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

by Max Boot

As a security measure, he adopted a new pseudonym: Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens).

he told his comrades, “We must be able to tolerate all hardships, surmount the worst difficulties, and struggle to the end.”

In 1945, he received a team of OSS operatives who helped to train his men and even provided him with quinine and sulfa drugs, which may have saved his life after he contracted malaria and dysentery. Like most people who met him, the OSS officers were impressed by Ho’s “clear-cut talk” and “Buddha-like composure”;14 the rebel leader shared Ramon Magsaysay’s personal magnetism, a quality that his future rival, Ngo Dinh Diem, singularly lacked. The OSS men did not notice how skillfully Ho deflected questions about whether he was a Communist. That’s what “the French label . . . all Annamites who want independence,” he replied disingenuously.

AS SOON as the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, following the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ho Chi Minh shrewdly moved to fill the power vacuum in Indochina. On September 2, in a Hanoi bedecked with red bunting, the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed with Ho Chi Minh its president.

Fredrik Logevall in Embers of War,

Ho realized that his nascent state soon would be imperiled by the arrival of Chinese troops in the north and British troops in the south, tasked by the Allies with overseeing the surrender of Japanese forces. Before long, he knew, the supercilious French would be back as well.

To forestall this eventuality, he vainly tried to enlist the United States as an ally. He even quoted liberally from the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming Vietnam’s

own independence. But his appeals to President Truman—there were at least eight letters from Ho between October 1945 and February 1946—went unanswered. Administration officials had little enthusiasm for the return of French colonialism, but they also had no desire to aid a veteran Comintern operative. Many analysts would later see this as a squandered opportunity, although in those days, before Tito’s 1948 break wit...

Failing to get American help, Ho Chi Minh could not prevent the return of the French. On November 23, 1946, in an attempt to drive the Vietminh out of the port of Haiphong, French warships and aircraft opened fire on the Vietnamese quarter, killing thousands of civilians. The French then secured Hanoi after a brief battle, but Vietminh units slipped out to continue the struggle—a pattern that would recur in the years ahead. The French forces could inflict casualties, but they could not achieve victory. The French war machine, like the American one that would come after it, was simply too slow, too ponderous, and, above all, too clankingly loud to annihilate the elusive Vietminh fighters in la guerre sans fronts (war without fronts). The guerrillas would inevitably hear the attackers coming and scatter long before they could be pinned down. In frustration, the French resorted to old colonial habits, torturing prisoners and bombing villages that were suspected of harboring insurgents. In the process, they made many of the same mistakes the Philippine army had made in its losing battles against the Huks before the reforms instituted by Magsaysay and Lansdale—only on a much bigger s...

future, as the British were then doing in Malaya. But this the French resolutely refused to do. Having already alienated much of the Vietnamese population, the French suffered a blow from which they would never recover with the ascendance in 1949 of the Communists in neighboring China. Mao Zedong sent military advisers and weapons to the Vietminh. Outside assistance or lack thereof is usually the surest indicator of the fate of any insurgency, and the Vietminh, unlike the Huks, now had it in abundance. In October 1950, Giap threw thirty thousand of his newly trained and equipped troops against the isolated French posts along the 200-mile border between Vietnam and China. By the end of the month, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps had lost control of the border, along with six thousand troops and enough weaponry to equip an entire Vietminh division.17 It was, as a French correspondent noted, an “appalling, stupefying, unbelievable defeat.”18 An indomitable new French general, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, momentarily retrieved the situation and stymied Giap’s Red River offensive in 1951, securing for the time being Hanoi, Haiphong, and the rice-growing regions of the north. Bu...

THE STALEMATE in Indochina was of growing concern to Washington because the United States, having long ago abandoned a posture of neutrality, was now paying 80 percent of the bill for the French war effort. In 1953, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to send Lieutenant General John W. O’Daniel, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, to Indochina to assess whether the French had adequate war plans and, if not, to assist in the creation of better plans.

“Big Frontier Administrative Center.” Or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.37

OPERATION CASTOR, as the plan to fortify Dien Bien Phu was known, began in earnest on November 20, 1953, while Edward Lansdale was back in the Philippines advising newly elected President Ramon Magsaysay on how to put together his government.

