Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  The Irish Troubles also ended with a negotiated settlement, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which set up a power-sharing arrangement between the Unionists and Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, but kept Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The fundamental reason why the IRA failed to achieve its ultimate objective is the same reason why the Malayan Races Liberation Army, the Mau Mau, and the Dhofar separatists also failed: They were fighting on behalf of an aggrieved minority, while the majority was on the government’s side. (Protestants made up 53 percent of Northern Ireland’s population, Catholics 44 percent.)181 It is much harder for a counterinsurgent to win when the bulk of the population is sympathetic to the insurgent cause—as in Algeria and Indochina.

  The Algerian and Indochinese wars were much larger than any of Britain’s conflicts. The French confronted enemy forces numbering in the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands, whereas most of the guerrilla or terrorist groups Britain faced numbered only in the hundreds. This produced a startling disparity in casualties, with French forces losing more than 17,000 dead in Algeria and 92,000 in Indochina while the British had fewer than 2,000 soldiers and police killed in Malaya, 62 in Kenya, 156 in Cyprus, 35 in Oman, 200 in Aden, and 729 in Northern Ireland. In the 1959 Emergency in Nyasaland, today’s Malawi, the British lost not a single member of the security forces.182 In large part, of course, the relatively low losses were due to the weakness of the opposition the British faced. It is nevertheless telling that they had more success with their minimal-force approach than the French did with maximal force.

  In no small part this was because the British paid greater attention to the political side of the business. Prior to the twentieth century and stretching back to the days of ancient Mesopotamia, colonial powers usually had enough legitimacy to suppress revolts on their own with scant regard for the sensitivities of “the natives” except for a few elites who could be co-opted with generous financial incentives. The British recognized that with the spread of new ideologies (liberalism, nationalism, socialism) and new forms of communication (newspapers, radio, television), this was no longer the case. In the modern world for a regime to be considered legitimate it had to be homegrown and preferably democratic. As Lewis Clark, the American consul general in Algiers, wrote in 1955, “No people will accept permanently a secondary status in a political community of today.”

  The French were slow to come to this realization—they lived for too long in what Clark aptly called “a dream world.”183 The Vietminh and the NLF might never have grown as powerful as they did if the French had been more willing to make political concessions early on, namely, to promise an end to colonial rule as the British did in Malaya. The need to wage counterinsurgency warfare on the political as well as the military level is one of the enduring lessons of the decolonization era—and one of the stark contrasts with an earlier epoch of imperial “small wars.”

  The same principle applied to insurgents. Mao Zedong and, following him, Ho Chi Minh, emphasized the need for political action combined with military measures as opposed to the sort of apolitical raiding tactics that had been common since the days of prehistory. It is no coincidence that they will be remembered as two of the most successful insurgent leaders of the twentieth century. A similar lesson was learned by the Zionists and other groups struggling for their own nation-states. Their victories showed that, although counterinsurgents still held the advantage in the 1950s, the odds of success for any broad-based revolt, especially one that could tap into nationalist sentiment, had increased dramatically since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to say nothing of earlier times. In the American West, the Colt revolver was dubbed “the Equalizer” because it allowed even those who were physically weak to kill the strong. In the same way, in the post–World War II era, the growth in influence of public opinion, both foreign and domestic, was the great equalizer that increasingly allowed the militarily weak to best the strong. The potency of this one-two punch, political and military, would be demonstrated anew not only in the second Vietnam War but also in countries as far-flung as Cuba and Israel.

  BOOK VII

  RADICAL CHIC

  The Romance of the Leftist Revolutionaries

  49.

