The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

the authors of the Pentagon Papers later wrote, “Our complicity in [Diem’s] overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment in an essentially leaderless Vietnam.”38

Within four years, half a million American troops were trapped in a quagmire. William Colby, a former CIA director and station chief in Saigon, was later to call Diem’s overthrow “the worst mistake of the Vietnam War,” a judgment shared by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,39 if resisted by other analysts who maintain that the tragedy of America’s defeat was inevitable whether Diem remained in power or not.

But it is no exaggeration to suggest that the whole conflict, the worst military defeat in American history, might have taken a very different course—one that was less costly and potentially more successful—if the counsel of this CIA operative and Air Force officer had been followed. Who was this singular visionary, this unhonored strategist, this sidelined adviser who wanted to follow, as Robert Frost put it, the road not taken? His name was Edward Geary Lansdale.

THE legendary Edward Lansdale, a covert operative so influential that he was said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and for one of the main characters in The Ugly American, remains, even more than four decades after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, one of the most fascinating and mysterious, yet misunderstood, figures in post-1945 American foreign policy.

He was portrayed by David Halberstam in his 1969 classic, The Best and the Brightest, as a “particularly futile and failed figure”: a “classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for,” who “allegedly knew and loved Asians” but “talked vague platitudes one step away from the

chamber of commerce.” In Halberstam’s telling, he was an expert on “how to fight guerrilla wars the right way” who became “part of a huge American mission which used bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.”2 Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 Vietnam: A History, drew Lansdale in equally unflattering hues as “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former advertising executive,” an ineffectual “romantic” who “overlooked the deeper dynamics of revolutionary upheavals” and who “seemed to be oblivious to the social and cultural complexities of Asia.”3 Tim Weiner, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, was more scathing still, deriding Lansdale as a “Madison Avenue . . . con man” who dreamed up impractical schemes to overthrow Fidel Castro.4 By contrast, Neil Sheehan, in another Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), lauded Lansdale as a Machiavellian genius, a “legendary clandestine operative” who ruthlessl...

Halberstam, Karnow, Sheehan, and Weiner were—and, in the case of the latter two, still are—superb journalists and historians, but none has captured the totality of Ed Lansdale, and, by extension, of this particular part of the Vietnam War itself. The accounts of the first three were circumscribed because the authors knew Lansdale only in the 1960s, a frustrating decade for him, not at the peak of his effectiveness in the 1950s. The time is right, then, for a deeper look at Lansdale, one that is intended to do for him what Sheehan so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie or what Barbara Tuchman so effectively did for General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell in Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Like those earlier works, The Road Not Taken is meant to be not only a biography of a pivotal, yet strangely unknown, figure; it is also a work of history with often surprising diplomatic, political, and military implications that seeks to recast our understanding of recent American history—and, indeed, of contemporary American policy debates. As the subtitle suggests, this book is concerned both with Lansdale and with the “American tragedy in Vietnam,” but in order to understand his impact on Vietnam, one must first appreciate what he did elsewhere, not only in the Philippines, where he served prior to arriving in Saigon in 1954, but also in “the Washington jungle,” where he struggled to make a mark in the eight years, 1957 to 1965, between his two Vi...

Lansdale was not an advocate for a larger U.S. military presence in Indochina. He argued that the American emphasis should be on building up legitimate, democratic, and accountable South Vietnamese institutions that could command the loyalty of the people, and he thought that sending large formations of American ground troops was a distraction from, indeed a hindrance to, achieving that all-important objective.

Lansdale’s yin-yang approach, of hunting down guerrillas and terrorists while trying to attract the support of the uncommitted, is the basis of modern “population-centric” counterinsurgency doctrine as applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Britain in Northern Ireland, by Colombia against the FARC, by Israel in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and by many other countries with varying degrees of success.

Lansdale’s legacy stands as a rebuke both to anti-interventionists who assume that fragile states should stand or fall on their own and to arch-hawks who believe that massive commitments of American military forces are necessary to win any war.

dystopian

Late in his life, Harry Lansdale was to quote to his son David a passage of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875) that was particularly meaningful to him: “At all times and under all circumstances overcome evil with good. Know thyself and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil.”31 Overcome evil with good: that was Edward Lansdale’s unspoken mantra throughout his years on the front lines of the Cold War. His deeply held assumption that he could transform Pacific societies to live up to America’s ideals had its origins not only in his reading about the American Revolution and in his Los Angeles upbringing but also in the mind-over-matter teaching of his parents’ faith.

