In addition to these major proposals, Lansdale and his team spewed out a variety of lesser ideas. Recalling the propaganda coups he had carried out in the Philippines and Vietnam a decade or more earlier, he proposed air-dropping nearly five thousand captured Chinese Communist weapons over North Vietnam to show the peasants “how their government was working with the Chinese to threaten their compatriots in the South” and to force Hanoi to mount laborious and time-consuming searches for “ ‘returned’ armament.”34 He proposed building a “Rural Construction ‘operations room’ . . . in the vicinity
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