  TWO SIDES OF THE COIN

  The Guerrilla Mystique in the 1960s–1970s

  THE INCIDENCE OF guerrilla warfare and terrorism did not decline with the demise of the European empires. Quite the contrary. The years from 1959 to 1979—from Castro’s takeover in Cuba to the Sandinistas’ takeover in Nicaragua—were, if anything, the golden age of leftist insurgency. There remained a few colonial wars in Oman, Aden, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, and a larger number of essentially ethnic wars in places like Congo, East Timor, and Nigeria’s Biafra region that were fought to determine the nature of postcolonial states, but the primary propellant of conflict was socialist ideology, often mixed, as in the Basque ETA, the Kurdish PKK, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the IRA, and even the American Black Panthers, with a strong dose of nationalist separatist sentiment. Radicals who styled themselves as the next Mao, Ho, Fidel, or Che took up AK-47s to wage either rural guerrilla warfare or urban terrorism—or in many instances both. This section will focus, first, on the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines and the U.S. war in Vietnam, then on Fidel Castro’s path to power in Cuba and Che Guevara’s attempts to export the Cuban revolution abroad, and, finally, on the rise of a new age of international terrorism in the 1970s led by Palestinian groups whose symbol and leader was Yasser Arafat. All of these conflicts save the Huk Rebellion garnered intensive international media coverage and brought guerrilla warfare and terrorism to the forefront of public attention, where they have remained ever since although not necessarily in the heroic hues of the 1960s–1970s.

  Never before or since has the glamour and prestige of irregular warriors been higher. Tom Wolfe captured the moment in his famous essay “Radical Chic” (1970), which described in hilarious and excruciating detail a party thrown by the composer Leonard Bernstein in his swank New York apartment for a group of Black Panthers—one of myriad terrorist groups of the period whose fame far exceeded their ability to achieve their amorphous goals.1

  American journalist Robert Taber was a good example of the sort of guerrilla groupie that Wolfe was mocking. Taber interviewed Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution and later helped establish the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He penned a widely read paean to guerrillas and terrorists, The War of the Flea (1965), analogizing them to an insect that “bites, hops, and bites again, nimbly avoiding the foot that would crush him.” Taber believed that the fleas of the sixties were selfless idealists waging war on behalf of the “world’s have-nots,” “subjugated and exploited peoples everywhere,” and that “to try to suppress popular resistance movements by force is futile.”2

  Yet some governments had considerable success in suppressing “resistance movements.” The architects of the most successful counterinsurgency campaigns briefly became celebrities in their own right, consulted by presidents and prime ministers and profiled in popular magazines. Counterinsurgency was, as the Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1965, “faddish.”3 The 1960s saw the publication of influential manuals such as Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964), by the French officer David Galula, a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence and, as a military attaché, a witness to the civil wars in Greece and China. Even more widely read at the time was Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (1966), by Sir Robert Thompson, a British veteran of the Chindits and the Malayan Emergency.

  In spite of their differing origins, experts such as Galula and Thompson reached a remarkable degree of agreement that insurgencies could not be fought like conventional wars. The fundamental principles that set counterinsurgency apart were the use of “the minimum of fire” (Galula) and the priority given “to defeating the political subversion, not the guerrillas” (Thompson). Large-
scale infantry or armor offensives, they argued, would prove counterproductive against an elusive foe. Truly defeating an insurgency would require creating a legitimate and responsive government and generating timely and accurate intelligence, as Templer had done in Malaya. Echoing Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the godfather of population-centric counterinsurgency theory, Galula wrote that a “soldier must be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout.”4

  It was one thing to generate such hard-won lessons. Altogether more difficult was to get them accepted by military officers whose ideal remained an armored blitzkrieg and who had nothing but contempt for lightly armed, ragtag fighters who had never even been to a proper staff college. Even the British army, despite its long tradition of imperial policing, at first had tried to use conventional tactics in Malaya before recognizing their futility. The problem was even more acute in the U.S. armed forces. They too had a tradition of fighting guerrillas, ranging from American Indians to Philippine insurrectos and Haitian cacos. The U.S. Marine Corps had even produced a Small Wars Manual in 1935.5 But those inglorious campaigns, never popular to begin with among professional soldiers, were seared out of the collective military mind in the cauldron of World War II. The U.S. armed forces emerged entirely focused on fighting a mirror-image foe—either the Red Army or a mini-me such as the North Korean army.

