9

The Power Broker

At times I feel like Boss Hague, at others Rasputin.

—EDWARD LANSDALE

THE CIA manipulated its first foreign election only half a year after the agency’s establishment in 1947. To keep Italy, economically and morally lacerated after two decades of Fascist wantonness, from going Communist, the newly formed National Security Council approved a program of covert action to buttress the conservative premier Alcide De Gasperi and his Christian Democratic Party against the Popular Democratic Front established by the Communist and Socialist parties in an election scheduled for April 18, 1948. The CIA provided as much as ten million dollars in cash to finance the Christian Democratic campaign. In addition to bankrolling anti-Communist politicians, the CIA worked in cooperation with the State Department and the Voice of America to launch an all-out propaganda blitz to warn Italians against embracing Communism. Anti-Communist appeals from well-known entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore were supplemented by shipments of the film Ninotchka, Greta Garbo’s 1939 satire of Soviet life. The newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, who subsequently founded the National Enquirer, chipped in with a campaign asking fellow Italian Americans to send letters and telegrams to their friends and relatives in the old country urging them to vote against Communism. Jay Lovestone, an American labor activist and erstwhile Communist with close ties to the CIA, mobilized his Italian labor union contacts to assist in the campaign.

The result, from Washington’s perspective, was entirely satisfactory: the Christian Democrats won 48.5 percent of the vote in 1948, up from 36 percent in 1946, and acquired an absolute majority in parliament. It is not clear, admittedly, how much of the outcome was due to CIA efforts. American economic aid such as the Marshall Plan, signed into law just weeks before the vote, and efforts by the Vatican to mobilize church members were also of considerable importance—to say nothing of De Gasperi’s own appeal. But in the minds of policymakers the 1948 Italian election established a covert-action template that could be followed successfully in other elections where the Communist threat loomed large. Arthur Krock of the New York Times spoke for many when he commended officials for the “perfect handling of the American interest . . . in the peninsular roughhouse.”1

Such operations became much easier to execute after the establishment, just two months after the Italian election, of Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, expressly designed and amply funded for waging “political warfare.” Thus, by the time that Lansdale submitted a request to his superiors at the OPC to influence the 1951 Philippine congressional campaign, the institutional resources for such a project were in place—along with the determination to use them. America, it was clear, was far removed from pre-1941 isolationism. Yet the manipulation of foreign politics remained a controversial project within the American foreign-policy establishment. Naturally, it was more contentious still in the countries whose destiny lay in the balance. Before long, Lansdale would find himself at the center of political storms in both Washington and Manila.

THERE WAS, admittedly, a crucial difference between the situation in Italy in 1948 and that in the Philippines in 1951. In the former instance, the Truman administration had been worried about Communists’ winning power outright at the ballot box, because the Italian Communist Party was the largest in Western Europe. In the Philippines, by contrast, the Communist Party was prevented by law from contesting the election. The concern was that abusive, corrupt, and reactionary anti-Communists would win the election by fraud and thereby inadvertently strengthen the Communists’ attempts to foment a revolution.

Charged with safeguarding the vote was the ineffectual Philippine Commission on Elections. In the summer of 1951, Lansdale hatched a scheme with Ramon Magsaysay to have the commission request the assistance of the armed forces. President Elpidio Quirino’s Liberals had been the worst offenders among vote stealers the last time around, so Lansdale was careful to ensure that the request from the election commission came while Quirino was out of the country receiving medical care at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

To further safeguard the elections, Lansdale set up an OPC-funded organization, the National Movement for Free Elections, known by its acronym, NAMFREL. It was ostensibly run by three Filipino war veterans. Its real guiding light, in addition to Lansdale himself, was another CIA operative, named Gabriel L. Kaplan. He first came to Manila in 1951 on behalf of a CIA-backed Committee for a Free Asia, which eventually changed its name to the Asia Foundation. Later he would masquerade as the representative of yet another CIA front, the Catherwood Foundation.

