28

The Impossible Missions Force

[Lansdale] was the leader of the cult and I was a member of that cult.

—DANIEL ELLSBERG

EDWARD LANSDALE arrived in Vietnam in the late summer of 1965, at a time when Americans could already see glimmerings of the antiwar protests and race riots that would soon convulse their country. The Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles had become a veritable battle zone between August 11 and August 16. More sedately, if ultimately of greater consequence for the war just beginning, at least twenty thousand people picketed the White House on April 17 to demand that “the U.S. get out of Vietnam.” The protest was organized by Students for a Democratic Society, a New Left group (“left-leaning but non-Communist,” in the words of a news report) that claimed chapters at sixty-three campuses across the country. By later standards, the protest was polite and decorous. The New York Times noted, “Beards and blue jeans mixed with Ivy tweeds and an occasional clerical collar in the crowd. The marchers seemed to be enjoying their holiday from exams.” Most Americans still supported the president and the war. This was no mass revolt, but it was the beginning of a movement that within two years would paralyze many American campuses and leave the president feeling under siege in the White House.1

Pop songs are often an accurate barometer of the national mood, and the release of a hit called “Eve of Destruction” by a former pipefitter named Barry McGuire captured the anxiety of the times. Its lyrics, proclaiming “The eastern world it is explodin’ / Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,” were particularly apt, given that the Marine Corps had just launched the first major battle of the American war in Vietnam.

OPERATION STARLITE was intended as a preemptive assault on the First Vietcong Regiment, a Main Force unit, which, according to American intelligence reports, was planning to attack the newly established Marine air base at Chu Lai, sixty miles south of Da Nang. In reality, the Vietcong were not planning any such offensive; they preferred to wear down the Marines with hit-and-run raids. This was only the first sign of how faulty American battlefield intelligence in Vietnam would turn out to be. The Vietcong, on the other hand, consistently had accurate information about the ponderous movements of the increasingly bloated American war machine. They knew Starlite was coming, and they were ready for it.

The plan, drawn up by veterans of the Pacific island campaign of World War II, called for Marines to land simultaneously from sea and air on the Van Tuong Peninsula, taking advantage of a new technology—helicopters—that had not been available during the struggle against Japan. The amphibious assault force, equipped with M-48 tanks and armored amphibian tractors (amtracs), would drive the Vietcong into the blocking force, which was to be inserted inland by H-34 helicopters. And then heavy American firepower—delivered not only by the Marine infantry and armor, helicopter gunships, and fixed-wing aircraft but also by three warships offshore—would annihilate the fifteen hundred or so Vietcong caught in the vise.

Armed with mortars, machine guns, recoilless rifles, and small arms, the veteran Vietcong fighters were waiting when the Marines landed in the early morning hours of August 18, 1965. The fighting was especially intense around the hamlets of Nam Yen 3 and An Cuong 2, both honeycombed with “spider holes” and bunkers. The Marine infantrymen had to back off and let F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks finish the job. These jet-powered aircraft swooped in to drop “snake and nape”—250-pound Snakeye bombs and 500-pound napalm canisters that were certain to kill civilians along with enemy fighters. When the Marines continued taking small-arms fire from Nam Yen 3, they called in tanks, which leveled all the remaining houses with their main guns. As an official Marine Corps history later noted, “Although attempts were made to avoid civilian casualties, some villages were completely destroyed by supporting arms when it became obvious the enemy occupied fortified positions in them.” A few years later, at the height of the American war in 1968, an anonymous Army major would be quoted saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The philosophy embodied in those chilling words was already evident in Operation Starlite.

The Marines could congratulate themselves that Starlite was “the first major U.S. battle victory of the Vietnamese war,” and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge could gloat that it was a “milestone” that showed “that the U.S. can with relative certainty prevent the Viet Cong from ever becoming a regular army.” But the cost of this “victory” was high. The Marines lost 54 men killed and 200 wounded out of 5,500 engaged, while claiming to have killed more than 600 of the enemy, an estimate that was likely as exaggerated as “body counts” always were. It was a foretaste of what was in store for other units, including the army’s helicopter-borne First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), which three months later was to lose nearly 250 soldiers in a battle in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands against North Vietnamese regulars.