Christian Science was important to Ed Lansdale in another way: it gave him sympathy for the underdog and added to his empathy for minorities.

LATER in life, Edward Lansdale would emerge as one of the foremost American authorities on Vietnam and the Philippines. He would also become a virtuoso politico-military adviser, a crack propagandist, and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, a field that has been described as the “graduate level” of warfare—“far more intellectual than a bayonet charge,” in the words of T. E. Lawrence.1 Those were not skills he learned, by and large, in the classroom. Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, to whom he has been compared, Lansdale was not drawn to the region where he would make his name by any academic inquiry, which helps to explain why he did not make his first acquaintance of Asia until he was in his mid-thirties. By contrast, Lawrence first visited the Middle East in 1909 as an

Oxford undergraduate to work on his senior thesis on Crusader castles, and returned after graduation to work as an archaeologist on an excavation sponsored by the British Museum. Lansdale would be, at best, an undistinguished student who did not display the intellectual brilliance—or the psychological fragility—of T. E. Lawrence, who admitted that “madness was very near” for him.2 But Lansdale’s school years did teach him lessons in character and leadership, striving and hustling that would help make possible his later exploits.

Long Telegram sent from Moscow in 1946 by the diplomat George Kennan, who elaborated on his thesis in an article he published in the journal Foreign Affairs the following year under the byline “Mr. X.” He argued that the United States had to enter into a “policy of firm containment, designed

to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”31 This became the intellectual underpinning of the Truman Doctrine—the president’s announcement, on March 12, 1947, that he was asking for $400 million in assistance to Greece and Turkey to help fight Communist subversion. The following year, Secretary of State George C. Marshall unveiled a $12 billion initiative to rebuild Europe—an act of both selfless generosity and cold strategic calculation that came to be known as the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union tried to test the West by blockading West Berlin in 1948, but Truman rose to the challenge by dispatching the U.S. Air Force to deliver supplies to the beleaguered city for nearly a year. In April 1949, the United States and Canada joined with ten nations in Western Europe to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to resist Soviet aggression.

Yet despite these Western countermeasures, the threat from the Soviet bloc only seemed to be growing. On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb, breaking the American nuclear monopoly. Just eight days later, Mao Zedong announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China. America, it seemed, had entered a new age of insecurity. Two of the most powerful nations in the world were aligned against it and one of those nations possessed the ultimate weapon. Many feared that Armageddon was imminent. The well-informed British diplomat Harold Nicolson reflected the anxiety of the times when on November 29, 1948, he wrote in his diary that “Russia is preparing for the final battle for world mastery and th...

In 1949, the OPC had just 302 personnel and a budget of $4.7 million. Three years later, it had nearly 6,000 full-time and contract employees and a budget of $82 million.

2007 National Book Award–winning novel, Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, the son of a U.S. Information Agency officer who spent part of his childhood living in Manila. One of the book’s characters, the former Air Force colonel-turned-CIA officer Francis X. Sands, cites the vampire story as evidence that it’s important to wage war “at the level of myth,” because the enemy is “more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.”31 What such celebratory accounts left out was that this operation constituted, even in the early 1950s, a war crime because the Philippine soldiers deliberately killed rather than captured an enemy fighter and then mutilated his corpse.

COLLECTIVELY ALL of these measures—the field inspections to improve the army’s honesty and effectiveness, the expansion of the army’s size and its reorganization into Battalion Combat Teams, the creation of the Scout Rangers to hunt down rebels in the jungle, the raids to capture the Huk leadership in Manila, the expansion of civic action, the resettlement of surrendered rebels, the use of psywar tactics such as the “eye of God” and the “vampire” killing, the booby-trapped weapons—took a serious and

growing toll on the Huks. By the middle of 1951—

the Philippine insurgents were on the defensive for the first time since the beginning of their struggle in 1946.