Vo Nguyen Giap, for his part, would assemble fifty thousand carefully camouflaged troops on the forested slopes around Dien Bien Phu. Another fifty thousand or so porters and support troops—a long line of human ants—dragged heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns through the jungle. Incredibly enough, the Vietminh would have more than twice as many artillery tubes as the defenders.3 The French were blissfully unaware of the extent of Vietminh preparations. Their only concern was that the Vietminh might slink back into the jungle and refuse battle. A young French lieutenant stationed at Dien Bien Phu wrote to his sister on December 26, 1953, in racist prose typical of his comrades, “If they attack, there’ll be plenty of yellow meat in the barbed wire.”

The challenge of understanding was exacerbated by the fact that, whereas the Philippines was the most Americanized country in Asia, with English as its lingua franca, Vietnam until that point had had little contact with Americans or their language and culture. Its chief foreign influences were China and France. While the Philippines had had decades of experience with democracy and a free press, freedom was an entirely new concept in Indochina. Yet counterinsurgency and state building—the exercises upon which Lansdale was to be engaged—are inherently context-specific: what works in one location may not apply in another.

Journalists were among his best sources of information. Shortly after arriving, he had an all-night session with the veteran reporters John M. Mecklin of Time-Life and Henry R. “Hank” Lieberman of the New York Times. The three of them, all friends from the Philippines, wound up going to Lieberman’s “favorite eating joint where he could get hot dogs (on French bread) and milk shakes.” “While eating,” Lansdale wrote, “he told me (and everyone else in the joint) what I should do to win the war.”26 Such friendly conversations allowed Lansdale to pick up behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt while also shaping media coverage. A small group of American correspondents, including not only Mecklin and Lieberman but also the husband-and-wife team of Tillman and Peggy Durdin of the New York Times, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, and Robert “Pepper” Martin of U.S. News & World Report, Lansdale wrote, “joined together and offered to help me out as part of the team, and we used to plan together to get the truth of things out in the world.”

AS HE had done upon first arriving in the Philippines, Lansdale also traveled across Vietnam extensively at a time, June 1954, when the country was poised in a gray zone between war and peace. His most instructive trips were to the rural areas in the south that were the strongholds of two religious sects—the Cao Dai (pronounced cow-die) and the Hoa Hao (wah-how)—that would assume enormous importance over the next year. The Cao Dai, founded in 1926, claimed to synthesize all of the world’s major religions, from Christianity to Taoism, and their eclectic roster of saints included Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Sun Yat-sen and Victor Hugo. Their “Holy See” in Tay Ninh Province was a riotous explosion of colors—yellow, blue, red, pink—with paintings everywhere of the Divine Eye.28 The Hoa Hao sect, an offshoot of Buddhism, was formed a decade later, in 1939. By 1954, each one had roughly a million adherents as well as armed forces numbering in the tens of thousands, which had received subsidies and training from the French to fight the Vietminh. The power of these sects was limited only by the disunity in their ranks, since their troops were commanded by independent warlords.

Another sect leader Lansdale met, Colonel Jean Leroy, was a Catholic warlord born of a French father and Vietnamese mother who had served as a French army officer. Leroy presided over his home province of Ben Tre like a medieval despot; he “struck,” Graham Greene wrote, “with the suddenness and cruelty of a tiger, at the Communists in his region.”31 “Short, wiry, and intense,”32 Leroy reminded Lansdale of his Philippine army friend Colonel Napoleon Valeriano, who as head of the “Skull Squadron” had also been accused of committing atrocities against Communist forces: “I have to sort of pinch myself now and then,” Lansdale wrote, “to realize they are different people.”

BEYOND LEARNING what he could, there was not much that Lansdale could do to influence the situation upon his arrival; all seemed in abeyance, amid an atmosphere of “deepening gloom,”43 pending the outcome of an international conference that had convened in Geneva on April 26, 1954, to broker a deal between the French and the Vietminh.

Lansdale tried to teach “psywar” techniques to Vietnamese troops, his curriculum focusing, as in the Philippines, on trying to improve “the relationship between the troops and the people.” He did not have much success. “Hungry and ill-paid troops still stole chickens, pigs, and rice during military operations,” Lansdale lamented. The French “found my ideas alien,” he wrote, “and suggested laughingly that I take up smoking opium instead.” Lansdale realized that to change the situation would require “some new direction from the top.”44 That new direction arrived, unexpectedly, on June 25, 1954, in the form of an “honest mystic,”45 as he had been dubbed by the CIA, who had just been named prime minister of the state of Vietnam.

LANSDALE KNEW nothing about Ngo Dinh Diem (pronounced no-din-zee’em in northern Vietnam and yee’em in the south).