A short, stocky man with a taste for giant Churchill cigars, Gabe Kaplan was a liberal Republican lawyer and politician from New York who had failed in a bid for Congress in 1938 and for the state supreme court in 1940. He used to say of his unsuccessful campaigns, “Fortunately I’m Jewish. But even that wasn’t enough. I needed just a bit of Italian blood besides.” (The dominant New York City politician of the day, Fiorello La Guardia, was both Jewish and Italian.) Kaplan was recruited for the OPC by a fellow liberal Republican lawyer from New York, Desmond FitzGerald, who had joined the Office of Policy Coordination’s Far East Division after battling alongside Kaplan against the corrupt Democratic Party machine. He thus became one of the few Jews in an organization that still resembled a WASPy men’s club. Kaplan’s New York political experience proved invaluable in foiling Tammany Hall’s Philippine counterparts. He also brought exactly the same perspective to dealing with Filipinos that Lansdale himself had, treating his contacts with “trust and respect,” rather than trying to bribe or blackmail them in the way that CIA case officers normally were taught to do. But he was more outspoken than his quiet boss: “Gabe was short but very glib of tongue,” Frisco “Johnny” San Juan, one of the founders of NAMFREL, recalled decades later. “You put him in a room, he would always dominate the conversation.”2

Employing NAMFREL volunteers as well as Philippine troops, the unlikely tag team of Lansdale and Kaplan orchestrated an ambitious scheme to protect the election. “Philippine Army troops guarded public meetings to guarantee free speech and later patrolled the vicinity of polling places to prevent harassment of voters and electoral officials,” Lansdale recalled. “The polling places themselves were guarded by high school and college ROTC cadets, who were often taken to the precincts by army transports or by members of Namfrel; and the latter also served as poll-watchers under the direction of the Commission on Elections.” While some cheating undoubtedly occurred in 1951, it was much less than in 1949. That most of the winning candidates belonged to the opposition party—the Nacionalistas—attested to the election’s honesty.

To heighten the impact of the voting, Lansdale orchestrated a typical bit of black propaganda. After the Military Intelligence Service arrested a Huk agitprop cell in Manila, Lansdale used their communications channels to write his own propaganda on behalf of the insurgency. His theme was “Boycott the Election!” based on the assumption that the 1951 vote would be as dirty as its 1949 predecessor. He produced an entire fake directive along those lines “typed on a captured Huk typewriter on captured paper, with authenticating identification.” So realistic was Lansdale’s missive that soon it was echoed by the entire Huk propaganda apparatus. When the election turned out to be honest, the Huks were discredited.³

LANSDALE WAS shrewd enough to apprehend that one honest election by itself was hardly enough to win the war. Six months after the 1951 election, he wrote to his wife, Helen (“Tike”):

It looks like the Huks are really crumbling, the first country in the world to defeat the Communists this way. It isn’t over yet, but the end is in sight if we can just keep the pressure up. . . . Trouble is, democracy is not building up fast enough to replace the void created as communism crumbles, which presents new and complex problems. . . . There are indications that same old tricks of using forceful coercion on the electorate are being planned, even though this was licked in the last election of 1951. Friends are getting worried and jittery again and running in here with their tales of woe . . . and are getting bucked up, fannies slapped and sent out as men again.4

To maintain momentum, Lansdale decided that his friend Ramon Magsaysay would be the ideal candidate to replace Quirino as president, but he knew that it was important not to have Magsaysay campaign for office prematurely, so as to sustain the nonpartisan aura of the defense secretary. When speculation began about a Magsaysay-for-president campaign, Lansdale wrote to Helen, “[I] had him say he was too busy with a big job to have time to think of politics—go ‘way and let me work.’ ”⁵ All the while, Lansdale was plotting to raise Magsaysay’s political profile so as to position him for the presidential race.

Lansdale orchestrated a campaign-style trip for the defense minister to the United States and Mexico in June 1952. Magsaysay traveled on a four-engine Lockheed Constellation aircraft lent to him by the U.S. military. He was accorded practically the treatment of a head of state, welcomed with nineteen-gun salutes in San Francisco, Washington, and New York. He even met with President Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, General Omar Bradley, and major newspaper and magazine publishers. Newspapers hailed him as an “imaginative administrator” (New York Times), “a Pacific dynamo” (New York Herald Tribune), and other encomia.

The only glitch occurred on Magsaysay’s airplane en route to Mexico City to address a Lions International convention. Lansdale’s team had prepared a speech for Magsaysay. Its author was David T. Sternberg, a chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound CIA officer who had initially arrived in the Philippines in 1939, endured Japanese incarceration during the war, and now worked for the CIA while posing as the Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Manila. Frisco San Juan described him as a “genius”: “His physical condition sharpened his mind. He was at a disadvantage physically but first-class mentally.”6 Sternberg’s draft speech stressed the need for “the highest type of fighting ideals and principles” to defeat “the Communists.” But Magsaysay had been sold on a competing draft written by a “right-wing party hack” in the Philippines that Lansdale described as a “tirade of negative invective against the Huks”—“one of those ‘they eat little babies for breakfast’ type of things” in which “the only good Huks were dead Huks.” There was no mention of the spirit of “brotherly protection and friendship” that animated the anti-Huk campaign Lansdale had devised. Yet aboard the airplane Magsaysay told Lansdale that this was the text he was planning to deliver.