And to what end? The Marines, who thought they had destroyed the First Vietcong Regiment, were in for a nasty shock four months later during Operation Harvest Moon, when they encountered the very same Main Force unit again near Chu Lai—and once again it was back at full strength and in control of the area. This was a sign of how easily the Vietcong could replenish their losses from a population base they controlled and how quickly they could reinfiltrate territory from which they had been temporarily evicted by an American offensive. It was an early warning, a warning unheeded, that in this type of war conventional combat tactics could produce lots and lots of casualties—to Americans and Vietnamese, combatants and noncombatants alike—but not decisive results.2

THESE EVENTS— an increasingly Americanized war in Vietnam, an increasingly divided nation at home—did not form an auspicious backdrop for Edward Lansdale’s arrival in Saigon on August 29, 1965, after an absence of more than four years. Like any other airline passenger coming to Saigon in those days, he would have felt the turbulence of conflict even before landing: aircraft, both military and civilian, were now doing corkscrew turns and heading practically straight down like a cannonball falling out of the sky in order to avoid possible ground fire. Once he stepped onto the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Airport and into the blast-oven heat that was characteristic of Saigon year-round, he would have seen, as did a young American officer named Larry Gwin, an airport teeming with military activity: “Small mountains of military hardware covered every available inch of the field’s macadam surface. Jeeps and trucks and forklifts busted through the maze. Shirtless American GIs struggled and sweated, pulled and tugged, lifted and lugged. . . . Two camouflaged Phantom jets, their wings heavily laden with bombs, took off from an adjacent runway with a terrible roar.”³

Proceeding into the teeming capital city, which he vividly remembered from more placid and pleasant days, Lansdale would have seen American military vehicles joining civilian traffic on the increasingly clogged streets. To make way for even more vehicles, the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV) had widened the streets, cutting down hundreds of Saigon’s “grand, old” trees in the four and a half years since Lansdale had last been there.⁴ By mid-1966, there would be thirty-six thousand Americans in and around Saigon.⁵ These well-heeled newcomers drove housing prices through the roof. And because each American-occupied apartment required its own air conditioner and refrigerator, the demand for electricity far outstripped the capacity of the city’s old power plant. Brownouts ensued. To meet the surging power demand, the U.S. military at first anchored generator barges in the Saigon River and then flew in thousands of small generators that could be installed outside each billet. Bert Fraleigh of USAID, who returned for another tour at roughly the same time as Lansdale, noted, “Within a few weeks, the quiet old city was filled around-the-clock with a strong, low-pitched hum from these generators, and the previously clear, perfumed, tropical air became a brown, diesel-fumed miasma, which curiously seemed to cling about forty feet off the ground.”6

In search of female company, off-duty soldiers and contractors dressed in Hawaiian shirts would gambol around the bars spreading like a fungus from the city center all the way to Tan Son Nhut ­Airport—as they had once spread in Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and other Asian cities with a large American military presence. Bar girls would beseech prospective clients: “GI, buy me one drink?” Actual prostitutes would be cruder: “Boom-boom, GI? Fuck-suck?” Pimps with pompadours would be hovering nearby, ready to skim part of the day’s take. An entirely new argot developed between GIs and the profusion of Vietnamese eager to separate them from their piastres. “Gimme cigarette,” kids would beg passing American troops. “You numbah one.” (Number one meant “very good.”) If the GIs refused, the street kids would denounce them: “Cheap Charlie, number-ten cheap Charlie.” (Number ten meant “very bad.”)⁷

The free-spending American ways were driving up inflation and creating an anomalous situation where prostitutes were making more than army majors.⁸ Many Vietnamese soldiers succumbed to corruption to supplement their incomes. More honest officers would hang up their uniforms at the end of the day and use their personal cars or motor scooters to act as cab drivers for big-spending GIs out for a good time on the town, a necessity that was deeply humiliating to the proud Vietnamese, always mindful of their “face,” or reputation, in this Confucian society.⁹

