by Max Boot
AS LANSDALE wrote those words, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was in its death throes. The Vietminh had methodically overrun strongpoint after strongpoint. The situation became particularly grim after Vietminh artillery fire shut down the lone airstrip in the main camp on March 28. Thereafter all supplies and reinforcements had to be delivered by parachute, and there was no way to evacuate the wounded. In desperation, the French government asked for American intervention. The French and American military staffs had developed a plan for such a contingency, known as Operation Vulture, which called for employing American aircraft to relieve the siege. In one variant, Pentagon planners even contemplated dropping atomic bombs.34 President Eisenhower tried to win congressional and British support for a military intervention, but when that was not forthcoming he refused to pull the trigger for fear of being drawn into a unilateral and unpopular conflict.35
With no American help coming, the bedraggled garrison was doomed. The onset of the monsoon season only added to their agony. Miserable and wet, soldiers staggered on through sheer exhaustion, surviving on a little rice and canned corned beef of uncertain origin nicknamed “monkey meat.”36 The wounded and the dead piled up in the mud. Flies and rats were everywhere. Gangrene was starting to appear, and the “stink of putrefaction” was in the air.37 An army lieutenant observed “one-legged soldiers manning machine guns in the blockhouses, being fed ammunition by their one-armed and one-eyed comrades.”38 On May 7, 1954, the French commander, Brigadier General Christian de Castries, concluded that he could hold out no longer. The last message, sent at 5:50 p.m. from the French garrison, was “We’re blowing everything up. Adieu.”39 By then, a red-and-gold Vietminh flag was already fluttering over the command post.
General Giap had paid a fearfully high price for his victory—twenty-five thousand of his best troops had been killed or wounded—but he had inflicted on France the worst defeat that any European state had ever suffered at the hands of its colonial subjects. Now the question from the American perspective was, what could be salvaged from the ruins of the French empire in Indochina? Was Ho Chi Minh destined to rule all of Vietnam?
It was natural in this era for the CIA to take the lead in filling this political vacuum—a mission that in another period would have gone to the State Department or the armed forces. There was already a CIA station in Saigon, of course, but the Dulles brothers wanted a political warfare expert on the spot—their very best man, as Nixon had demanded.
Thus, on May 17, 1954, just as Lansdale was “writing detailed plans on how to run a government and build a new social economy” for the Philippines,40 he received orders from Allen Dulles to report posthaste to Saigon. “The radio message ended with a personal touch that neither the clerks at the message center nor I had seen before in official orders,” Lansdale later wrote. “After the string of abbreviations and budget citations normally given in orders, the message closed with ‘God bless you’!” (In his memoir, Lansdale attributed this message to John Foster Dulles so as to preserve the fiction that he had not been a CIA operative.)41
He would need all the support that he could muster, divine or otherwise, for the nearly impossible task that lay ahead. After having returned to the United States for an all-too-brief home leave and then gone back once again to the Philippines, Lansdale had a new mission that dwarfed anything that he—or anyone else in the postwar world—had attempted before. The United States had experience creating new nations such as West Germany and South Korea and transforming existing nations such as Japan and Italy, but those tasks had been accomplished with hundreds of thousands of American troops—and even then the going had been hard. Now Lansdale would be charged with accomplishing an act of state creation armed with little more than his wits.
