The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

For Lansdale, one of the first signs that he was losing influence came when Diem announced that he wouldn’t abide by the Geneva Accords proviso on the holding of national elections in the summer of 1956. In the cynical political circles in which he traveled, Ed Lansdale may have been the only person left in either Saigon or Washington to believe that those elections could and should be held. This was rooted in his belief—and again, Lansdale appeared to be a quorum of one on this point—that Diem could actually beat Ho Chi Minh at the ballot box, an argument he pressed on the prime minister. “I started to describe the improving factors that could mean a victory for the free Vietnamese nationalists in the plebiscite,” Lansdale wrote, “but Diem admonished me for underrating the dirty-trick capability of the Communists.” What the SMM commander apparently didn’t grasp was that in rejecting elections, Diem was heeding the counsel of Nhu’s CIA advisor, Harwood, as well as most every American diplomat up to and including John Foster Dulles with an opinion on the matter.