U.S. Ambassador Myron Cowen, a lawyer turned diplomat, knew where to give the credit. “Through a combination of guile, good luck, and brute force, Magsaysay and Lansdale inflicted severe defeats on the Huks,” he wrote to Secretary of State Acheson on September 19, 1951. [Lieutenant] Colonel Lansdale has been the right hand of the Secretary of National Defense Magsaysay and he has in a large measure been responsible for Magsaysay’s success in breaking the backbone of the Huk military forces and in dispersing the Philippine Communist organizational setup. It is inconceivable to me that the Philippine situation would be as favorable as it is without Colonel Lansdale’s superb performance. He has lived day and night with Magsaysay at very real risk to himself. He has guided and advised him. He has provided a driving power and when necessary a restraining one and furthermore he has been a better source of intelligence than all the rest of our intelligence efforts put together.

This was high praise from the American diplomatic establishment. But to convert the tactical successes that Lansdale and Magsaysay had achieved into a lasting strategic victory would require more than mere military action. It would require political action centered on two upcoming elections—the 1951 legislative and regional election and the 1953 presidential election. If these votes were as corrupt as previous ballots had been, the government could not win the confidence of the people. If, on the other hand, the elections could be conducted honestly, the Huks would lose a valuable rallying cry.

Magsaysay, however, was only in charge of the army. How could he and his American adviser stop the president, Elpidio Quirino, and his corrupt Liberal Party machine from stealing more elections? And if they could not prevent more election fraud, how could they possibly defeat the Huks? Two men were now matched against an entire political system.

THE CIA manipulated its first foreign election only half a year after the agency’s establishment in 1947. To keep Italy, economically and morally lacerated after two decades of Fascist wantonness, from going Communist, the newly formed National Security Council approved a program of covert action to buttress the conservative premier Alcide De Gasperi and his Christian Democratic Party against the Popular Democratic Front established by the Communist and Socialist parties in an election scheduled for April 18, 1948. The CIA provided as much as ten million dollars in cash to finance the Christian Democratic campaign. In addition to bankrolling anti-Communist politicians, the CIA worked in cooperation with the State Department and the Voice of America to launch an all-out propaganda blitz to warn Italians against embracing Communism. Anti-Communist appeals

from well-known entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore were supplemented by shipments of the film Ninotchka, Greta Garbo’s 1939 satire of Soviet life. The newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, who subsequently founded the National Enquirer, chipped in with a campaign asking fellow Italian Americans to send letters and telegrams to their friends and relatives in the old country urging them to vote against Communism. Jay Lovestone, an American labor activist and erstwhile Communist with close ties to the CIA, mobilized his Italian labor union contacts to assist in the campaign. The result, from Washington’s perspective, was entirely satisfactory: the Christian Democrats won 48.5 percent of the vote in 1948, up from 36 percent in 1946, and acquired an absolute majority in parliament. It is not clear, admittedly, how much of the outcome was due to CIA efforts. American economic aid such as the Marshall Plan, signed into law just weeks before the vote, and efforts by the Vatican to mobilize church members were also of considerable importance—to say nothing of De Gasperi’s own appeal. But in the minds of policymakers the 1948 Italian election established a covert-action template that could be followed successfully in other elections where the Communist threat loomed large. Arthur Krock of the New York Times spoke for many when he commended officials for the “perfect handling of the American interest . . . in the peninsular roughhouse.”

Such operations became much easier to execute after the establishment, just two months after the Italian election, of Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, expressly designed and amply funded for waging “political warfare.” Thus, by the time that Lansdale submitted a request to his superiors at the OPC to influence the 1951 Philippine congressional campaign, the institutional resources for such a project were in place—along with the determination to use them. America, it was clear, was far removed from pre-1941 isolationism. Yet the manipulation of foreign politics remained a controversial project within the American foreign-policy establishment. Naturally, it was more...

THERE WAS, admittedly, a crucial difference between the situation in Italy in 1948 and that in the Philippines in 1951. In the former instance, the Truman administration had been worried about Communists’ winning power outright at the ballot box, because the Italian Communist Party was the largest in Western Europe. In the Philippines, by contrast, the Communist Party was prevented by law from contesting the election. The concern was that abusive, corrupt, and reactionary anti-Communists would win the election by fraud and thereby inadvertently strengthen the Communists’ attempts to foment a revolution.

