The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  Not finding a niche in the intelligence bureaucracy, Lansdale in 1957 severed his relationship with the CIA, which had begun in 1950 when he had gone to work for its forerunner, the Office of Policy Coordination. His most productive and influential years had been spent as a CIA officer, and his legend would forever be intertwined with the history of the spy agency, but now he was hanging up his cloak and dagger, choosing instead to join the staff of the Air Force in the world’s biggest and possibly most depressing office building.

  THE PENTAGON had been erected hurriedly during World War II by fifteen thousand workers laboring around the clock for sixteen months to create a new home for the fast-expanding Army bureaucracy. (The other services moved in after the war.) The five-story, five-sided design was meant to minimize the use of steel, which was in short supply in wartime, so it featured concrete ramps rather than steel elevators. “The Building,” as it came to be known, had five rings of drab offices housing twenty-seven thousand functionaries, more than seventeen miles of gray corridors, seventy-seven hundred no-frills, institutional windows, eighty-five thousand fluorescent light fixtures, and six and a half million square feet of floor space, three times more than the Empire State Building.11 Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower got lost in the building when he became Army chief of staff at the end of 1945. “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it,” Ike wrote.12 The future president was inaugurating a long tradition of Pentagon employees joking about the place where they worked—a sign of how unhappy most officers were to find themselves confined within its walls, far from the work with soldiers in the field that had drawn them into military service.

  If Lansdale was an odd fit within the Pentagon, he was even more of an anomaly in the Air Force, a service then focused on waging nuclear war against the Soviet Union, not on fighting guerrillas. After just three months as Far East action officer for the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations, Lansdale found a more congenial niche in the Pentagon. He became deputy director of the secretary of defense’s Office of Special Operations—“one of those awful Washington titles,” he wrote, “which I’m sure must puzzle the Communists as much as it does me. It merely means that I have an ‘In’ basket with problems that nobody else is damfool enough to want to tackle, so they pass them along.”13

  Lansdale’s new boss was the retired Marine general Graves B. Erskine, yet another fighting man—like Iron Mike O’Donnell, Hanging Sam Williams, and Ray Spruance—with whom he would establish a close rapport. “Big E” was a native of Louisiana who had started his military service as a National Guardsman chasing Pancho Villa in 1916. Thereafter he had joined the Marine Corps and earned a Silver Star while fighting in France in World War I. In the interwar years, he served in the Marines’ “small wars” in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, where he experienced guerrilla war firsthand. In 1945, as commander of the Third Marine Division, he spearheaded the bloody invasion of Iwo Jima. He was a four-star general in 1953 when he retired from the Marine Corps to become assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations and director of the Office of Special Operations.14

  Not long after Lansdale’s arrival in June 1957, Erskine suffered a heart attack and was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He would spend much of the next two years on convalescent leave, giving Lansdale the opportunity to run the office in his absence. Some bureaucratic rivals tried to use Big E’s ill-health as an excuse to ease him into retirement, but the loyal Lansdale would have none of it. He notified the White House, expecting that President Eisenhower, himself a heart-attack victim, would be sympathetic. The president handwrote a nice “get well” note to “Gravestone” (a macabre pun on his first name), expressing the hope that he would return to work soon. Before taking the note to Erskine’s hospital bed, Lansdale read it to a senior staff meeting at the Pentagon, thereby making clear that his boss had the president’s full support. That “stopped all the sniping,” Lansdale recalled, “and so Erskine and I became very close after that.”15

