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

by Max Boot

minimize the use of steel, which was in short supply in wartime, so it featured concrete ramps rather than steel elevators. “The Building,” as it came to be known, had five rings of drab offices housing twenty-seven thousand functionaries, more than seventeen miles of gray corridors, seventy-seven hundred no-frills, institutional windows, eighty-five thousand fluorescent light fixtures, and six and a half million square feet of floor space, three times more than the Empire State Building.11 Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower got lost in the building when he became Army chief of staff at the end of 1945. “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it,” Ike wrote.12 The future president was inaugurating a long tradition of Pentagon employees joking about the place where they worked—a sign of how unhappy most officers were to find themselves confined within its walls, far from the work with soldiers in the field that had drawn them into military service.

Lansdale advocated that armies in the region “undertake missions of public works, welfare, health, and education, as well as national security.” “As the soldier becomes the true brother of the people, the enemy and his weapons become identified, with the help of the people, and the enemy when so identified can be defeated.”

wisdom—counterinsurgency 101, as codified in the 2006 Army-Marine Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, which preached the importance of winning over the populace rather than simply killing insurgents.

sometimes to understand him clearly, you had to lean forward. It took me some time to realize that was really a technique of his. If he spoke softly and you had to lean forward to hear him, he already had placed himself in the position that he wanted to be in. It was subtle but effective.”

The Ugly American appeared in the fall of 1958 shortly after Lederer retired from the Navy.

THE Vietnamese Workers’ Party, as the Communist Party was known, always had a collective leadership. But some leaders were more equal than others. The First Vietnam War—the French war—had been largely directed by Ho Chi Minh in consultation with Vo Nguyen Giap and, after 1949, Chinese advisers. But by the late 1950s, “Uncle Ho” was in his late sixties and was increasingly being pushed by his Politburo colleagues into a largely symbolic role. The Second Vietnam War—the American war—would be instigated and directed primarily by his ruthless and single-minded successor as secretary general: Le Duan.

Le Duan did not project the warmth and charisma of Ho Chi Minh or the intellectual sophistication

of Vo Nguyen Giap. In political maneuvering, however, he would turn out to be their superior.

Ho Chi Minh Trail.

At the end of 1960, Hanoi created the Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam to wage war in the South, along with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) to serve as an umbrella organization for opposition political parties. The NLF was designed to foster the illusion that the war breaking out was a spontaneous, non-Communist uprising against the hated My-Diem (American-Diem) regime and its “lackey ruling clique of U.S. imperialists.”5 In reality, the NLF was as wholly controlled by

the Communist Party as its predecessor, the Vietminh, had been. All of the insurgents soon became known generically as the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists)—a pejorative label coined in Saigon that represented one of the few propaganda victories won by South Vietnam and its American allies in this new war. Later, the people of Vietnam would look back on the years from 1954 to 1960 as a golden age. “The six years of peace,” they would call it.6 Now the interlude b...

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. . . . Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”7 As a Cold Warrior himself, as someone who had dedicated

LANSDALE’S REPORT began, “1961 promises to be a fateful year for Vietnam. The Communist Viet Cong hope to win back Vietnam south of the 17th Parallel this year, if at all possible, and are much further along towards accomplishing this objective than I had realized from reading the reports received in Washington.” He found that the “Viet Cong have the initiative and most of the control over the region from the jungled foothills of the High Plateau north of Saigon all the way south down to the Gulf of Siam, excluding the big city area of Saigon–Cholon.” If “Free Vietnam” falls, he warned, “the remainder of Southeast Asia will be easy pickings for our enemy, because the toughest local force on our side will be gone.” Lansdale argued, as he had done since 1954, that the key to saving South Vietnam lay in backing Ngo Dinh Diem, “still the only Vietnamese with executive ability and the required determination to be an effective President.” Rather than replace Diem, he continued, it was time to replace the U.S. ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow: “Correctly or not, the recognized government of Vietnam does not look upon him as a friend, believing that he sympathized strongly with the coup leaders of 11 November [1960].” In place of Durbrow, Lansdale recommended the appointment of an ambassador “with marked leadership talents who can make the Country Team function harmoniously and spiritually, who can influence Asians through understanding them sympathetically, and who is alert to the po...

