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

by Max Boot

Harvey was a small-town lawyer from Indiana and a former FBI agent. The trim and elegant Ivy Leaguers who dominated the CIA looked down upon him as an ignorant and uncultured gumshoe.58 But his police skills came in handy when he uncovered the British double agent Kim Philby, precisely the sort of upper-class snob whom he resented.59 On the strength of this achievement, he was transferred in 1952 to become chief of the CIA’s base in West Berlin, on the front lines of the Cold War. He didn’t speak a word of German and drank so heavily that he served martinis in water goblets, but he pulled off one of the CIA’s most celebrated intelligence coups when he supervised the construction of a secret tunnel into East Berlin designed to tap into Soviet communications. Operation Gold operated for eleven months in 1955–56, producing warehouses full of intercepts. Only later did the CIA learn that the KGB, because of a mole in MI6, knew about the operation the whole time, raising the disquieting suspicion that the tunnel had been used to feed the CIA disinformation. But even if the Berlin tunnel, known internally as “Harvey’s hole,” was not quite the success it had seemed at first blush, its inglorious end did not hurt Harvey’s