  Headquartered in Room 3E-114 of the Pentagon (an office that, following post-9/11 remodeling, no longer exists), the Office of Special Operations (OSO), which Lansdale ran in Erskine’s absence, was utterly obscure but also quietly powerful, as is so often the case in Washington. Its head was expected to serve as the senior adviser to the defense secretary on special operations, psychological warfare, guerrilla warfare, counterguerrilla warfare, intelligence, and civic action, and with Lansdale installed, it became the primary Pentagon office for dealing with Vietnam issues as well. The CIA often needed military support for its operations in the form of weapons, aircraft, personnel, and other necessities. All such requests were funneled through OSO, meaning that Erskine or, in his absence, Lansdale had to approve the plans. In addition, the head of OSO was a member of important interagency committees that supervised the entire U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. Still only a colonel, albeit no longer as young as when he had first pinned on his wings in 1952 (he turned fifty in 1958), Lansdale was expected to hold his own in interagency meetings with two- and three-star generals as well as senior executives from the civilian intelligence agencies. To make the disparity in their ranks less glaring, Lansdale usually left his uniform at home and wore a civilian suit, “because it was embarrassing really to be junior to them and try to give them guidance.”16

  Despite his newfound power, being in the “Washington bureaucracy was a horrible experience” for Lansdale, his aide Jerry French recalled.17 Ed complained in his letters to Pat Kelly that his Pentagon superiors had more “uninspired drudgery for me than any guy should be expected to do.”18 He spent a lot of time looking wistfully out his Pentagon window at the airplanes taking off and landing at National Airport. In the fall of 1957, he wrote to Pat, “Rumors reach me that I’ve been in Manila (also Saigon). Only wish they were true. Unfortunately I’m stuck in a Pentagon job with a view of the airport—and keep wishing I was aboard one of the flights west which seem to take off about every five minutes.”19

  In spite of Lansdale’s obligatory complaints about the arid bureaucratic routine, his subordinates discovered that he would often stay in the office late into the night—an indication not only of how devoted he was to his work but also of how little desire he had to go home to a family he barely knew. While Lansdale was as unmindful of his family and as consumed with his work as many other “organization men” of the fifties, he was not a self-serving schemer striving to advance his own interest at the expense of his colleagues. He showed unusual empathy for those around him. French recalled that one day he got word that his brother, a Detroit police officer, had been involved in a serious accident. He immediately left for National Airport to catch a flight to Detroit, and was surprised to find Lansdale in the airport’s waiting area. “He had taken the trouble to leave the office and see me and talk to me at the airport before I took off,” French said. “This meant a lot to me, that a guy who was several ranks above me would do that.”20

  While the usual Washington pattern is “kiss up, kick down,” Lansdale, in fact, did the opposite—to the long-term detriment of his career.

  FAR AHEAD of most of his contemporaries, Lansdale apprehended in the 1950s that in the post–World War II era the United States would be involved more often in conflicts against shadowy guerrillas than in battles against uniformed foes such as the Wehrmacht or the Imperial Japanese Navy. To his new job, he brought a passion for developing capabilities that would better enable the United States to compete with the Communists in the kind of unconventional combat that he had waged in the Philippines and Vietnam. “Since the cease-fire in World War II, the communist enemy has conquered some 550 million people living on over 4 million square miles of territory,” he wrote in September 1957, attributing the Communist successes to their ability to perfect “unconventional warfare techniques,” while “our Armed Forces . . . are still too dependent upon mechanical means of warfare,”
which “tends to make us conventional—even when we are engaged in unconventional warfare.”21

  With machine-gun rapidity, Lansdale sprayed out ideas to rectify these shortcomings. In one secret memorandum, titled “A Cold War Program for Defense,” he called for “proper indoctrination” of American personnel sent abroad so that “they will want and know how to make friends among the people,” “a global program of bringing U.S. personnel and foreigners together on a favorable basis,” assigning “trained counter-guerrilla advisers to MAAGs [Military Assistance Advisory Groups] where required,” and stimulating “U.S. thinking on unconventional warfare through seminars conducted by outstanding, experienced persons.”22 In short, he was proposing to train thousands of Edward Lansdales—soldiers who would interact on a sympathetic basis with embattled societies and spread the gospel of freedom.