THE creation of modern nation-states in Europe was a protracted and bloody business. In the Middle Ages, the continent was divided into roughly a thousand political entities—duchies, free cities, kingdoms, republics, and the like. By 1789, there remained only 350 and by 1900 a mere 25.1 Countless conflicts such as the War of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Wars of German Unification had to be fought before the map of Europe could assume its modern shape. The whole process took hundreds of years. In South Vietnam, the nation-building experience began in earnest in mid-1954, and its first stages had to be completed before mid-1956, when

national reunification election was scheduled. Actually there was even less time than that. Ngo Dinh Diem’s authority at first was so tenuous that, if he did not show immediate success, he would lose the support not only of local power brokers but also of his primary outside sponsors, France and the United States, which somehow expected South Vietnam to develop virtually overnight the kind of strong and responsive central government that had taken centuries to emerge elsewhere. Even as he was supervising the movement of refugees from North Vietnam and trying to subvert the Hanoi regime, Edward Lansdale took on the herculean challenge of trying to consolidate Diem’s power. He would have to figure out how to fill the power vacuum in the countryside that would be left by departing Vietminh cadres. But first he had to make sure that Diem wasn’t toppled in a coup d’état.

“ONE man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Never has this hoary adage been more applicable than in the case of Trinh Minh Thé (pronounced tay), a warlord who was reviled by the French as a mass murderer and revered by many Vietnamese as a hero.

Trinh Minh Thé would become notorious in the English-speaking world following the publication in late 1955 of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The novel features a series of terrorist explosions in Saigon that are blamed on Thé and indirectly on Alden Pyle, a naïve young CIA officer who is revealed to be helping him.

The controversy over Lansdale’s relations with the sect leaders was not dissimilar to that involving T. E. Lawrence, a figure to whom Lansdale was now being compared. (The French had taken to calling him “Lawrence of Asia,” which in their minds was hardly a compliment, given how Lawrence had schemed to stymie their colonial designs in the Middle East.) Lawrence had been accused of buying the loyalty of Arab tribal leaders, but a British officer who worked alongside him said, “Lawrence could certainly not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount.” In truth, Lawrence was so successful because he had “established himself by sheer force of personality” among the Bedouin

tribes.16 In Lansdale’s case, his offers of friendship and his appeals to the patriotism of men such as Thé were not insignificant; previously Thé had refused to take money from the French. But, contrary to Lansdale’s denials, his idealistic appeals were combined with more tangible inducements to “rally” to Diem.

THE LEGEND of “Lawrence of Arabia” was concocted single-handedly by the American impresario Lowell Thomas, who in 1919 premiered a lecture and slide show on Colonel Lawrence’s exploits that played to packed houses in New York and London and beyond. The legend of Edward Lansdale had more authors, but one of the most important—and inadvertent—was Graham Greene.

In December 1955, the eminent English writer published The Quiet American, a novel featuring a character named Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, who was an undercover intelligence operative, a supporter of Trinh Minh Thé’s, the owner of a black dog, and an enthusiast for promoting a “third force”—that is, a democratic alternative to communism and colonialism. For understandable reasons, the widespread assumption, held not least by Lansdale himself, was that he was the model for the protagonist, who was hardly painted in flattering hues: Graham depicted Pyle as a naïve young interloper who supplied Trinh Minh Thé with explosives that maimed innocent Vietnamese. “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” sighed Thomas Fowler, the world-weary English correspondent who is the novel’s narrator. In retribution, he would arrange for Pyle to be murdered by the Vietminh.50 Lansdale first heard of the new book at a diplomatic party early in 1956. As he reported to his wife, At the reception, the Embassy staff were teasing me about my love life. Seems that Graham Greene has written a new novel, supposedly based upon me. Called the “Quiet Man” or maybe it’s the “Quiet American.” Anyhow, a naïve American, me, makes friends with a murderous Vietnamese called General The (Trinh Minh The, I suppose) who fools him and leads him astray, but the American finally wakes up and finds he has been sucked in by a very despicable guy. Meanwhile the story...

By mid-February, Lansdale had managed to get his hands on a copy and decided that “the book has about everything wrong politically.” It was also wrong in details such as Greene’s inaccurate description of plastic explosives. “However,” he continued, “I like the way the fellow writes. . . . Trouble is, it will fill a lot of Americans with quite a false picture of things here, and follows the French propaganda line quite faithfully, despite its being critical of the French.”

