Lansdale may have been losing influence in Washington and Saigon, but he had not lost his touch for psychological warfare. His handling of The Quiet American was as deft a propaganda coup as all of the rumors he had spread to encourage emigration from North Vietnam in 1954–55 or the anti-Huk rumors he had spread in the Philippines a few years earlier. He was shaping Western public perceptions so as to bolster the new Republic of Vietnam even as he was experiencing an erosion of his preeminent position of influence in Saigon.