  Lansdale might be accused of an excess of idealism, but he was not naïve—he knew from personal experience how far most Americans fell short of his ideals. And if he needed any reminding, Pat Kelly wrote to him about the way the U.S. embassy in Manila, where she worked for the U.S. Information Agency, was being run: “As of a few weeks ago, the snack bar here is only for American employees and their guests, and Filipino employees may only use it as a special concession or condescension as the gossip goes. The gossip further says that the real joke, brittle and bitter, is that this privilege was given to the Filipinos so that the American in the office can have his coffee bought and brought in by his Filipino clerk while he is busy talking to his wife over the telephone about the cocktail party the night before.”23 This was exactly the kind of racist attitude that, in Lansdale’s view, undermined the American position in the Cold War. In one of his speeches, he said that Filipinos bristled at foreigners with “hidden attitudes of superiority” who treated them as if they were children. “The Filipino is adept at what some call ‘the deep freeze’—a surface compliance or agreeableness hiding their true feelings.”24

  Other Lansdale ideas that promoted a philosophy of “soft power,” decades before that term was coined, included plans to give “foreign military personnel . . . training that would allow them to assist in certain situations of a basically civilian nature, e.g., critical road building, flood control, etc.”;25 to send retired American military personnel “as civilian instructors in African educational institutions”;26 and to assign American military advisers to create “a national ideal for the [local] troops to admire and aspire to emulate” by promoting national heroes such as Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines or, in Vietnam, “the fabulous Trung sisters who led Vietnamese armies to battle the invading Chinese in olden days.”27 In a more hard-power vein, Lansdale proposed to take Freedom Company global, utilizing an ostensibly private entity secretly supported by the U.S. government to dispatch military personnel from nations such as South Vietnam, Pakistan, Taiwan, and South Korea to battle Communist advances. He suggested calling the new entity, which anticipated the rise of military contractors decades later, Freedom Inc. and said that “it may be concerned with sending of a single infantry battalion or possibly a force as large as two divisions.”28

  Like many visionaries before him, Lansdale was better at generating ideas than at implementing them. Few of his brainstorms were enacted. His lack of skill in manipulating a giant bureaucracy was becoming a bigger problem in Washington than it had been in Manila or Saigon, where he had thrived in a more freewheeling, chaotic culture amid a far smaller American presence.

  CHARACTERISTICALLY, LANSDALE did not confine his advocacy to the inner councils of power. In fact, no sooner had he returned from Vietnam at the end of 1956 than he became an active speaker before military, intelligence, and Foreign Service audiences, proselytizing for his version of “counterguerrilla” warfare, as counterinsurgency was then known.

  A representative talk was the one that he gave at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on December 1, 1958. He began by addressing the audience as “Gentlemen and Gremlins,” the latter a word coined in the 1940s for an “imaginary mischievous sprite”; it had become a favorite term of his to refer to those who might share his unconventional ideas. His focus was on Southeast Asia, “one of the major battlegrounds of today’s death struggle,” with one-fourth of the world’s population up for grabs. He warned, “We don’t want to be like the French, who went marching out of Hanoi in defeat in 1954, with millions and millions of dollars’ worth of modern U.S. equipment—brave men whose heroism and weapons and numbers were not enough—licked by a local army wearing tennis shoes and pajamas.” To counter the Communists, Lansdale advocated that armies in the region “undertake missions of public works, welfare, health, and education, as well as national security.” “As the soldier becomes the true brother of the people, the enemy and his weapons become identified, with the help of the people, and the enemy when so identified can be defeated.”29

  From the perspective of the twenty-first century, much of this might seem to be conventional wisdom—counterinsurgency 101, as codified in the 2006 Army-Marine Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, which preached the importance of winning over the populace rather than simply killing insurgents. But in the aftermath of the greatest war in history—one decided in such epic battles as Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad, and D-Day—there was nothing remotely conventional about Lansdale’s wisdom. He was part of the first generation of postwar counterinsurgents, men such as the British officer Gerald Templer and the French officer David Galula, who were articulating a new doctrine to deal with “wars of national liberation” across the Third World.