Lansdale remembered seeing the English novelist only once, in 1954, when Greene was sitting on the terrace of the colonial-era Continental Hotel, a favorite haunt of expatriates in Saigon, along with a large number of French officers who began to boo Lansdale when they saw him. Lansdale was with two of his friends, the husband-and-wife New York Times correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Peggy Durdin. Peg stuck her tongue out at the crowd on the terrace and said, “But we love him,” and turned around and gave Lansdale “a big hug and kiss.” In an anecdote a bit too good to be true, Lansdale recalled saying, “Well, I’m going to get written up someplace as a dirty dog. Thanks a lot!”

In truth, Greene always denied that he modeled Pyle on Lansdale. “Pyle was a younger, more innocent, and more idealistic member of the CIA,” he wrote. “I would never have chosen Colonel Lansdale, as he then was, to represent the danger of innocence.”54 The novelist claimed that his inspiration was Leo Hochstetter, a young American economic aid official with whom he had shared a room one night while visiting Colonel Jean Leroy, the Catholic warlord. According to Greene, Hochstetter, who was assumed by the French “to belong to the CIA,” lectured him on the “long drive back...

American between March 1952 and June 1955, he completed a draft before Lansdale arrived in Vietnam for good in June 1954.56 That makes it unlikely that Lansdale was the model for Alden Pyle, as generations of writers have assumed,57 but The Quiet ...

If The Quiet American, the novel, was anti-American, the movie version, which came out in 1958, was very different. In the movie, Trinh Minh Thé is not really responsible for the terrorist bombings in Saigon—the Vietminh are. Thé, along with the Alden Pyle character (played rather woodenly by war hero Audie Murphy), is framed by the Communists. Thomas Fowler (the veteran English actor Michael Redgrave) sets up Pyle to be killed by the Vietminh not because of his revulsion at Pyle’s complicity in terrorism but because he is a Communist dupe who is intensely jealous of Pyle for stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong—played, bizarrely, by the Italian actress Giorgia Moll. The cinematic version ends with Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin), the detective investigating Pyle’s murder, telling Fowler that he has been “used” and “childishly manipulated” by the Communists: “If you will pardon my attempt at colloquial English, Mr. Fowler, they have made a bloody fool of you.” This was a neat inversion of Greene’s plot, one that infuriated the author, who later decried the “treachery” of the film’s writer and director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz.58 (The second movie version of The Quiet America...

a quiet American—an “Oxford don manqué,” with an “ever-present pipe” and a “way of making considered statements with his twinkling eyes peer...

With a talent for witty, ribald tales, Mankiewicz was just the sort of person who would have gotten along well with a CIA operative who had once dreamed of becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. Over dinner at Lansdale’s Rue Duy Tan house, Mankiewicz said he had bought film rights to The Quiet American “to prevent the British or French from making an anti-U.S. movie.”60 Lansdale helped him craft an alternative storyline. A few weeks later, Ed wrote to Helen, “Seems that Mankiewicz liked the plot twist for ‘The Quiet American’ that we discussed. . . . Quite a change in the French propaganda!”61 A month later, Lansdale sent Mankiewicz a follow-up letter urging him to “go right ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all.”62 A liberal anti-Communist, Mankiewicz took Lansdale’s advice and produced a film that Graham Greene did not recognize. He was able to win permission from Diem to film in Vietnam—the first Western moviemaker granted that privilege—thanks to Lansdale’s intervention.63 In October 1957, when the film was ready for viewing, Lansdale wrote to Diem that “Mr. Mankiewicz’s ‘treatment’ of the story” was “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel...

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 ...

The first intimations of how things were about to change, and not for the better, came shortly after Lansdale’s departure, when the new chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, Al Ulmer, visited Saigon to announce “that the era of free-wheeling improvisation was over, and that the CIA in Saigon would begin operating like a normal station, with more emphasis on intelligence collection.”73 The next CIA chief of station, Nicholas Natsios, who took over in the spring of 1957, concentrated, as an in-house history

puts it, “more on illuminating the workings of the regime than on helping it against its adversaries.”74 For the CIA station, “normal” intelligence gathering meant recruiting a member of Diem’s housekeeping staff to steal trash from his wastebaskets. By contrast, when Lansdale wanted to know something, he went straight to Diem or another official and asked—and more often than not he learned more than traditional spies, with their elaborate tradecraft, ever did.

Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon nor any other institution was prepared to fill the resulting vacuum by providing Diem with the kind of guidance that Lansdale once had offered.

As the CIA’s official history notes, Lansdale’s departure marked the end of an era—“When Lansdale left Saigon in December 1956, he took with him whatever modest capacity the United States had to persuade Ngo Dinh Diem of the need to win the consent of the governed.”76 Maybe it was simply a coincidence, but the post-Lansdale epoch would turn out to be far more sanguinary and far less successful.