Charged with safeguarding the vote was the ineffectual Philippine Commission on Elections. In the summer of 1951, Lansdale hatched a scheme with Ramon Magsaysay to have the commission request the assistance of the armed forces. President Elpidio Quirino’s Liberals had been the worst offenders among vote stealers the last time around, so Lansdale was careful to ensure that the request from the election commission came while Quirino was out of the country receiving medical care at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

To further safeguard the elections, Lansdale set up an OPC-funded organization, the National Movement for Free Elections, known by its acronym, NAMFREL. It was ostensibly run by three Filipino war veterans. Its real guiding light, in addition to Lansdale himself, was another CIA operative, named Gabriel L. Kaplan. He first came to Manila in 1951 on behalf of a CIA-backed Committee for a Free Asia, which eventually changed its name to the As...

To heighten the impact of the voting, Lansdale orchestrated a typical bit of black propaganda. After the Military Intelligence Service arrested a Huk agitprop cell in Manila, Lansdale used their communications channels to write his own propaganda on behalf of the insurgency. His theme was “Boycott the Election!” based on the assumption that the 1951 vote would be as dirty as its 1949 predecessor. He produced an entire fake directive along those lines “typed on a captured Huk typewriter on captured paper, with authenticating identification.” So realistic was Lansdale’s missive that

soon it was echoed by the entire Huk propaganda apparatus. When the election turned out to be honest, the Huks were discredited.

He found himself citing Mao to argue, “All military actions are meant to achieve political objectives while military action itself is a manifested form of politics.”

Allen followed his brother to Princeton and after graduation entered the Foreign Service—but only because the United States had no civilian intelligence service. Like Edward Lansdale, Allen was a devotee of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, one of the first and most popular novels of espionage, and he aspired to follow in Kim’s footsteps.37 Posted during World War I in Vienna and Bern, Switzerland, Allen developed the case officer’s skill at cultivating sources and evaluating their information. In 1926 Allen, who had attended law school at night, left the government to become a high-paid international lawyer at his brother’s firm. His recreational interests were tennis, talking foreign policy over brandy and a pipe, and womanizing. He would torture his long-suffering wife by writing letters telling her of all the enjoyable hours he had spent on his frequent trips abroad with a variety of beautiful women. “I don’t feel I deserve as good a wife as I have,” he confessed, “as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies.”38 Allen Dulles’s life changed for good in 1942 when another New York lawyer with a roving eye—Wild Bill Donovan—recruited him for what would become the OSS. Before long, Dulles was back in his old stomping ground in neutral Switzerland, which in World War II, as in World War I, proved to be a playground for secret agents. Much like Lansdale, Dulles had, in the words of his biographer Peter Grose, a “marvelous, low-key way of speaking” that endeared him to most pe...

After the war, Dulles briefly returned to the practice of law but, like Frank Wisner and many other veterans, he found civilian life a bore. In January 1951, he became the CIA’s deputy director for plans; in August, deputy director of the entire agency; and then in February 1953, following Eisenhower’s election, director of central intelligence. Nicknamed the Great White Case Officer, he loved the romance of espionage and hated the paperwork. The Soviet mole Kim Philby, who knew Dulles when he was MI6 liaison officer in Washington, said that Dulles “was nice to have around: comfortable, predictable, pipe-smoking, whisky-sipping company,” and that “his unprofessional delight in cloak-and-dagger for its own sake was an endearing trait.”

While Eisenhower set the general direction of foreign policy, a field in which he was far better schooled than most of his predecessors and successors, he delegated much of its implementation to the brothers Dulles. They spoke on the telephone daily and gathered every Sunday at their sister Eleanor’s place in northern Virginia to plot by her pool. Foster distrusted the Foreign Service and preferred to implement sensitive ope...