  The folksy way in which Lansdale delivered his homilies, blending in his own experiences while eschewing hard-to-follow jargon, made an indelible impact on listeners. After a talk that Lansdale delivered at the Army War College in February 1957, lasting from 8:30 p.m. until midnight, two infantry captains were so interested by what he had to say that they stayed up talking with him until 4:30 in the morning.30

  Then-Major Samuel V. Wilson, an army officer on loan to the CIA, remembered that in 1957 one of his colleagues went to hear a lecture at the Pentagon. The CIA man returned and said, “Sir, I have just just listened to the most remarkable individual that I have ever heard. When he began talking, he was dry, had a monotonous voice, and I thought I’m not sure that I was wise in coming here. But as he kept talking I was mesmerized by what he had to say.” Wilson had never heard of the speaker. What did you say his name was? he asked. “Ed Lansdale,” his colleague replied. “They call him ‘Landslide’ Lansdale for his exploits in the Philippines, and he’s just come back from Vietnam.”31

  SAM WILSON would come to know Landslide Lansdale the following year. Having left the CIA in March 1958, he had some free time before he started attending classes at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in August and spent that interregnum by “snowbirding” (army slang for a short-term assignment) in the Office of Special Operations. Later, he would return to the Pentagon to become Lansdale’s deputy.

  A veteran of Merrill’s Marauders, a U.S. Army unit that had fought behind Japanese lines in Burma, Wilson was a highly decorated combat soldier who looked as if he could have stepped out of an Army recruiting poster; the columnist Jimmy Breslin later described him as “six-foot-two, 195 pounds, with blue eyes and light wavy hair and the outdoors on his face and big hands.”32 But he was entranced by this offbeat Air Force colonel with the movie-star mustache who had never fired a gun at the enemy. More than half a century later, looking back on those distant days from his farm in rural Virginia, where he settled after retiring as a three-star general, the elderly Wilson, by then white-haired and infirm, recalled in his soft Southern accent that Lansdale was a “guru” to him: “To me he was a bit of a mystic. He had dark, soulful brooding eyes. He spoke softly and in order sometimes to understand him clearly, you had to lean forward. It took me some time to realize that was really a technique of his. If he spoke softly and you had to lean forward to hear him, he already had placed h
imself in the position that he wanted to be in. It was subtle but effective.”

  Every night after the Pentagon shut down, “Lansdale would stand there leaning against the doorjamb of his office, and I’d put my backside on the desk of the secretary who had long ago gone home,” Wilson recalled. “He’d start almost in midsentence from something he had been talking about a week ago, as though it had just occurred, and spin some sort of yarn. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. I thought, ‘This fella has found the golden fleece. He understands how warfare has changed, and he knows what the dynamics are.’ I felt I had better listen to him and learn all I could. I was kind of like a lamprey eel, sucking on him.” After getting “a good dose of the Lansdale philosophy,” Wilson pronounced himself a “complete convert.”33

  After his year at Leavenworth, Wilson, by now a lieutenant colonel, was assigned as director of instruction at the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army Special Forces, not yet known as the Green Berets, had been formed in 1952. Numbering 2,300 men, they were initially envisioned primarily as guerrillas operating behind enemy lines, just like Merrill’s Marauders. By the late fifties, it was dawning on Special Forces officers that, on the “it takes a thief to catch a thief” principle, they were well positioned to become the country’s premier counterguerrilla force.

  In 1959, one year after Sam Wilson first met Lansdale, Colonel George M. Jones, the commander of the Special Warfare School, assigned him to put together the school’s first course on fighting guerrillas. Wilson, however, struggled for a name. He recalled thinking that “ ‘counterguerrilla operations’ was too narrow because it did not embrace those nonmilitary factors that so often dominate the scene in this conflict arena. ‘Counterresistance’ was a bad choice because we had identified ourselves so many times in our history with resistance forces that were trying to pursue worthy causes, to include our own revolution. To call it ‘counterrevolutionary’ played right into the hands of Soviet dogma.” Wilson and his colleagues were stumped until he wrote on a chalkboard a new word that they all liked: “Counter-Insurgency.” Eureka. By then it was two in the morning, and a major said, “Let’s go home.”34 They had come up with their term.