himself.9 But, recognizing his own limitations, Lansdale told his friend Rufus Phillips that he had no desire to deal with all of the ceremonial and managerial tasks of being an ambassador. With his aversion to pomp and protocol, Lansdale was later to say, “I didn’t want to be an ambassador. Jesus. . . . That’s one of the world’s worst jobs.”10 According to Phillips, Lansdale preferred that the appointment go to one of his State Department friends—Kenneth Young, who had handled Southeast Asia issues during the Eisenhower administration—in the expectation that he could work as closely with Young as he had with other ambassadors such as Raymond Spruance and Donald Heath.11 That Lansdale did not have the ambassadorship in mind for himself was clear from his recommendation, within his trip report, that “a mature American, with much the same qualifications as those given above for the selection of the next Ambassador, should be assigned to Vietnam for political operations which will start creating a Vietnamese-style foundation for more democratic government without weakening the strong leadership required to bring about the defeat of the Communists.” Rather than the “Ugly American” or the “Quiet American,” the sobriquets bestowed on him by others, Lansdale saw himself as this “mature American”: an influential, behind-the-scenes political operator assisted by a small, handpicked team of loyalists—in other words, the role he had previously played in the Philippines and South Viet...

In addition to this Cassandra-like twelve-page report, Lansdale penned a separate thirteen-page memorandum on his experiences with Father Hoa.13 His intent was to balance out the more negative tone of his main report by holding out hope that successful resistance to the Vietcong was still possible if the Sea Swallows’ example was emulated elsewhere. Yet his case study did not address the main reason why the experience of Binh Hung was not readily applicable in other parts of South Vietnam: much of Father Hoa’s community was made up of Catholics, who were ideologically distinct from the mainstream Vietnamese population and largely impervious to appeals from atheist insurgents. Lansdale later argued that there were other “free villages” out there—“Catholic villages, Hoa Hao villages etc.”—that could be pillars of a successful counterinsurgency strategy.14 But keeping the Vietcong out of ordinary Vietnamese villages without a distinctive religious identity would prove much tougher.

Vietnam, up from only 685 when he assumed office. In February 1962, the lower-level Military Assistance Advisory Group would be expanded into the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV), led by a four-star general, initially Paul Harkins, a protégé of George S. Patton’s. American advisers would now be embedded with all South Vietnamese army units down to battalion level, while American-flown aircraft would provide air support to the South Vietnamese army. Lansdale had argued in favor of letting military advisers participate in combat. “It would make all the difference in the effectiveness of their relationship to the Vietnamese,” he argued; “comrades are listened to, when they share the risk.”41 His advice was taken, and before long U.S. Air Force crews were flying attack missions in the guise of training Vietnamese crewmen who were simply along for the ride—not quite what Lansdale envisioned, but the natural consequence of allowing gung-ho Americans eager for combat to get into the thick of the action.42 The Taylor-Rostow

mission subsequently would be seen as a major step toward the American armed forces’ entering the Vietnam War as a full-fledged combatant.

The diplomats did soften their opposition a bit a few weeks afterward, in late November 1961, when they found Diem still reluctant to implement the governmental changes they advocated, including giving the United States a significant say in South Vietnamese decision-making. Diem saw that as a return to colonialism, this time under the Americans rather than the French.44 At that point, State suggested, just as Elbridge Durbrow had done in 1960, that Lansdale go to Saigon “and, presumably, clobber [Diem] from up close.”45 At least that was how Lansdale interpreted the request, which he adamantly rejected.

“Rather than just ‘hold Diem’s hand,’ apparently they want me to accept the hospitality of a friend whom I respect and then follow orders to threaten him with penalties from that close-in position, simply because he doesn’t comply with every wish of some Americans who remain foreign to the scene,” he wrote angrily to McNamara and Gilpatric. “The Communists in Vietnam can be defeated, but this isn’t the way to do it.”46 In his own eyes, and those of his friends, Lansdale was taking a stand on principle in a way that few other government officials would ever dare to do. In the eyes of Lansdale’s many internal critics, his position—go on his terms or not at all—was simply more evidence that he was an uncontrollable prima donna.