The Dulles brothers’ plans to liberate the “captive peoples” of the Communist bloc—an Eisenhower campaign slogan in 1952—went awry when Communist secret police forces rolled up CIA-organized networks in, inter alia, Poland, Ukraine, Albania, China, and Tibet. That left the Dulles brothers to focus on lands where Communism had not yet taken root. Allen Dulles proclaimed, “Where there begins to be evidence that a country is...

With Eisenhower’s blessing, Dulles charged ahead in June 1953 with Operation Ajax, a joint undertaking with Britain’s MI6 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran, who was threatening to nationalize oil fields belonging to the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and who, it was feared in Washington, was soft on Communism. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Theodor...

occurred in Tehran in August 1953, while the Philippine election campaign was heating up, although historians continue to debate how much of the credit or blame should go to the CIA. Later that year, Eisenhower would give the go-ahead to Operation Success to topple Guatemala’s leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz. In 1954, a CIA team under Co...

Such coups were not without cost. After taking power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist revolutionaries would cite the anti-Mossadeq uprising, which actually had been supported by the clerical establishment, to justify their anti-American animus. And among those embittered by the overthrow of Arbenz was a young Argentinian physician named Ernesto “Che” Guevara who was in Guatemala City as it was being bombed by unmarked American aircraft; this experience helped turn him into a Marxist revolutionary. But the Eisenhower administration never imagined that its regime-change operations would eventually produce such “blowback.” To the contrary, the CIA campaigns in Iran and Guatemala were seen as proof that covert action was an economical and effective alternative to waging war. As one of Eisenh...

It is hardly a surprise, then, that Allen Dulles was inclined to support Lansdale as much as he did Kim Roosevelt and other swashbuckling covert-action specialists. He loved to take favorite field officers to the White House and introduce them to Eisenhower, saying, with a twinkle in his eye, “Mr. President, here’s my best man!”44 Intensifying a post-1945 shift in the exercise of American influence—quite a change from prewar days, when the United States did not even have a civilian intelligence agency—the Eisenhower administration did not cavil at using covert operatives to manipulate f...

It helped that the senior American representative in the Philippines was also a supporter of Lansdale’s. Ambassador Ray Spruance was no professional diplomat. A career ...

he hated Quirino with a passion and admired Magsaysay for his “courage, honesty, and patriotism.”46 To win Spruance’s favor, Lansdale hosted him on inspection trips to the provinces, “which,” Lansdale noted, “he loves since he can get into old khakis and walking shoes.”47 After hearing that Spruance liked melons, Lansdale even took him to a cantaloupe patch in the Candaba Swamp that had just been liberated by Filipino troops.48 This campaign paid off: in December 1952, the ambassador wrote to...

YET THE schism between the sanctioned diplomats of the Establishment and the new guild of covert operatives intent on saving “Western freedom from Communist darkness” continued to widen. Despite the support of Dulles and Spruance, Lansdale still complained of “sniping at me (verbally) by several folks at our Embassy to whom I am somewhat lower than a skunk.”50 Major General Albert Pierson did more than just snipe. He insisted that Lansdale’s continued presence in JUSMAG was an embarrassment and a violation of the embassy’s decree that U.S. personnel stay neutral in the election. (Spruance, who knew and approved of Lansdale’s behind-the-scenes machinations, had issued a disingenuous “warning” on March 13, 1953, to “all Americans resident here to refrain scrupulously from any kind of participation in the election.”)51 Pierson was not able to expel Lansdale from the country any more than Quirino could. But he did manage to expel Lansdale from JUSMAG’s organizational chart and its housing compound. Lansdale would soon get his revenge; his complaints to Allen Dulles contributed to Pierson’s dismissal and replacement in August 1953 by another general, Robert M. Cannon, who was more accommodating.

“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.

autodidact

Mao’s three-stage model of revolution: a “localized guerrilla war,” followed by a “war of movement” waged by a mix of conventional and guerrilla forces, and finally a “general uprising” that would bring down the regime. This concept of “people’s war” waged in the countryside by peasants was more appropriate for rural countries such as China and Vietnam than the kind of urban uprising that Lenin had carried out in Russia.

The weakness of the Vichy regime allowed Nguyen to return in 1941 to Vietnam for the first time in thirty years and establish the Vietminh as a “popular front” to galvanize a nationalist uprising.