“The hell you are,” Lansdale said. “You are going to use this speech that was written for you and that is you to a T.”

Peeved, Magsaysay shot back, “All right, I am going back to Manila then. To hell with them, I don’t need to give a speech anyhow.”

Lansdale replied firmly, “You are going down and you are going to give that speech.” Then, “shocked and angry,” he grabbed the other speech from Magsaysay’s hands and tore it into shreds.

As the argument escalated, Magsaysay shoved Lansdale, and Lansdale “slugged him real hard, and he went down.” Or so he recalled years later; in another version of the tale, he merely said they had a “brief tussle.” In both versions of the story, the two men looked up and saw that their fight had been witnessed by Quirino’s wide-eyed adult daughter, Vicky Quirino Gonzalez, who was traveling with the party.

She said to Lansdale in horror, “Papa told me about you!”

Lansdale replied that this was a “brotherly fight,” adding, “I am fighting because I love this guy very much.” Magsaysay saw things the same way. The two men quickly patched up their quarrel, and Magsaysay wound up delivering the speech that Lansdale wanted.

In fact, Magsaysay did pretty much everything that Lansdale wanted, not because he was a paid American agent but because he had such faith in his friend’s acumen. Magsaysay’s confidence was justified, at least judging by the consequences of the trip. He returned to Manila “as a conquering Caesar,” in the words of two early biographers.7

THE CHALLENGE was to convert Magsaysay’s popularity into a viable campaign—and to prevent Quirino from stealing the election. Magsaysay was a member of Quirino’s Liberal Party, but he knew that the president would not step aside for him. There ensued complex negotiations with the barons of the Nacionalista Party, the former president José Laurel and Senator Claro Recto, to secure its nomination for Magsaysay. This was not a natural alliance. Laurel and Recto were as anti-American as Magsaysay was pro-American. Moreover, they had served under the very Japanese occupation regime (Laurel as president, Recto as a cabinet minister) that Magsaysay had fought. But they were also professional politicians who could spot a winner when they saw one.

Lansdale was in the thick of all the wheeling and dealing. At one point, the Nacionalistas produced an agreement that would have given Magsaysay the nod in return for a promise that the party, not the president, would select his cabinet members. Magsaysay was willing to sign anything he needed to win, but Lansdale “prevailed on Magsaysay,” according to Magsaysay’s biographer José Abueva, “not to cut corners which would later compromise his moral position as a reform leader.”⁸ Finally, on November 16, 1952, Magsaysay and the Nacionalistas signed a secret agreement: they would support him in return for his resignation from the Liberal Party and his pledge to give them a say, but not a veto, in cabinet appointments. The agreement also pledged support for Magsaysay from a third party, the Citizens Party led by Senator Lorenzo Tanada, a prominent former Liberal known as a corruption fighter.

Lansdale subsequently detailed these negotiations in a top-secret cable to Allen Dulles, who had taken over as CIA director in February 1953. (The OPC had been merged with the CIA in 1952.) Referring to Dulles only as “Director, KUBark,” and signing himself “Geoffrey S. Villiers” (a pseudonym apparently picked at random from a telephone directory), Lansdale recalled that Tanada had come to him in 1952 “stating that he was ‘reporting for orders to save democracy in the Philippines.’ ” The marching orders Lansdale gave were to support Magsaysay, and subsequently “Citizens Party personnel helped construct the opposition structure under Magsaysay.”9

The secret agreement was so politically explosive that Lansdale could not leave it even in his preferred hiding spot, the JUSMAG liquor locker. Fearing it would be used to blackmail Magsaysay, he gave the only copy for safekeeping in a sealed envelope to Raymond Spruance, a retired admiral and World War II hero who had taken over as ambassador in February 1952. Spruance placed it in his bedroom safe, not trusting the main embassy safe for such a sensitive document. A few months later, after knowledge of the letter’s existence leaked out, he returned it to Lansdale, who secreted it under the floor of his house. Two decades later, and long gone from the Philippines, Lansdale said, “It’s still there today, as far as I know.”¹⁰

RAMON MAGSAYSAY resigned from the cabinet on February 28, 1953, with a blast at President Quirino. His resignation letter, carefully crafted by a group of supporters, including no doubt Lansdale, said, “It would be useless for me to continue as Secretary of National Defense with the specific duty of killing Huks as the administration continues to foster and tolerate conditions which offer fertile soil to Communism.”¹¹

Now that Magsaysay was openly a candidate, Lansdale helped organize a Magsaysay for President Movement modeled on a similar campaign that had drafted Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952. Lansdale even composed a slogan for the candidate, “Magsaysay Is My Guy”; Magsaysay became known as “the Guy” throughout the country. Lansdale collaborated with the jazz musician and future foreign minister Raul Manglapus to compose a campaign song, “The Magsaysay Mambo.” Its first two verses:

Everywhere that you would look

Was a bandit or a crook

Peace and order was a joke

Till Magsaysay pumasok [entered]!