After sitting up “practically all night in a last-minute session with the Philippine gang, helping them plan,” Lansdale on May 31, 1954, was winging his way to Saigon in a U.S. Air Force flying boat. The Thirty-First Air Sea Rescue Squadron at Clark Air Base had offered to fly him over, provided he didn’t mind spending a few extra hours en route patrolling the South China Sea. Sitting sleepily in a bucket seat, his “boxes and other baggage piled up around” him, “shaking gently with the aircraft’s vibrations” and “sipping coffee from a paper cup,” Lansdale wondered about what he would encounter once he landed. He knew that “events in Indochina were moving toward a climax and that the U.S. wanted me on the spot for whatever occurred next,” but there was no way to predict what that would be.42
13
“I Am Ngo Dinh Diem”
[Diem] was happiest when cloistered with books or papers in his study.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
LANSDALE’S arrival in the jittery, if outwardly placid, city of Saigon on June 1, 1954, less than a month after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, was as unceremonious as one could imagine. This was entirely fitting for such a self-effacing man who favored an informal approach to dealing with the most important questions of war and peace. He had to wrestle his own luggage off the airplane in the tropical heat and look around for a ride. An American aircraft mechanic offered to take him into town in his jeep. They drove through bustling streets swarming with bicyclists, along with “tiny taxicabs, jeeps, and ancient open touring cars.” “The only reminders of a country at war, other than the uniforms worn by so many of the people,” Lansdale observed, “were an occasional military truck with an African colonial soldier driver and now and then a French military dispatch rider, helmeted, crouched over his handlebars, zig-zagging through the sluggish traffic on his motorcycle.”1 But even more than in the Manila of 1950, fearful concerns about the future lurked just beneath the patina of normality. No one knew, after all, what fate would befall southern Vietnam and its principal metropolis now that the French empire was effectively finished.
Lansdale’s destination was Iron Mike O’Daniel’s house in the center of the city. The general offered to share his dinner with the new arrival and to put him up for the night. Lansdale was not long asleep, however, when he was woken up by a “terrific racket.” Getting out of bed, he heard “the constant roar of gigantic explosions somewhere not too far away,” while “gusts of hot air beat at the wooden shutters . . . setting them dancing and banging.”2 Vietminh sappers had just blown up a French ammunition dump on the outskirts of town—further confirmation, if any were needed, that the situation was “sliding downhill fast, or almost completely sour.” Lansdale’s challenge was “to start building something positive on our side—if I can discover how.”3
Lansdale’s cover was as assistant air attaché at the U.S. embassy, but he did not find a warm welcome from the thirty-five-year-old Air Force colonel, William L. Tudor, who was serving as air attaché. “The bastard hated my guts,” Lansdale recalled. “He could find no place for me to sit in this office, not even a chair. No place to keep any papers, no place to do anything.”4 Nor was the CIA station under Chief of Station Emmett J. McCarthy, a professional intelligence officer who had gotten his start with the OSS in Burma,5 of any help beyond providing Lansdale with secure communications links back to Washington. In fact, McCarthy was so threatened by the new arrival that he tried to undermine Lansdale at every turn. Eventually Lansdale got so mad that he told McCarthy, “You dirty son of a bitch . . . somebody’s got to beat you up and I hereby appoint myself.”6 McCarthy refused to engage in fisticuffs. Instead, he and Lansdale would engage in bureaucratic sniping at each other.
Practically the only American official in Saigon who actively supported Lansdale’s presence was Iron Mike O’Daniel, and he provided the newcomer with a temporary apartment. The two men—the short, squat, scar-covered combat veteran and the lean, mustachioed former advertising man—could not have been more unalike, but they developed a mutual respect and admiration. Lansdale lauded O’Daniel as a “good fighting man who clawed his way up despite not going to West Point” and as “quite a forthright person” who was “fighting a seemingly lonely uphill battle to get something done here.”7
O’Daniel, in turn, would tell his officers that Lansdale was “the only guy fighting the enemy in the whole country,” thus generating jealousy that the CIA man had to handle as best he could.8
The diplomatic scene in Saigon was governed by the same rigid and stuffy rules of protocol as that in Paris with the added necessity—or so it was perceived among Western envoys—of not “losing face” among “Orientals,” whom most viewed as not quite their equals. But so lacking in resources was Lansdale—only a month earlier a kingpin in the Philippines—that he caused double takes when, amid a long line of black cars discharging self-important occupants, he arrived for his first diplomatic reception at the Gia Long Palace in a rickety three-wheel cyclo taxi driven by a Vietnamese man “clad only in a pair of undershorts.” Inside the reception, hosted by the powerless prime minister, Prince Buu Loc, Lansdale was ambushed by “angry American officials” who were furious that he had lowered “the prestige of the United States of America by arriving in such a manner.” He replied that if they were so worried about prestige, they should assign him a car. Much amused, O’Daniel overheard the exchange and offered to give Lansdale one of the inexpensive Citroën 2CVs that MAAG had just acquired.