Then, on September 7, 1956, knowing that Ed was about to return to his family in Washington, Pat sat down at her typewriter and wrote him a letter full of pain and longing that deserves to be quoted at length for the light it sheds on the state of their relationship: I am having an extremely difficult time trying to say the right things. What does one write when one wants to terminate 10 years of a wonderful association? Does one merely scribble “finis” and let it go at that? Or does one merely keep silent and thus let it be understood that everything is all over. This would have been the easiest thing to do . . . just like running away and hiding and refusing to face facts. It would have been very cowardly too. I think what we have or had, deserves something better than that. It is so hard to give you up without a struggle which I suspect you are ready to do. The years go by, people change and the things they want are different. I wish I could just keep on feeling the same old way, happy to compromise, blind to almost everything except to be with you, to love you and have you love me, to be content after some fashion. But things have changed. I feel I must keep faith with myself. I have reached a bridge and it has to be crossed.

I am no longer contented with just knowing you love me and being with you now and then. I want more. I want to have the right to be with you for always, to have security and peace and happiness. You need me too. You will be needing more as time goes on, when there will be no more countries to save, no more wars to be won, no more troubles to shoot. Without us together, your life will just be one long, continuous work—empty in the end. There won’t be anyone to nag you or tease you or jump you or tell you what a stinker you are getting to be. My fight isn’t against your work or your devotion to it. (I remember, though, that one of your real friends did say that you put so much in your work because you have nothing else in this world to look forward to. I remember too how this saddens me.) My fight is against what you think is your moral obligations to your wife and children. You seem to have forgotten a moral obligation to yourself too, and to both of us. Years ago, there was no doubt your family had first claim on you. But things are changed now. You have given your family (people who see you once or maybe twice a year) all that is due them—the prestige and protection of your name, a social standing in the community due to your position, and all the material comforts they need. They have enjoyed all these things while you were thousands of miles away from them, not just for a few days but for a number of years! Obviously they can get along fine without you. They can’t miss ...

am told is the American standard of life. . . . Anyway let’s save us both some face and start life anew in our separate way. I can’t go on the same old way and still retain respect for either of us. It has been a wonderful ten years, and if I had a choice, I won’t change any little bit of it. It has been wonderful knowing you and I hope we will continue to be friends after a while. Right now, I hope you will keep away from me and stop writing. (Did I ever tell you you write the most wonderful drunken letters?) So long.

This letter is still painful, even for a biographer, to read, after all those years; it must have been unimaginably difficult to digest for its intended recipient, a man still very much in love with his Patching.

This was not just a clash of personalities but also a difference of ideas about how the CIA should operate. The mainstream view at the spy agency held then, and still does, that the job of a case officer is to create “formal, controlled agent relationships”—that is, to pay or blackmail foreigners into spying on their countries.8 Lansdale was willing to give funding to his friends in the Philippines or Vietnam to help them accomplish certain

tasks, whether to publish a pro-Magsaysay newspaper or to lure sect troops over to Diem’s side, but he did not believe in creating formal reporting relationships with agents. In his Saigon Military Mission report, Lansdale went out of his way to express his dissent from CIA orthodoxy: “There is a lesson here for everyone concerned with ‘control’ of foreign persons and groups. The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based on mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish. Once established, the foreign person or groups serve our own best national interests by serving their own national interests, which coincide with ours.”9 This view was anathema at the CIA, where cynical intelligence officers viewed it as hopelessly naïve.

Lansdale was hardly the first or last covert operative to run up against this prejudice. So did, among others, Robert Ames, the CIA’s premier Middle East case officer in the 1970s and 1980s. Ames established an invaluable friendship with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Ali Hassan Salameh, who served as an informal American conduit to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Yet, as the historian Kai Bird has shown, CIA colleagues repeatedly sabotaged the relationship and almost drove Salameh away...

Not finding a niche in the intelligence bureaucracy, Lansdale in 1957 severed his relationship with the CIA, which had begun in 1950 when he had gone to work for its forerunner, the Office of Policy Coordination. His most productive and influential years had been spent as a CIA officer, and his legend would forever be intertwined with the history of the spy agency, but now he was hanging up his cloak and dagger, choosing ...

THE PENTAGON had been erected hurriedly during World War II by fifteen thousand workers laboring around the clock for sixteen months to create a new home for the fast-expanding Army bureaucracy. (The other services moved in after the war.) The five-story, five-sided design was meant to