That is why, that is why,

You will hear the people cry:

“Our democracy will die

Kung wala si [without] Magsaysay!”12

Lansdale had a master disc sent to the United States, where thousands of vinyl records were produced by the CIA and smuggled back into the Philippines.¹³ The song became so popular, Lansdale wrote to Helen on May 18, 1953, that “it has made a big hit around here, all the kids singing it, and of course radios turned on full blast so that the neighbors half a mile down the road can enjoy the pretty music. Some of the newspaper lads here claim I wrote the thing. As they say in Brooklyn,” he concluded wryly, “perish forbid.” When some of the officers at the mess at Clark Air Base asked Lansdale whether he had “heard that hit tune in the Philippines called the Magsaysay Mambo,” he simply played “dumb.”¹⁴

Lansdale had become, he wrote home, the ringmaster of “a twenty-ring circus, with each ring needing an eye kept on it and with me having to run several of the rings at the same time to boot.”¹⁵ He was getting used to being woken up early to be confronted with problems he had not expected when he went to bed the night before. As he told Helen,

It might be the use of napalm against Moro outlaws or the financial troubles of a newspaper or the replacement of a good combat commander or putting on a radio program at a moment’s notice to how to bring two Filipinos together despite mutual distrust or hearing about the latest rumor campaign to discredit me or how a close friend’s wife is being seduced by a band leader or a special operation against the Huk leadership or how to bring security for civilians along the eastern shore of Laguna de Bay or doping out the intentions of intriguing politicos or, most often, the 1953 presidential campaign here.

With a mock-humble flourish, Lansdale concluded, “It will be good to just have to wonder whether I get orange juice or grapefruit on the breakfast table.”16

Far removed from the duties of an ordinary military officer or even secret agent, Lansdale had become a political power broker. “At times I feel like Boss Hague, at others Rasputin,” he wrote to Helen, adding cryptically, “but without entering into things the way they did.”¹⁷ This was not a model that most American government representatives would aspire to: Frank Hague had presided over a corrupt political machine as mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 1917 to 1947, and became notorious for proclaiming, “I am the law,” while Grigori Rasputin was a licentious mystic who gained a sinister hold over the Romanov family in the last days of the Russian czar. Presumably when Lansdale said that he was not “entering into things the way they did,” he meant that he did not abuse his power as Hague and Rasputin did. But that he would even invoke the comparison shows that his hidden influence was expanding in a way that many of his countrymen—to say nothing of ordinary Filipinos—would not have approved of.

IN RECOGNITION of the success he was having orchestrating the anti-Huk campaign, Lansdale was promoted by the Air Force to full colonel in January 1952, ahead of his peers. He was in many ways eclipsing the CIA station chief, Ralph B. Lovett, a mild-mannered and soft-spoken retired army one-star, as well as JUSMAG’s new commander, Major General Albert Pierson, a veteran of the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns in World War II. Lansdale was even assuming more prominence than Ambassador Ray Spruance, the victor of the Battle of Midway, who was dubbed “the Sphinx” by Filipino newspapermen because he was so reluctant to speak in public.18 (One of the ambassador’s aides recalled, “On the rare occasions when we were able to talk him into making a speech he approached it with far more nervousness than he ever did the Japanese fleet.”)¹⁹ Lansdale was dismayed by “the lack of firm and positive U.S. representation here” and decided he had no choice but to fill the vacuum—even if he was supposed to be a covert operative. “I’ve found myself time and again having to speak up strongly on U.S. policy—when Spruance or Pierson should,” Ed wrote to Helen. “That’s strictly between us, because a colonel can really be jumped on for some of the things I’ve had to say and do recently.”²⁰

Soon Filipino reporters were kidding Lansdale that he was running for president himself after having already served as the real secretary of national defense.²¹ He was becoming so famous that he was recognized wherever he went. He wrote to Helen in the spring of 1953, “I’ve never been in Fura before, but as I drove up the only street, folks leaned out my windows, yelling hello, Ed, and Magsaysay is my Guy (a campaign slogan) at me and inviting me in to eat. A few days earlier, I was stuck for the night down in Southern Luzon and rather than drive a not-too-safe-highway at night, stopped off at a hotel run by Chinese (as most are). I scribbled some name on the register (making it up at the moment) and the hotel manager read it, smiled, and said happy to have you with us Col Lansdale.”²²