Americans were not the only newcomers. Refugees fleeing the fighting in the countryside were also inundating Saigon, transforming this once elegant French provincial capital into an urban gallimaufry of every possible ingredient. The ramshackle South Vietnamese government simply could not cope with the influx. Garbage was piling up, potholes were not being repaired, bus service was becoming unpredictable. Surveying the scene, the USIA’s Howard Simpson concluded, “The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.”10 Lansdale thought that “Saigon looks a bit run-down and war-weary right now but maybe,” he added, with typical optimism, “we can put some spark back in.”¹¹

THAT WAS a tall order—to revive the spirits of a deflated city and a country ravaged by war—but, then, great expectations accompanied Lansdale on his return to Vietnam. Upon hearing of his appointment, many friends wrote with some version of the sentiment expressed by retired Admiral Arleigh Burke: “I and a lot of other Americans took heart when we heard that you were returning to Viet Nam.”¹²

Practically every major American newspaper—and most of the minor ones—ran breathless accounts of Lansdale’s new role. Mentions of The Quiet American and The Ugly American were obligatory. There was even a new fictionalized version of the Lansdale legend to read: the English-language translation of Yellow Fever, a novel by the French journalist Jean Larteguy, came out in 1965. Its characters included an American colonel named Lionel Terryman, clearly based on Lansdale (terre means “land” in French), who is advising a Diem-like president named Dinh-Tu. Larteguy wrote of Terryman, “He could get hold of the most bigoted old scoundrel, the most inexperienced novice and, out of a gang leader, make a president of the republic; out of an odious and tyrannical old fogey, an all-powerful dictator.”¹³ Little wonder that the New York Times wrote that Landale had “made a rather legendary reputation in Asia in the nineteen-fifties.”¹⁴ Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post wrote that, like T. E. Lawrence, “Lansdale has inspired admiration, ridicule—and, above all, controversy.” He quoted “one U.S. official” as saying, “If he doesn’t produce a miracle, his friends will be disappointed and his enemies delighted.”¹⁵

When Lansdale landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport, wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and skinny tie, he was met by a gaggle of fifteen reporters and photographers who surrounded him as if he were a visiting movie star—Cary Grant, perhaps, or John Wayne. He had been expecting this and delivered a brief statement he had prepared en route: “When Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge asked me to join him on his mission to Vietnam, I had the happy feeling that he was asking me to come back home again. Vietnam and Vietnamese friends have been so much in my thoughts, so close to my heart, even while I was 10,000 miles away, that Vietnam truly seems like home to me. So now I am home again.”16

It was a good statement; it struck just the right note to win over the Vietnamese. As Lansdale subsequently wrote in a diplomatic cable, “Arrival statement about being members of Great Vietnamese Family stirred heart-warming emotional acceptance among wide circle Vietnam.”¹⁷ His statement did not engender such warm feelings in Helen Lansdale, who was not amused to read a news clipping of her husband proclaiming that he was finally home when he was thousands of miles away from the house they shared in Washington. “You sounded as though hurt a bit,” Ed wrote to her apologetically a few days later. In his defense, he pleaded insincerity: “I have to make like a real feather merchant to get us all set in here again just the right way, so I know you’ll understand when I sound off, it’s for a real cause.”¹⁸ (“Feather merchant” was old military slang for someone who talked a lot but said little.) In fact, there is every reason to think that Lansdale was being sincere in what he had said at the airport. He really felt Saigon was where he belonged.

LANSDALE’S FIRST days back were predictably harried as he tried to make up for years away by insinuating himself into the labyrinthine structures of power in Saigon. He was confronted, he noted, by “all this tremendous seeming confusion and seemingly ineluctable problems that are flooding me from all quarters . . . with so many, many folks to see and so many demands on time.” With no quarters prepared for him, Lansdale took refuge temporarily in a series of hotels, where he checked in under an assumed name: “My sleeping arrangements have to keep being changed, because all the publicity of course aroused the other side—who now have all sorts of pictures of me. So, I just keep moving fast.”19

He was, in any case, not getting much shut-eye. Ten days after arriving, Ed wrote home, “Can’t sleep. Or, maybe just wide awake at the wrong time. I just was trying to figure out what the date is . . . and was shocked to find out how many days have gone by since I was here. It’s just sort of a blur to me, of seeing people, of moving around all the time, of getting our group in place and running, of security, and of having to be eternally diplomatic with Americans and Vietnamese who are artfully playing their dealings with us.”