This simple, mass-produced car with only two cylinders “was an ugly little tin can, its seats made from wide rubber bands,” Lansdale wrote, but he “loved it.”9 He drove it “French style (although I still do not have a driver license)—gas pedal to the floor and blowing a horn like mad,” he said gleefully. “It’s a real sport.”10
In addition to a car, Lansdale acquired in early June a four-room, embassy-owned bungalow at 5 Rue Miche, but he was so low on funds that he spent his first weeks subsisting entirely on fresh rolls from the bakery across the street and big slabs of Roquefort and Swiss cheese that he bought at a French department store. An “overwhelmingly ripe odor” soon permeated the whole house.11
The French were even less eager to help Lansdale than his American colleagues were. A Swiss journalist whom Lansdale talked to compared their attitude to that of “a man giving up his mistress”: “He knows the affair is over, but he hates it when he sees his mistress ride by in the big car of a rich man she has just met.”12 Yet, even with the end of the affair in sight, the French still exercised enough control in Vietnam—with their officials embedded in all layers of the government, Lansdale noted, “giving advice in tones that sounded strangely like orders”13—to stymie the Yankee parvenus. “Am having a little trouble getting out with the Vietnamese Army with the French acting like a suspicious chaperone, suspecting seduction,” Ed wrote to Pat Kelly.14
Lansdale’s task was made harder by his inability to speak not only Vietnamese but French as well. “Am having a real problem with languages here,” he admitted, “and will probably become a real expert in charades as I learn to act out all my needs.”15 When he did try to speak rudimentary French, all he got in return was “giggles.” This created some practical problems for him. “My housegirl,” he wrote three days after his arrival, “took my clothes away a couple of days ago and I suppose sold them to the junk man instead of doing laundry . . . despite my lavish acting out of what I wanted done.” Instead of bringing back his clothes, “she just smiles and brings the other housegirls around when I’m taking a shower, at which they all giggle and run away when I yell at them.” He was “so blue and mad I cannot even think it great fun, which I would have done at one time.” He was down to “wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, with long French khaki stockings,” making him look like a “real Boy Scout.” “I almost give the scout salute in return when somebody salutes,” he joked to his wife, Helen.16 To his mistress, Pat, he wrote that he was tempted to get up in the morning to “watch the girls below riding by on their bicycles in their black satin pajamas,” but “I shouldn’t be doing so, because I’m dressed up in the best Boy Scout tradition in my short khakis and tan hose, and we boy scouts have to behave ourselves.”17
Lansdale’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that he was lonely. “Here I am still out ‘saving the world’ so many thousands of miles away from home at a time when I thought we would all be together again,” he lamented to his wife.18 He told Helen that he had decided against bringing her and the boys to Saigon because of the physical danger and the lack of housing. “The atmosphere is definitely ungood and I shudder to think of you and the boys living with me here,” Ed wrote.19 He might have been suspected of telling a fib to keep his wife back in Washington so that he could spend his time with his Filipino girlfriend except that he was conveying the same message to Pat: “Sure do miss you, but am glad you’re not around even though you’d brighten up the gloomy atmosphere—this is no place for a wonderful person.”20 At least Pat would visit Vietnam and also meet Ed in Hong Kong, something that Helen would never do.