Walt Rostow, who at the end of 1961 was moving to the State Department to take over policy planning, tried one last time before he left the White House to persuade the president to post Lansdale to Saigon. It is “cruci...

Ed Lansdale from his present assignment and get him out to the field in an appropriate position. He is a unique national asset in the Saigon setting.”47 Once again, however, Kennedy did not act. McGeorge Bundy later explained that the president “was relatively sympathetic to Lansdale. Lansdale was temperamentally somewhat his kind of person. I don’t think, on the other hand, that he felt so strongly about it that he wanted to push it against strong opposition from either the military or the diplomatic bureaucracy.”48 In his memoir, published a decade later, after tens of thousands of bodybags had come home, Rostow was to lament the failure to find a role for Lansdale in Saigon: “It is by no means...

THE origins of Edward Lansdale’s next assignment could be found in the calamitous events of April 17, 1961. In the early morning hours, an armada of six cargo ships appeared off the southern coast of Cuba. They had been chartered by the CIA and filled with fourteen hundred Cuban exiles trained and armed by the CIA. (The trainers had included one of Lansdale’s old friends, the former Philippine army officer Napoleon Valeriano.) The mission of Brigade 2506 was nothing less than to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro, the strongman who had seized power on January 1, 1959, and had steadily moved closer to the Soviet bloc. The liberation of Cuba was supposed to begin with a landing at the Bahia de Cochinos—in English,

the Bay of Pigs—a scenic site of turquoise waters, white sand beaches, and mangroves that Castro was hoping to develop into a tourist destination.

Lansdale had been among a minority of officials who opposed the invasion plans. In November 1960, in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Allen Dulles had presented the CIA’s proposal for Operation Zapata to the senior interagency group charged with approving all covert actions. After analyzing the proposal, Lansdale later said, he concluded that “too little attention was being paid to the political preparation in Cuba and that too small a force was being utilized for what had turned into an over-the-beach invasion.” “We are going to get clobbered,” he warned, muc...

When the operation went ahead anyway, it would amply vindicate Lansdale’s warnings. The plan had been for brigade B-26 bombers flying out of Nicaragua to destroy Castro’s air force on the ground. But at the last minute President Kennedy became worried about exposing American complicity and ordered three-quarters of the initial air strikes canceled. Lacking air cover, the invaders were trapped in the open on a beach where, as Lansdale had predicted, they were “clobbered” by twenty thousand Cuban troops equipped with tanks, machine guns, artillery, and aircraft. On April 17, Kennedy relented and allowed the B-26s to fly again, but many of these slow, propeller-driven aircraft were blasted out of the sky by Castro’s T-33 jet trainers, which, unbeknownst to the Americans, had been equipped with 20-mm cannons. On April 19, after the invaders had already suffered a shellacking, Kennedy reluctantly authorized six unmarked Navy jets to spend exactly one hour over the beachhead without, however, giving them authorization to shoot down Cuban aircraft. By April 20, it was all over. Only a few of the exiles escaped to sea to be re...

The answer can be found in the history of the OSS, which gave Lansdale his start in intelligence work. The ethos of the OSS, as we have seen, was “Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous,” and that was Lansdale’s motto too. His deputy Sam Wilson recalled that Lansdale “was always coming up with outlandish ideas. He would release them like clay pigeons, and they’d systematically get shot down. One of them would sprout wings and fly away and be a real pigeon.”43 But while Lansdale dreamed up a few madcap schemes for Mongoose, he was hardly the only or even the main culprit.

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

career. He returned to Washington in 1959 to become head of the CIA’s Division D, charged with breaking into foreign embassies to steal secret codes.