Not surprisingly, the last thing on his mind was his twenty-second wedding anniversary on September 3. “I know you might have been expecting some word from me on our Anniversary,” he wrote to Helen (“Darling”), “but honest Injun, the day was just another 18-hour work grind of puzzling out a seemingly million loose ends here and how to fit them all together. But, my thoughts were on you during the day, and I’d sure have been happier home than here, to give you a big hug and kiss for the day. I miss being home! Miss you!”²⁰ One wonders whether the exclamation points were meant to convince Helen or himself.

IN SEPTEMBER 1966, CBS would air a new show called Mission: Impossible. It featured a group of secret agents who would assemble every week to battle dictators, mobsters, and other enemies designated by their unseen supervisor, “the secretary,” who would deliver their orders via a self-destructing tape-recording that threatened to “disavow” any knowledge of their actions if they were caught or killed. As if anticipating the series, Lansdale was then in the process of assembling his own Impossible Missions Force in Saigon, known as the Senior Liaison Office, made up largely of the same individuals who had served with him previously in South Vietnam and, in some cases, before that in the Philippines.

“It is worth noting,” Rufus Phillips later wrote, “that for those with established government positions, going out to Vietnam with Lansdale was not going to enhance a career. It was obvious from prior experience that bureaucratic enemies would be generated. For those with families it was a considerable sacrifice, since dependents were no longer allowed in Saigon. For members of his original team, it was a display of loyalty based on firsthand knowledge of how effective Lansdale could be and how he dealt with those who worked for him.”21 Phillips himself joined the team only temporarily; he came to Saigon for the first month to help them set up operations before returning home to run his father’s engineering firm, which was negotiating to build a new airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the future, he would act as a Washington liaison for Lansdale.

Others came out for longer periods in spite of their misgivings. Joe Redick, the French-speaking CIA officer, reprised his role as translator. He earned the nickname Mother—“an appellation that he does not precisely cherish,” wrote another team member²²—because he showed “so much solicitude” toward his teammates. Lou Conein, the covert operator who had overseen the coup that toppled Diem, was looking forward to a promised new assignment as a military attaché in Venezuela when he was called in by the CIA’s deputy director, Richard Helms, and told, “Lou, you are going to Vietnam.” Lou replied that he didn’t want to go. Helms put a stop to that: “This is a directed assignment and you cannot refuse and you cannot let the agency down.”²³ Once in Saigon, the hard-drinking Luigi would be referred to by his teammates as “the I & I (Intelligence and Intoxication) Officer.”²⁴

Other Lansdale associates from his 1950s heyday included the eccentric archaeologist-turned-intelligence officer Charles “Bo” Bohannan, his onetime deputy in the Philippines; the cautious CIA operative Joe Baker, who left his posting in Paris to become the team’s executive officer, or second in command; the Army colonel (and Christian Science practitioner) Sam Karrick, who had helped direct South Vietnamese pacification in 1955; the former Philippine army officer Napoleon Valeriano, who was now on the CIA payroll and had helped train the Bay of Pigs invasion force; the erstwhile Shanghai symphony conductor and anti-Japanese guerrilla Bernie Yoh, “an extremely brilliant and energetic man,” in Henry Kissinger’s estimation;25 the economist Michael J. Deutch, a warmhearted Russian-Jewish refugee who had arrived in America by way of Belgium in 1940 and helped the war effort by developing synthetic rubber out of petroleum; and Hank Miller of the U.S. Information Agency, who at six feet six inches towered over the Vietnamese. One of the few team members with whom Lansdale did not have a long relationship was the white-shoe Boston lawyer Charlie Choate, who had been recommended by Henry Cabot Lodge’s son. With no experience in Vietnam but lots of idealism, Choate arrived bearing a letter of introduction from the president of the Boston Bar Association to the president of the Saigon Bar Association.²⁶