It wasn’t just in the provinces that Lansdale was acquiring an outsize reputation. Carlos Romulo, the Philippine ambassador to Washington, who was contemplating a presidential bid of his own, told his staff, Lansdale wrote, “that nobody could be elected President here if I opposed the guy . . . a pleasant false belief, huh?”²³

False or not, this belief in Lansdale’s omnipotence became increasingly widespread, and it led to a backlash both in Washington and in Manila. Criticism of Lansdale broke into the open in early 1953, just as the Eisenhower administration was assuming office, when Bataan magazine published an article, subsequently circulated by Quirino’s office, warning of a “master mind”—“a certain army colonel”—who was creating “an American Army party organized to foist a ‘man on horseback’ on the Filipinos.”24 In case there was any doubt as to the identity of the “master mind,” the Manila Evening News ran its own article making clear that “the American colonel attacked in Bataan Magazine is the propaganda chief of the JUSMAG.” The Huks got into the act, too. They “have coined a phrase of ‘Jusmagsaysay’ to indicate he’s my boy,” Lansdale reported.²⁵

Among those irate at Lansdale’s machination, not surprisingly, was Elpidio Quirino himself. The onetime prodigy of Philippine politics, he had climbed what Disraeli called “the greasy pole” ever since, as a young lawyer from a small town in backwoods Luzon, he had first been elected to the House of Representatives in 1919 at age twenty-nine. His steady ascent had taken him to the Senate and then the vice presidency, followed, after Manual Roxas’s death in 1948, by the ultimate prize, the presidency itself. His more than three decades in politics were full of considerable achievements. He had helped secure from Washington the passage of a law in 1934 to grant the Philippines independence, which would come in 1946, and he had helped draft the constitution. During the war, unlike many of his political rivals, he had refused to cooperate with the occupiers. He had been captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, and his wife and three children had been killed during the bloody Battle of Manila. In the postwar years, he had presided over impressive reconstruction efforts even if his term was also marred by the pervasive corruption that had allowed the Huk insurgency to flourish.

In 1953, Quirino was only sixty-three years old but looked older. He had but three years to live and had to spend two valuable months of the 1953 campaign receiving treatment in Baltimore for a variety of ailments, including heart, stomach, and kidney problems. But even from his hospital bed, he was not too sick to fight back against those who were seeking to usurp his hard-won hold on power. “I swear to God,” Quirino vowed, “I will destroy those who will try to destroy me.”²⁶

Quirino knew that Lansdale was not only a close adviser to Magsaysay but also a CIA officer, and he tried to kick Lansdale out of the country. Lansdale was forced to cut short a vacation with his family in Florida in early 1953 to rush back to the Philippines at the personal request of Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. These two dedicated Cold Warriors believed that it would be easier for Quirino to bar Lansdale from the country than to expel him. High-level U.S. pressure kept Quirino from carrying out his threat. Acting on behalf of the CIA—a potent, if concealed, force in American foreign relations that now rivaled and even eclipsed the State Department—Lansdale was free to continue exerting his quasi-covert influence.

In the end, given how pro-American most Filipinos were, the attacks on Lansdale’s leading role did not sting nearly as much as they would have in other countries. On the stump, Magsaysay would boldly declare, “Quirino and the other Liberals charge that I have American advisers. Sure I do. . . . These are the best friends we’ve ever had, and I’m proud to have them as my associates.”27 Magsaysay even had an aide who looked a bit like Lansdale, right down to the mustache, stand on the campaign platform with him when the real Lansdale wasn’t around to make clear that he had the American imprimatur.²⁸

QUIRINO AND his supporters were not the only ones unhappy about Lansdale’s growing prominence in Filipino politics. So were some of Lansdale’s own colleagues in the U.S. government who opposed American operatives’ intervening so deeply in the politics of a sovereign country and the CIA’s playing such a prominent role in American foreign policy. “A lot of our little guys . . . seem to be trying to pull me down as much as the politicos here, figuring I guess that now is a good time,” Lansdale complained in the spring of 1953.²⁹