Early in 1961, Harvey was approached by Dick Bissell, the CIA’s operations chief, and told to develop “Executive Action capability,” a euphemism for assassination. Bissell made clear that this request came from the top. Harvey knew better than to inquire too closely. (Years later, Bissell testified that his orders had come from McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and that they “would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident it would meet with the president’s approval.”)61 Harvey duly developed a program known as ZRRIFLE to give the White House what it wanted. In the process, he inherited an ongoing plot to use mobsters with Cuban business interests—specifically Johnny Rosselli of Las Vegas and Salvatore “Sam” Giancana of Chicago—to bump...

Harvey ran this troubled, and troubling, operation once he became the CIA’s representative to Mongoose and the head of the CIA’s Task Force W, charged with overthrowing Castro. (The W—Harvey’s choice—was in honor of William Walker, an American adventurer who had ruled Nicaragua in 1856–57.)63 But Harvey did not tell Lansdale what he was up to. Everything was on a strictly “need to know” basis, and Harvey did not think that Lansdale, as an outsider, needed to know. When Lansdale tried to get information, the CIA man turned “monosyllabic”—“I got yes and no types of answers and very brief ones,” Lansdale said.64 All Harvey would tell him was “Everything’s under control.” In frustration, Lansdale would say to Harvey, “I’m not the enemy. You can talk to me.” Once, when Lansdale was talking with Harvey and a phone call came in, Harvey began talking on the phone in code. “After a while I caught on and realized he was talking about me,” Lansdale sa...

at an August 10, 1962, Special Group (Augmented) meeting by Robert McNamara, who subsequently was to deny knowledge of any assassination plots.66 As soon as he saw the memo, Harvey immediately called Lansdale’s office and lectured a CIA liaison officer on “the inadmissibility and stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document.” Shortly thereafter Lansdale sent around a revised copy of the memo that excluded the offending w...

This episode confirms what earlier experience in Vietnam, where Lansdale had delivered $57,000 to Diem to “get rid of” the sect leader Ba Cut, had already indicated: Lansdale was not averse, if necessary, to assassination as a tool of foreign policy. But in this case he did not know that an assassination plot was already under way and was dubious about its utility; he feared that if Fidel were killed, he would be replaced by Raúl Castro or Che Guevara, both doctrinaire Marxists, and “we might very well [wind up] in something much worse.”68 Years...

The obsession with “deniability” ensured that there was never anything in writing tying the Kennedys to the planned assassination of Castro, but all of the CIA officers involved were convinced that they were carrying out the White House’s sotto voce desire. Richard Helms said, “I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected. . . . No member of the Kennedy administration, as I recall it, ever told me that it was prosc...

THE CIA’s Miami station, JMWAVE, became in short order its second-largest outpost in the entire world, behind only the new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which had opened in the fall of 1961. Housed on the University of Miami’s sprawling South Campus, under the cover name of Zenith

Technical Enterprises, JMWAVE grew to as many as six hundred personnel headed by the “blond ghost,” as the young and dashing station chief, Ted Shackley, would be nicknamed. Another two hundred or so CIA employees toiled for Task Force W at Langley.

JMWAVE had more than a hundred cars under lease and so many boats, used to ferry agents and supplies to Cuba, that it controlled the third largest navy in the Caribbean, after the United States and Cuba. It operated an archipelago of safe houses and training sites across south Florida. Some fifteen thousand Cubans were connected with JMWAVE.72 Dozens of Cuban exile groups were setting up shop in the Miami area, many with CIA backing. Miami came to resemble “wartime Casablanca,” in the words of two reporters, who noted that it “swarmed with spies, counterspies, exiled dictators, Mafia executives, refugees, entertainers, countesses, smugglers, gamblers, fortune-tellers, gun runners, soldiers of fortune, fugitives, and loudly dressed tourists—many pursuing possibly criminal ends against the garish backdrop of Miami Beach.”73 Lansdale was impressed by the...