Lansdale’s team was a good one, but, like Lansdale himself, it sometimes seemed trapped in the past. The gonzo war reporter Michael Herr, then of Esquire magazine, called Lansdale and Conein—the best-known team members—“spook deities,” but added, “As sure as heat rises, their time was over. The war passed into the hard hands of firepower freaks out to eat the country whole, and with no fine touches either, leaving the spooks on the beach.”²⁷

BY THE end of September 1965, all of the members of the Senior Liaison Office had arrived and settled in. Lansdale moved into “a big barn of a house, really two flats, or a duplex,” located at 194 Cong Ly, on the road to the airport. The four bedrooms were used as living quarters and offices and the large living room as a conference and entertaining space. Joining Lansdale were Joe Redick, Michael Deutch, and Hank Miller. The team commandeered another house at 35 Nguyen Thong for Sam Karrick, Bernie Yoh, and Charlie Choate. Just as at Cong Ly, they had a cook and a “houseboy” to take care of them. As a pet they kept a ten-foot boa constrictor, named Baby, given to them by Father Nguyen Loc Hoa, the “fighting priest” defending the village of Binh Hung. Bo Bohannan took up residence with the Filipino workers at the Eastern Construction Company compound in Cholon; Eastern Construction, or Eccoi, was the successor to the Freedom Company. No longer CIA funded, it was now working as a contractor for the Saigon government.28

The only team member who got his own villa, oddly enough, was its youngest and least experienced member. Writing a letter home to the wives of the team members, Mike Deutch described him jocularly: “Now I don’t want to alarm you girls unduly—but I cannot dissimulate from you the skeleton in the team’s closet—a young, handsome, presently unmarried team member (in fact, brace yourself—he is divorced—but he’s only one exception that confirms the good rule of married men on the team, and it will never happen again). He is Dan Ellsberg of Rand and the Pentagon. It is his first trip to Asia, and he is free to enjoy the sight of the alluring ao-dais [dresses], but he is beginning to learn, and in time we will get him married.”²⁹ Deutch was more prophetic than he could have realized in describing Daniel Ellsberg as the “skeleton in the team’s closet,” since five years later he would gain worldwide notoriety as the leaker of the top-secret Pentagon Papers.

How did a future hero of the antiwar movement come to work for Major General Edward G. Lansdale, USAF (Ret.)? The answer to that question requires a brief recapitulation of Ellsberg’s life up to that point, a story told not only by Ellsberg himself but also by his biographer Tom Wells. Then thirty-four years old, he had grown up in Highland Park, the same municipality within Detroit where Lansdale had spent part of his youth, to Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science. Although he did not grow up to be a practicing Christian Scientist, this religious background as well as his childhood around Detroit gave him some common ground with Lansdale. His father even had the same first name as Lansdale’s father and, like Harry Lansdale, a connection to the automobile industry: Harry Ellsberg was a structural engineer who had helped design Ford’s vast Willow Run factory.³⁰

The similarities, however, ended there. While Lansdale had been a mediocre student, Ellsberg was an intellectual standout. As a young man, he had been a musical prodigy who was relentlessly pushed by his mother, Adele, to practice the piano even though he displayed little enthusiasm for the instrument. He was only freed of the burden of musical practice by the great conductor in the sky. In 1946, the entire Ellsberg family was on a long road trip when Daniel’s father fell asleep at the wheel, and the car veered into a concrete bridge abutment. Daniel’s thirteen-year-old sister and his mother were killed. Daniel himself was in a coma for thirty-six hours. When he woke up and learned that his mother had died, his first reaction was, “Now I don’t have to play the piano anymore.”31 Daniel’s father survived, but they never had a close relationship again, leaving him to seek out a series of surrogate father figures as mentors.