Some of those trying to pull him down were not, in truth, so little, and their objections, far from being petty or spiteful, raised an important and enduring debate about the role of America’s intelligence agencies. They included David K. E. Bruce, the under secretary of state, a man who would serve every president between Truman and Ford. Like Lansdale, he was an OSS veteran, albeit from a moneyed, Old South milieu far removed from Lansdale’s more modest upbringing. (Bruce’s first wife was the daughter of Andrew Mellon, the nation’s richest man; his second wife, Evangeline Bruce, became a legendary Georgetown hostess.) Bruce wanted Lansdale sent home in December 1952 because he was so closely identified with Magsaysay. He suggested in telegram shorthand that the “relationship established between US and Magsaysay threatens become prejudiced to US interests in Philippines and to those of Magsaysay if not altered to meet present circumstances. Full US support for SecDef in his campaign against Huks is quite different from support for potential presidential candidate already committed to oppose admin in which he serves. Believe we must find way of making this position clear to Magsaysay, who must also realize any widespread conviction that he is hand-picked candidate of US wld not further his own polit career.”30

This was the beginning of a larger critique of covert action that Bruce would develop in the years ahead. In 1956, he and the former defense secretary Robert Lovett would submit, at President Eisenhower’s request, a secret review of the CIA that was harshly critical of its tendency toward “King Making” in pursuit of those twin goals “of ‘frustrating the Soviets’ and keeping others ‘pro-western’ oriented.” Anticipating an argument that would become a staple of political discourse in the 1970s after the CIA’s covert activities were publicly revealed, Lovett demanded to know, “What right have we to go barging around into other countries, buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?”³¹

Another skeptic was George Aurell, a cautious and ineffectual bureaucrat who was the head of the CIA’s Far East Division. A CIA colleague recalled that Aurell “had never been able to accept the fact that so much social engineering was involved in the activities of Lansdale and Kaplan,” whom he would sneeringly describe as “great crusaders.” Aurell would say, in reference to EDCOR, “What in hell is an intelligence agency doing running a rural resettlement program? I’m glad to help fight the Huks, but is it our job to rebuild the nation?”³²

His criticisms of “nation building” would be echoed in Washington during conflicts ranging from Vietnam in the 1960s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. Many policymakers would advocate a narrow, tactical approach to battling insurgents—kill or capture as many as possible and don’t worry about fixing societal problems. Lansdale, by contrast, was convinced that without creating functioning state institutions there was no way to defeat a determined insurgency. He was aware of the difficulties of improving governance in a Third World country—he confronted them every day—but still he was frustrated with colleagues who “failed to grasp the political nature of ‘people’s warfare,’ such as the Huks had attempted to wage.” He found himself citing Mao to argue, “All military actions are meant to achieve political objectives while military action itself is a manifested form of politics.”33 When it came to CIA involvement in the 1953 Philippine presidential election, Lansdale wrote to his superiors, “In brief, it was because we saw no other ready solution to the defeat of Communism in the country.”³⁴

Now he just had to convince the new CIA director.

ALLEN WELSH DULLES had a diplomatic pedigree like few others. His maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, had been President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state. His “Uncle Bert” was Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, became Eisenhower’s secretary of state. But although Allen and Foster Dulles pursued similar career paths, they had very different personalities. Foster was brilliant and hardworking but also dour, moralistic, pompous, and reserved. Winston Churchill, one of many who did not care for him, said he was a “bull who always brought his china closet with him.”³⁵ Allen was more charming, a genial raconteur and practiced seducer—in short, more like Lansdale himself. His “Santa-like ‘Ho-ho-ho’ laugh”³⁶ somehow made the covert machinations he directed seem less menacing. Foster would be respected by his colleagues; Allen would be beloved.

After graduating from high school at fifteen, Foster was valedictorian of the Princeton class in 1908 and afterward enjoyed a meteoric rise at the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Soon he would become the highest-paid lawyer in the country and the Republicans’ chief foreign-policy spokesman. Allen followed his brother to Princeton and after graduation entered the Foreign Service—but only because the United States had no civilian intelligence service. Like Edward Lansdale, Allen was a devotee of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, one of the first and most popular novels of espionage, and he aspired to follow in Kim’s footsteps.37 Posted during World War I in Vienna and Bern, Switzerland, Allen developed the case officer’s skill at cultivating sources and evaluating their information. In 1926 Allen, who had attended law school at night, left the government to become a high-paid international lawyer at his brother’s firm. His recreational interests were tennis, talking foreign policy over brandy and a pipe, and womanizing. He would torture his long-suffering wife by writing letters telling her of all the enjoyable hours he had spent on his frequent trips abroad with a variety of beautiful women. “I don’t feel I deserve as good a wife as I have,” he confessed, “as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies.”³⁸