The major difference in the letters that Lansdale wrote contemporaneously to Helen and Pat was that his missives to the latter were earthy and to the former, pious. He wrote to Pat, for example, “A popular brand of local cigarettes in a blue package is called ‘Bleu Job.’ ‘Bleu’ is pronounced ‘blow.’ How in heck can I go up and ask the girl at the store counter for a pack of those?”21 It would have been hard to imagine him making such a jest to his prim, Christian Scientist wife. Instead, he assured her that he was paying attention to his religious studies. “Just going to sit down and read the lesson all the way through as the only way I have of going to church here,” he wrote one Sunday.22
Lack of administrative support, lack of transportation, lack of language skills, lack of love: all were reasons that Lansdale felt “blue” in his first weeks in Vietnam. “I’m a baffled, frustrated guy at the moment after my first days here,” he exclaimed.23 Years later, he recalled, “My first days in Vietnam were horrible, really.”24
AND YET most of these difficulties could be addressed more easily than Ed Lansdale’s biggest deficiency: his lack of knowledge of Vietnamese society. When he arrived in the Philippines in 1950 to work alongside Ramon Magsaysay, he had previously spent three years criss-crossing the country and becoming intimately familiar with its people and its problems—a process aided by his love affair with Pat Kelly and his close friendships with Johnny Orendain and other Filipinos. By contrast, when he arrived in Vietnam, he had previously spent only three weeks in the country and had as of yet made no Vietnamese friends.
The challenge of understanding was exacerbated by the fact that, whereas the Philippines was the most Americanized country in Asia, with English as its lingua franca, Vietnam until that point had had little contact with Americans or their language and culture. Its chief foreign influences were China and France. While the Philippines had had decades of experience with democracy and a free press, freedom was an entirely new concept in Indochina. Yet counterinsurgency and state building—the exercises upon which Lansdale was to be engaged—are inherently context-specific: what works in one location may not apply in another.
Lansdale tried to absorb as much about Vietnam as quickly as he could, but he had trouble finding good books in English—a sign of how little attention Anglophone observers had paid to this area up to that point. He was forced to learn “orally through questioning knowledgeable Americans, Vietnamese, and Frenchmen.”25 Journalists were among his best sources of information. Shortly after arriving, he had an all-night session with the veteran reporters John M. Mecklin of Time-Life and Henry R. “Hank” Lieberman of the New York Times. The three of them, all friends from the Philippines, wound up going to Lieberman’s “favorite eating joint where he could get hot dogs (on French bread) and milk shakes.” “While eating,” Lansdale wrote, “he told me (and everyone else in the joint) what I should do to win the war.”26
Such friendly conversations allowed Lansdale to pick up behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt while also shaping media coverage. A small group of American correspondents, including not only Mecklin and Lieberman but also the husband-and-wife team of Tillman and Peggy Durdin of the New York Times, Homer Bigart of the New York
Herald Tribune, and Robert “Pepper” Martin of U.S. News & World Report, Lansdale wrote, “joined together and offered to help me out as part of the team, and we used to plan together to get the truth of things out in the world.”27 Such close cooperation between journalists and an intelligence officer would come to be frowned on in later decades, after the setbacks of the Vietnam War and the scandals of Watergate, but in the fifties it was routine.
AS HE had done upon first arriving in the Philippines, Lansdale also traveled across Vietnam extensively at a time, June 1954, when the country was poised in a gray zone between war and peace. His most instructive trips were to the rural areas in the south that were the strongholds of two religious sects—the Cao Dai (pronounced cow-die) and the Hoa Hao (wah-how)—that would assume enormous importance over the next year. The Cao Dai, founded in 1926, claimed to synthesize all of the world’s major religions, from Christianity to Taoism, and their eclectic roster of saints included Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Sun Yat-sen and Victor Hugo. Their “Holy See” in Tay Ninh Province was a riotous explosion of colors—yellow, blue, red, pink—with paintings everywhere of the Divine Eye.28 The Hoa Hao sect, an offshoot of Buddhism, was formed a decade later, in 1939. By 1954, each one had roughly a million adherents as well as armed forces numbering in the tens of thousands, which had received subsidies and training from the French to fight the Vietminh. The power of these sects was limited only by the disunity in their ranks, since their troops were commanded by independent warlords.