AT THE end of July 1962, Lansdale took stock of Phase I. William Harvey reported that the CIA had met its intelligence targets by establishing “inside Cuba 59 controlled Cuban agents and 31 third country controlled agents.” In addition, 169 lower-quality agents were “producing intermittent intelligence reports,” and an interrogation center set up in Opa-Locka to debrief Cuban refugees was generating eight hundred reports a month. No sabotage had taken place to date, but the CIA had infiltrated eleven sabotage teams into Cuba.75 The Defense Department, for its part, had completed detailed contingency planning for a military intervention that would involve a quarter of a million troops.76 Under Lansdale’s prodding, the CIA had come up with a symbol for the Cuban resistance: Gusano Libre (Free Worm). Castro had denigrated

his enemies as “worms”; the CIA hoped to turn a term of derision into “a symbol of resistance and pride.” Cartoons were commissioned and mailed to Cuban households showing a smirking worm cutting electrical wires and spilling tacks in front of a jeep carrying Castro’s troops.77 Soon to come were “Gusano Libre pins, armbands, seals, pencils, balloons, etc.,” which could be delivered to Cuba via helium-filled balloons launched from a chartered ship in international waters.78 A State Department official expressed well-justified skepticism about “whether ‘worms of the world unite’ will cause people to revolt,” but such doubts were ignored in the heat of the moment.

Bill Harvey concluded that, based on what the CIA now knew, it would be feasible to incite a revolt by late 1963, a year behind Lansdale’s original schedule, “provided the Cubans could be assured . . . their revolt would be supported by U.S. intervention.”80 But there was still no sign that the Kennedy administration would make such a commitment. In planning for Phase II of Operation Mongoose, the Special Group (Augmented) ruled out options that “would commit us to deliberate military intervention,” while acknowledging that absent such intervention “we perceive no likelihood of an overthrow of the government by internal means.” “For the time being,” Maxwell Taylor wrote, “we favor a somewhat more aggressive program than the one carried out in Phase I, wherein we continue to press for intelligence, attempt to hurt the local regime as much as possible on the economic front and work further to discredit the regime locally and abroad.” “Higher authority,” meaning President Kennedy, approved these guidelines on August 20, 1962.81 As Mongoose failed to achieve a breakthrough, tempers flared and relations frayed among everyone involved. Bill Harvey was drinking more and becoming steadi...

CIA wouldn’t be in this mess, he crudely claimed, if the president had displayed some “bal...

The relationship between Bill Harvey and Bobby Kennedy, a CIA officer recalled, was “bad from the beginning, and then it deteriorated steadily.”83 At Langley, a story was making the rounds that when Kennedy demanded to know why a team of exiles had not yet been infiltrated into Cuba, Harvey replied they had to be trained first. “I’ll take them out to Hickory Hill and train them myself,” Kennedy snorted. “What will you teach them, sir?” Harvey shot back. “Baby-sitting?”84 During a meeting where the attorney general said he had ten minutes to hear the CIA’s plan, Harvey droned on and on. He was still not finished when, after ten minutes, Kennedy abrup...

It became apparent that confidence was also faltering in Lansdale. By the fall of 1962, Parrott recalled, “all the members of the [Special] Group were quite disaffected with both Lansdale and with Harvey.”87 In a contemporaneous memorandum, another CIA officer wrote, “Practically everyone at the operating level agrees that Lansdale has lost his value. Bundy and Taylor are not impressed with him.”88 It was hardly Lansdale and Harvey’s fault that ...

JOHN F. KENNEDY has been applauded by historians for his coolness under pressure during what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The president wisely rejected advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his more

hard-line civilian advisers in the NSC’s ExComm (Executive Committee), including Robert McNamara and Robert Kennedy, to undertake military action against Cuba. The president rightly called this option “one hell of a gamble.”93 Unbeknownst to the CIA, the Soviets had already shipped tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, along with 42,000 Red Army troops, and given their commanders authority to launch the weapons in the event of an American assault.94 An American attack on Cuba could have precipitated World War III, which is why the attorney general and the defense secretary later adjusted their recollections to excise their hawkish proposals.