  A handful of counterinsurgency experts tried to get the American military to use very different tactics to fight a very different foe. None was more innovative, more famous, or ultimately more frustrated than Edward Geary Lansdale, the “Quiet American.”

  50.

  THE QUIET AMERICAN

  Edward Lansdale and the Huk Rebellion, 1945–1954

  THE SOBRIQUET WAS bestowed by the British novelist Graham Greene, who visited Saigon in the early 1950s and in 1955 published The Quiet American, a novel pitting a dissolute, world-weary British journalist, a Greene stand-in called Thomas Fowler, against a naïve young American named Alden Pyle who was widely believed, probably erroneously,6 to have been inspired by Lansdale. Pyle is forever talking about creating a Third Force to save Vietnam from both the Communists and the French colonialists. Fowler thinks that Pyle is “too innocent to live.” But his “ignorant and silly”7 outlook has been vindicated by history. Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the Third Force—liberal democracy—has proved far more durable than either communism or colonialism. That was a lesson that Graham Greene, for all his literary genius, never grasped.

  A more favorable portrait of Lansdale was penned by the lesser writers William Lederer, a U.S. Navy captain who actually knew Lansdale, and Eugene Burdick, a political science professor. Their best seller The Ugly American (1958) featured a motorcycle-riding, harmonica-playing Lansdale stand-in named Colonel Edwin B. Hillandale—or as he was better known to his staid embassy colleagues, “that crazy bastard.” Hillandale “ate his meals in little Filipino restaurants, washing down huge quantities of adobo and pancit and rice with a brand of Filipino rum which cost two pesos a pint.” He spent his weekends mingling with ordinary people in the provinces and generally “embraced everything Filipino.”8 To the authors he exemplified how American representatives in Southeast Asia should interact with the locals—but seldom did. It was an unassuming, self-effacing style that made the real-life Lansdale popular and influential from the moment he set foot in the Philippines.

  He first arrived in the Philippines in 1945, pursuing, as always, an unconventional path. An ROTC cadet at UCLA, he had briefly joined the Army Reserves after leaving college without graduating in 1931. He then left the army to become a star of the San Francisco advertising industry. Among his achievements was helping a regional jeans maker, Levi Strauss, to roll out its products on the East Coast. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he went back into the army, working for military intelligence as well as the OSS and splitting his time between training new recruits and gathering intelligence. At war’s end, by then a thirty-seven-year-old major working in military intelligence, he was assigned to Manila, where he immediately began immersing himself in Philippine culture.9

  He was particularly interested in the Hukbalahap movement (originally an acronym for Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or People’s Anti-Japanese Army, later renamed the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan, or People’s Liberation Army), a Communist group that in 1946 began to fight the newly independent government of the Philippines. Leaving behind Manila’s whirl of “slick” cocktail parties, Lansdale hopped into a jeep and drove into the rural areas, the boondocks, where he found, as he noted in his diary, that “fear starts as the sun sets each day.” Here, amid nipa huts and carabao tracks, besieged by ants and mosquitoes, either “stinking hot” from the sun or “sopping wet” from torrential rains, he spent long hours talking with “folks on both sides of this squabble.”10

  In the process he developed sympathy for ordinary Huks, mostly “youngsters under twenty” who “believe in the rightness of what they’re doing” and are driven to “armed complaint” by “a bad situation, needing reform.” He even tried unsuccessfully to meet the Huk leader, Luis Taruc, whose secret headquarters was located close to the U.S. Air Force’s Clark Air Base. Lansdale almost got shot in the attempt.

  Often he was alone on these expeditions. Sometimes he was accompanied by a Filipino friend; a particular favorite was a “lovely, witty” young woman named Patrocinio (Pat) Kelly, who would one day become Lansdale’s second wife.11 His first wife, Helen, was not nearly as taken by the Philippines as he was, and they grew increasingly apart, but Lansdale would wait until her death decades later before remarrying.