Allen Dulles’s life changed for good in 1942 when another New York lawyer with a roving eye—Wild Bill Donovan—recruited him for what would become the OSS. Before long, Dulles was back in his old stomping ground in neutral Switzerland, which in World War II, as in World War I, proved to be a playground for secret agents. Much like Lansdale, Dulles had, in the words of his biographer Peter Grose, a “marvelous, low-key way of speaking” that endeared him to most people he met.³⁹ Also like Lansdale, Dulles did not believe in excessive secrecy; he made sure that his status as an American spymaster became common knowledge in Bern so that potential sources would know where to go with their information. Before long German officials dissatisfied with the Nazis were showing up in the sitting room of his cozy apartment. He was able to gain information about the Holocaust, rocket and nuclear development, plots to kill Hitler, and much else besides. He even helped to negotiate the surrender of the German army in Italy. Even more than Lansdale, Dulles also combined romance with espionage. Both Mary Bancroft, an American newspaper heiress, and Countess Wally Castelbarco, daughter of the Italian American conductor Arturo Toscanini, became his agents and his lovers.

After the war, Dulles briefly returned to the practice of law but, like Frank Wisner and many other veterans, he found civilian life a bore. In January 1951, he became the CIA’s deputy director for plans; in August, deputy director of the entire agency; and then in February 1953, following Eisenhower’s election, director of central intelligence. Nicknamed the Great White Case Officer, he loved the romance of espionage and hated the paperwork. The Soviet mole Kim Philby, who knew Dulles when he was MI6 liaison officer in Washington, said that Dulles “was nice to have around: comfortable, predictable, pipe-­smoking, whisky-sipping company,” and that “his unprofessional delight in cloak-and-dagger for its own sake was an endearing trait.”40

While Eisenhower set the general direction of foreign policy, a field in which he was far better schooled than most of his predecessors and successors, he delegated much of its implementation to the brothers Dulles. They spoke on the telephone daily and gathered every Sunday at their sister Eleanor’s place in northern Virginia to plot by her pool. Foster distrusted the Foreign Service and preferred to implement sensitive operations or handle important relationships through Allen’s CIA people because they labored under less oversight.⁴¹

The Dulles brothers’ plans to liberate the “captive peoples” of the Communist bloc—an Eisenhower campaign slogan in 1952—went awry when Communist secret police forces rolled up CIA-organized networks in, inter alia, Poland, Ukraine, Albania, China, and Tibet. That left the Dulles brothers to focus on lands where Communism had not yet taken root. Allen Dulles proclaimed, “Where there begins to be evidence that a country is slipping and communist takeover is threatened, we can’t wait for an engraved invitation to come and give aid.”⁴²

With Eisenhower’s blessing, Dulles charged ahead in June 1953 with Operation Ajax, a joint undertaking with Britain’s MI6 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran, who was threatening to nationalize oil fields belonging to the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and who, it was feared in Washington, was soft on Communism. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, was tasked with returning real power to the Shah of Iran. That is precisely what occurred in Tehran in August 1953, while the Philippine election campaign was heating up, although historians continue to debate how much of the credit or blame should go to the CIA. Later that year, Eisenhower would give the go-ahead to Operation Success to topple Guatemala’s leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz. In 1954, a CIA team under Colonel Richard Haney would contrive a “spontaneous uprising” to drive Arbenz out of power.

Such coups were not without cost. After taking power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist revolutionaries would cite the anti-Mossadeq uprising, which actually had been supported by the clerical establishment, to justify their anti-American animus. And among those embittered by the overthrow of Arbenz was a young Argentinian physician named Ernesto “Che” Guevara who was in Guatemala City as it was being bombed by unmarked American aircraft; this experience helped turn him into a Marxist revolutionary. But the Eisenhower administration never imagined that its regime-change operations would eventually produce such “blowback.” To the contrary, the CIA campaigns in Iran and Guatemala were seen as proof that covert action was an economical and effective alternative to waging war. As one of Eisenhower’s biographers put it, he had a “fundamental belief that nuclear war was unimaginable, limited conventional war unwinnable, and stalemate unacceptable. That left the CIA’s covert action capability.”43

It is hardly a surprise, then, that Allen Dulles was inclined to support Lansdale as much as he did Kim Roosevelt and other swashbuckling covert-action specialists. He loved to take favorite field officers to the White House and introduce them to Eisenhower, saying, with a twinkle in his eye, “Mr. President, here’s my best man!”⁴⁴ Intensifying a post-1945 shift in the exercise of American influence—quite a change from prewar days, when the United States did not even have a civilian intelligence agency—the Eisenhower administration did not cavil at using covert operatives to manipulate foreign elections. But even Dulles cautioned Lansdale that he had to “realize the delicacy of his position” and “conduct himself with extreme discretion.”⁴⁵