As an anxious nation held its breath, Kennedy opted for a more prudent response. He declared an air and naval “quarantine” of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering more weapons, while pursuing a secret diplomatic channel to Moscow. Eventually, Kennedy quietly reached a deal with Nikita Khrushchev to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and to remove obsolescent Jupiter missiles from Turkey.95 On October 28, 1962...

But while President Kennedy deserves considerable credit for walking away from the precipice of thermonuclear conflict, he can also be blamed for helping to cause the crisis in the first place by trying to topple Castro. Castro later said, “Six months before these missiles were installed in Cuba, we had received an accumulation of information that a new invasion was being prepared under the sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency.”96 “It was clear to me,” Khrushchev said, “that we might very well lose Cuba if we didn’t take some decisive steps in her defense.”97 Although Mongoose helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis, it also made possible its peaceful resolution by providing the intelligence that allowed Kennedy to act bef...

OPERATION MONGOOSE was not revived after the end of the crisis. On January 4, 1963, McGeorge Bundy wrote to President Kennedy, “There is well-nigh universal agreement that Mongoose is at a dead end.” 99 Efforts to overthrow Castro resumed shortly thereafter, with Bobby Kennedy as eager as ever to topple the Cuban strongman, but Lansdale was no longer in charge. A new Cuba Coordinating Committee, headed by Sterling J. Cottrell, a deputy assistant secretary of state, replaced the Caribbean Survey Group.100 Among the ideas explored in 1963, after Lansdale’s removal from the project, was a plan to give Castro a skin-diving suit contaminated with “a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin condition” and another one to plant an “explosives-rigged sea shell” in an area where he liked to go skin diving. This plan was called off, the CIA inspector general wrote, when it was determined that “none of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed volume of explosives.”101 The most that the CIA accomplished in 1963 was to stage a few attacks on Cuban infrastructure. But such sabotage—“boom and bang,” in CIA parlance—“never amounted to more than pinpricks,” Richard Helms conceded. “The notion that an underground resistance organization might be created on the island remained a remote, romantic myth.”

IT WAS unfair to blame Edward Lansdale for not toppling Castro when no one else had any better luck. And yet Mongoose had been a failure, and he had been responsible. His reputation inside the government went from that of a can-do covert-action specialist to a “nut,” “a fantasist, a lucky amateur.”103 This was the view pushed in particular by Sam Halpern and Tom Parrott of the CIA, the sources of these damning descriptions. They nurtured a long-standing loathing of the “Ugly American,” whose lack of traditional espionage credentials and disdain for CIA “tradecraft” was seen as an affront to career intelligence officers. Halpern had spent much of the 1950s working in the Far East Division alongside George Aurell, who resisted Lansdale’s forays into nation building as an unwelcome diversion

from traditional spying. Lansdale’s apostasy grated all the more because of the high-level backing that he enjoyed. The very establishment of Mongoose outside the CIA’s control was seen as a challenge to the entire intelligence establishment, whose competence had been called into question by the Bay of Pigs. If Lansdale succeeded where the CIA had failed, the CIA’s very future could be in jeopardy. Mongoose’s failure, therefore, occasioned some unseemly celebration at Langley.

Just days after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, George McManus, an aide to Richard Helms, wrote on November 5, 1962, “With a political solution to the Cuban problem in hand reflecting great credit on the part of the President, the A.G. [attorney general] will drop Lansdale like a hot brick.” He professed himself delighted that Task Force W would no longer be “available to Lansdale as a ‘whipping boy’ ” and would instead become “a normal part of our monolithic Agency structure.” His only concern: “Lansdale’s reaction to any reassignment is apt to be a violent one. He undoubtedly realizes that he never again will be in the position of a special adviser to the most powerful men in the country. Therefore . . . he might be able to inflict serious damage to CIA’s standing before his eventual demise.” Psychologists would call this a case of projection. In reality, there was no evidence that the easygoing Lansdale ever displayed such vindictiveness—in contrast to his bureaucratic foes, who pursued their vendetta against him with increasing success.104 Having failed to achieve the Kennedys’ most cherished desire, Lansdale lost their favor. He was left naked before his bureauc...