First at the Cranbrook Academy, an elite boarding school in Michigan, and then at Harvard College, Ellsberg’s classmates discovered that he was brilliant, charming, fascinating—but also boastful, self-centered, and prone to exaggeration. An economics major, Ellsberg graduated third in his class at Harvard. He interrupted his postgraduate studies in economics to join the Marine Corps. He was drawn to the Corps because he was, in his own words, “a dedicated cold warrior”³² and had, as one of his professors said, “a kind of macho way about him.”³³ He served as a lieutenant from 1954 to 1957 and even extended his tour in the hope of seeing combat in the Suez Crisis of 1956. He later called his years in the Corps “the happiest time in my life.”³⁴

Ellsberg left the Marines in 1957 to assume a prestigious fellowship at Harvard and continue his graduate studies. Eventually, in 1962, he would complete his PhD. By then, he had already been working for three years at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the nation’s leading defense think tank, where intellectual heavyweights such as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, and Harry Rowen were becoming famous for applying social science methods to the study of nuclear deterrence. Even at RAND, where genius was common, Ellsberg stood out as a “supergenius,” possibly a future Nobel Prize winner.³⁵ He was also a super-womanizer who openly bragged to colleagues about his conquests—and even passed around the RAND office nude photos of women he had slept with.³⁶ His family, including two young children, did not command the same level of attention. By the end of 1963, his wife, Carol, had had enough and demanded a divorce.³⁷

Reeling from the separation, Ellsberg in 1964 moved to Washington, where he became a special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Although, as he later acknowledged, his job was “a very lowly one,” Ellsberg asked for and received a very high civil service grade, GS-18, equivalent to a two-star general. However, Ellsberg had trouble keeping up with the hectic pace of work in the Pentagon. By the summer of 1965, he was being encouraged to find employment elsewhere, the sooner the better.38

In August 1965, Ellsberg attended an interagency meeting at the State Department. William Colby, who was now in charge of the CIA’s Far East department, introduced Edward Lansdale, who proceeded to speak about his upcoming mission to Vietnam. Ellsberg had heard of Lansdale, the Quiet American. Everyone had. He had, as Ellsberg later recalled, “a great reputation.” After the meeting, Ellsberg approached Lansdale and offered to accompany him to Vietnam as a counterinsurgency “apprentice.”³⁹ After checking him out, Lansdale decided there would be advantages to recruiting one of McNamara’s “whiz kids.” “I liked Ellsberg,” Lansdale later said. “But I had a sort of underhanded motive for putting him on the team. I wanted somebody to keep the bureaucrats off my back in Saigon, and here was this bright young man who could talk a mile a minute.”⁴⁰

Because Ellsberg carried such a high civil service grade, he came in with rank and perquisites greater than Lansdale’s own. (Ellsberg earned $37,678 a year, Lansdale $36,490.)⁴¹ And he became the only team member to be given a villa to himself. He was not shy about flaunting his rank in spite of his lack of experience in Vietnam. “That didn’t cut any ice with anybody else on his damn team,” Rufus Phillips said. “He had a hyper ego.”⁴²

If Ellsberg could be arrogant with others, he was, however, deferential to Lansdale. “I loved Lansdale,” he said decades later in his comfortable home in the hills near Berkeley, California, now white-haired but still handsome, voluble, and intense even in his eighties. “He was a father figure to me. I really revered him and continue to have the same warm feeling; that never changed. I felt just like the other members of the team did. It was a cult. He was the leader of the cult, and I was a member of that cult.”⁴³

After getting to know Lansdale, Ellsberg concluded that he was more impressive in private than in public:

Many people from their dealings with him got the impression that this guy is actually nutty, lightweight, stupid in his mind, crazy ideas and nothing else, just a salesman. I know that’s not true. I experienced him very often as strikingly shrewd in his calculations and his understanding and his analysis. I also understood at the time that he was capable of dissembling to people that he did not want to reveal anything to, by sounding like a hick. . . . That is not the case. This was a very shrewd, smart guy.44

Shrewd and smart Lansdale may have been, but most of his bureaucratic rivals in the burgeoning American establishment in Saigon shared the pejorative view—“nutty, lightweight, stupid”—that Ellsberg ascribed to those who did not know him well. As the American war was reaching its full fury, with offensives larger than Operation Starlite becoming a routine occurrence, Lansdale would have the unenviable task of trying to overcome the suspicion and resentment of his colleagues in order to influence the course of American and Vietnamese policy.