It helped that the senior American representative in the Philippines was also a supporter of Lansdale’s. Ambassador Ray Spruance was no professional diplomat. A career military man who was not given to dissembling, he hated Quirino with a passion and admired Magsaysay for his “courage, honesty, and patriotism.”46 To win Spruance’s favor, Lansdale hosted him on inspection trips to the provinces, “which,” Lansdale noted, “he loves since he can get into old khakis and walking shoes.”⁴⁷ After hearing that Spruance liked melons, Lansdale even took him to a cantaloupe patch in the Candaba Swamp that had just been liberated by Filipino troops.⁴⁸ This campaign paid off: in December 1952, the ambassador wrote to his superiors in Washington that Lansdale’s presence was “essential in view of his personal contacts and the current situation.”⁴⁹

YET THE schism between the sanctioned diplomats of the Establishment and the new guild of covert operatives intent on saving “Western freedom from Communist darkness” continued to widen. Despite the support of Dulles and Spruance, Lansdale still complained of “sniping at me (verbally) by several folks at our Embassy to whom I am somewhat lower than a skunk.”⁵⁰ Major General Albert Pierson did more than just snipe. He insisted that Lansdale’s continued presence in JUSMAG was an embarrassment and a violation of the embassy’s decree that U.S. personnel stay neutral in the election. (Spruance, who knew and approved of Lansdale’s behind-the-scenes machinations, had issued a disingenuous “warning” on March 13, 1953, to “all Americans resident here to refrain scrupulously from any kind of participation in the election.”)⁵¹ Pierson was not able to expel Lansdale from the country any more than Quirino could. But he did manage to expel Lansdale from JUSMAG’s organizational chart and its housing compound. Lansdale would soon get his revenge; his complaints to Allen Dulles contributed to Pierson’s dismissal and replacement in August 1953 by another general, Robert M. Cannon, who was more accommodating.⁵²

In search of a new cover, Lansdale transferred to the Thirteenth Air Force at Clark Air Base, where he masqueraded as deputy command historian. He received a room in the bachelor officers’ quarters in a concrete building that he described as “shaped coyly like a long cracker box, ultra modern and functional, but still a cracker box.” Lansdale also rented a “little one-bedroom sawali house in Angeles close by, to put up guests and visitors,” he informed Helen. (Sawali is a woven bamboo used to build nipa huts.) “Angeles is still quite a honky-tonk town and I dislike it as much as ever (the first town I ever really knew in the Philippines). The amusing rumor is that I’ve taken a house in town for nefarious love affairs . . . a rumor that is actually helpful. How about flying over for a weekend and give the rumor mongers something to really talk about?”53 Lansdale knew, of course, that his wife hated to fly and hated the Philippines, so she would never take him up on his offer. Moreover, he was still passionately in love with Pat Kelly and still seeing her regularly. Given his continuing relationship with Pat, it’s likely that the gossip was right and that Ed’s house in Angeles really was nothing more than a love nest, even as Ed was also working to repair his relationship with his distant wife. Helen was trying to promote a rapprochement with her faraway husband by sending him notes she had taken during Christian Science classes. “The lessons recently scare this poor old sinner, but then maybe I need the scaring,” Lansdale told her.⁵⁴

To the extent that Lansdale had any religious faith, it would have come in handy in dealing with mounting personal attacks during this period that were not just bureaucratic in nature. Tony Quirino was the president’s brother and political enforcer, performing much the same role that Ngo Dinh Nhu later would play for his brother Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. During the 1953 campaign, Quirino was recalled to active duty as a lieutenant colonel in the Philippine army and given charge of a special command in the Military Intelligence Service manned by his thugs. His men got on Lansdale’s tail a couple of times in Manila, making plain to Lansdale that he was “to be shipped home in a coffin.” Lansdale recalled “one wild nighttime chase all through Manila before I eluded them.”⁵⁵ Another time, he was shot at in his car with a .30-caliber rifle. “Incredibly,” he wrote, “the bullets missed me.”⁵⁶ As a precaution, he had to change his license plates and repaint his vehicle.⁵⁷ “It’s not much fun to be under attack all the time,” Lansdale admitted, “telephones tapped, followed night and day, threatened, asked by your commanding general to get out, have the general commanding the base I’m supposed to move to say he doesn’t want a ‘trouble maker.’ ”58

In light of the controversy that now surrounded him, Lansdale thought, “Maybe it’s just as well if I hole up for a few days and be quiet as a little mouse.”⁵⁹ It was an understandable reaction, a form of self-preservation. But Lansdale could not stay out of the action for long—not when an election with momentous consequences for the future of the Philippines and the Cold War was about to occur. Before long he would be the mouse that roared.