begun in the 1850s.
In 1911, he shipped out of Saigon aboard a merchant vessel bound for Marseille. He would not see Vietnam again for three decades. In the intervening years, he visited Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America while working as a gardener, cook, pastry chef, and snow sweeper, among other occupations. By 1917, he had settled down in Paris, where he was won over to Marxism, a conversion inspired by Lenin’s call for Communist parties to make common cause with nationalist movements in Asia and Africa to smash imperialism and capitalism. Reading Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” the man now known as Nguyen Ai Quoc (He Who Loves His Country) recalled, “I was overjoyed to tears.”8 In 1920, he took part in a meeting that formed the French Communist Party.