  Although the fictional Hillandale spoke fluent Tagalog, the actual Lansdale never learned any foreign language. This did not prevent him, however, from establishing an impressive rapport with Filipinos, Vietnamese, and other foreigners.12 One of his subordinates later noted that “he had an amazing ability to communicate understanding through an interpreter.”13 It helped, of course, that most Filipinos spoke English, but he could use sign language and a few phrases to make himself understood even by primitive Negrito tribesmen who spoke only their own tongue. A colleague in Manila said, “He could make a friend of everybody except Satan.” His secret? “He was a very good listener.” A Filipino friend recalled, “He would always say things in such a nice, disarming, and charming way. He never ordered but only asked, ‘What do you think about doing it this way?’ or ‘Don’t you think this is how we should treat the problem?’ ”14

  Lansdale’s soft-spoken, modest manner offered a welcome contrast to the bombastic, hectoring approach adopted by too many other Westerners in the Third World. When someone did not open up immediately, he pulled out his secret weapon—a harmonica. Music could melt social barriers even with those who were at first suspicious of this uniformed American with his crew-cut hair and brush mustache, and Lansdale always said he learned a good deal about a country from its folk songs.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT friend Lansdale made in the Philippines was Ramón Magsaysay, who was just a congressman when the two met in 1950. By this time Lansdale had transferred from the army to the air force (he thought “there would be more elbow room for fresh ideas” in the new service)15 and had gone to work for the newly established CIA—a covert relationship that would last from 1950 to 1956.16 Lansdale established an immediate bond with the burly Magsaysay, who was the same age and had fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese before going into politics. Lansdale became Magsaysay’s closest confidant, for a time even his roommate. The two men saw eye to eye on how to combat the Huks—and it wasn’t the way that the Philippine security forces were going about it.

  The army was attacking barrios with artillery and bombs and indiscriminately locking up and torturing suspects. “Democratic freedoms are completely smashed,” wrote one guerrilla leader; “farmers and other citizens are attacked, arrested, shot, jailed and even killed.”17 This campaign was not as brutal as the Japanese or Nazi co
unterinsurgent campaigns of the Second World War, but it was just as counterproductive and even less effective, because it was overseen by a government that Lansdale described as “rotten with corruption”18—one fault that the imperial Japanese and Nazi governments, for all their evils, at least managed to avoid. The Huks, who numbered 10,000 to 15,000 active fighters and had at least 100,000 active sympathizers out of a population of 20 million,19 only grew stronger under this ham-handed assault.

  Magsaysay believed that the government had to win the trust of the people. So did Lansdale. He lobbied Washington to use its clout to get Magsasyay appointed secretary of national defense in 1950 to carry out this program. The new cabinet minister’s motto was “All-Out Friendship or All-Out Force.”20 In essence this was the latest iteration of the population-centric counterinsurgency strategy that could be traced all the way back to the Roman Empire’s combination of “bread and circuses” for compliant populations and crucifixion for captured rebels. The modern theory behind such an approach, which combined “attraction” and “chastisement,” was laid out by Marshal Lyautey a half century earlier and would be further developed a decade later by Robert Thompson and David Galula. These strategies had already proven successful in the Philippines against an earlier generation of rebels who had resisted the imposition of American rule, and were now being implemented at virtually the same time in Malaya. The difference is that the fighting against the Huk Rebellion, unlike that in the Philippine Insurrection or the Malayan Emergency, was not being done by a foreign force; Filipinos themselves formed the whole of the security forces. That automatically gave them a certain level of legitimacy, one of the most important assets in any battle against guerrillas or terrorists. But it also placed greater importance on improving the abysmal performance of the indigenous army. In the Philippines the faults of the locals could not be masked by foreign fighting forces.