There are few individuals in my knowledge more damned and at the same time applauded. . . . History’s going to have to portray Lansdale’s real part.
—LIEUTENANT GENERAL VICTOR H. “BRUTE” KRULAK, U.S. MARINE CORPS1
THE legendary Edward Lansdale, a covert operative so influential that he was said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and for one of the main characters in The Ugly American, remains, even more than four decades after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, one of the most fascinating and mysterious, yet misunderstood, figures in post-1945 American foreign policy.
He was portrayed by David Halberstam in his 1969 classic, The Best and the Brightest, as a “particularly futile and failed figure”: a “classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for,” who “allegedly knew and loved Asians” but “talked vague platitudes one step away from the chamber of commerce.” In Halberstam’s telling, he was an expert on “how to fight guerrilla wars the right way” who became “part of a huge American mission which used bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.”2 Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 Vietnam: A History, drew Lansdale in equally unflattering hues as “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former advertising executive,” an ineffectual “romantic” who “overlooked the deeper dynamics of revolutionary upheavals” and who “seemed to be oblivious to the social and cultural complexities of Asia.”3 Tim Weiner, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, was more scathing still, deriding Lansdale as a “Madison Avenue . . . con man” who dreamed up impractical schemes to overthrow Fidel Castro.4 By contrast, Neil Sheehan, in another Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), lauded Lansdale as a Machiavellian genius, a “legendary clandestine operative” who ruthlessly and effectively bulldozed opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to consolidate the nascent state of South Vietnam. Sheehan wrote with what some might consider flattering exaggeration: “South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale.”5
Taking up the theme of Lansdale as a “dirty tricks” specialist, the late L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who had once worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon, went so far as to suggest that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy that was responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.6 These sinister animadversions were picked up by the director Oliver Stone in his conspiratorially themed 1991 film, JFK, which features a shadowy Lansdale stand-in referred to only as General Y running the assassination on behalf of the “military-industrial complex.”
This is symptomatic of the long concatenation of misunderstanding and misinformation that still clouds Lansdale and his legacy. His was an epochal, if ultimately tragic, story—one that sheds considerable light not only on the course of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose bitter legacy still haunts American foreign policy, but also on such vital issues as how the United States can effectively fight insurgencies abroad, how it can deal with autocratic allies, and how it can most effectively dispense military and political advice to foreign partners of dubious reliability. But Lansdale’s struggles and achievements, while important to postwar history and relevant to contemporary debates, remain but dimly understood.
Halberstam, Karnow, Sheehan, and Weiner were—and, in the case of the latter two, still are—superb journalists and historians, but none has captured the totality of Ed Lansdale, and, by extension, of this particular part of the Vietnam War itself. The accounts of the first three were circumscribed because the authors knew Lansdale only in the 1960s, a frustrating decade for him, not at the peak of his effectiveness in the 1950s. The time is right, then, for a deeper look at Lansdale, one that is intended to do for him what Sheehan so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie or what Barbara Tuchman so effectively did for General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell in Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
Like those earlier works, The Road Not Taken is meant to be not only a biography of a pivotal, yet strangely unknown, figure; it is also a work of history with often surprising diplomatic, political, and military implications that seeks to recast our understanding of recent American history—and, indeed, of contemporary American policy debates. As the subtitle suggests, this book is concerned both with Lansdale and with the “American tragedy in Vietnam,” but in order to understand his impact on Vietnam, one must first appreciate what he did elsewhere, not only in the Philippines, where he served prior to arriving in Saigon in 1954, but also in “the Washington jungle,” where he struggled to make a mark in the eight years, 1957 to 1965, between his two Vietnam tours.
THE STARTING point for this examination must be to clear away the mythology that surrounds Lansdale and obscures his real legacy. He was, for a start, almost certainly not the model for the young American intelligence operative Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (1955); Greene wrote a draft of his novel before Lansdale had even arrived in Saigon. Yet the identification of Lansdale as “the Quiet American” adheres like indelible ink, because the views that Greene ascribes to Alden Pyle are an identifiable caricature of the views held by Lansdale. He was the model for Colonel Edwin B. Hillandale, practically the only admirable character in Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s scathing indictment of U.S. foreign policy, The Ugly American (1958), but unlike the fictional Hillandale, the real-life Lansdale did not speak Tagalog or any other foreign language. More importantly, Lansdale was not, as he has so often been depicted, an inveterate practitioner of, or advocate for, assassinations and “dirty tricks.” In fact, although he had a weakness for fanciful propaganda coups, such as hiring an astrologer to predict a bleak future for North Vietnam, he was deeply suspicious of most covert action, seeing it as a shortcut designed to deal with deep-rooted problems that demanded a political, not a military, solution. And, as this book will show, he had no connection with the assassination of President Kennedy, a charge that is nothing short of historical blasphemy, for the thirty-fifth president was a man he worked for, admired, and respected.
The very fact that Lansdale is even mentioned in connection with a supposed right-wing plot to kill the president, credible evidence of which has never come to light, is symptomatic of how little he is understood still. What motive would the military and CIA have had to kill Kennedy? Conspiracy-mongers most often claim it was either revenge because Kennedy didn’t do enough to support the Bay of Pigs invasion or an act of preemptive warmongering because Kennedy wanted to pull American troops out of Vietnam. What Kennedy would have done had he lived is unknowable, and there is still much debate among historians about whether he was serious about downsizing the U.S. military commitment to South Vietnam. But of one thing there can be no doubt: Lansdale was not an advocate for a larger U.S. military presence in Indochina. He argued that the American emphasis should be on building up legitimate, democratic, and accountable South Vietnamese institutions that could command the loyalty of the people, and he thought that sending large formations of American ground troops was a distraction from, indeed a hindrance to, achieving that all-important objective. As for the Bay of Pigs, Lansdale had never been a fan of the operation in the first place. He wanted to oust Castro not with a D-Day-style invasion staged by exiles but rather by fomenting a popular internal uprising, a strategy that was very much in keeping with his philosophy.
Contrary to the journalistic clichés, Lansdale was neither a “dirty tricks” artist nor an unworldly dreamer, neither Machiavellian mastermind nor arch-bumbler. He was an idealist and realist both—a canny strategist who recognized the need both for tough military action against insurgents and for political and social action designed to address the roots of an uprising. The doctrine of “Lansdalism,” as his teachings were labeled by some journalists, was founded on the bedrock of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. He believed that the “basic political ideas” set out in those documents would have far more appeal in Asia than either colonialism or communism—and could help cement alliances between the United States and Third World peoples struggling for self-rule. His ideas were ridiculed at the time by self-styled sophisticates such as Graham Greene, but they look more credible when seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, when democracy has spread across Asia to such disparate lands as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and Nepal.
The larger implications are obvious—and they make The Road Not Taken more than just one man’s story. Lansdale’s yin-yang approach, of hunting down guerrillas and terrorists while trying to attract the support of the uncommitted, is the basis of modern “population-centric” counterinsurgency doctrine as applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Britain in Northern Ireland, by Colombia against the FARC, by Israel in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and by many other countries with varying degrees of success. The most commonly cited influences on counterinsurgency thinking include David Galula of France, Robert Thompson and Gerald Templer of Great Britain, and David Petraeus of the United States. But Lansdale was fighting insurgents as early as any of them—first in the 1950s in the Philippines, where he helped to put down the Huk Rebellion, and then in South Vietnam, where, even if he did not create the state, he helped to consolidate its authority in its uncertain early days.
Lansdale was a master of political warfare and propaganda whose tactics in fighting global communism could, I propose, usefully be studied by officials today fighting global jihadism. He was also one of the most storied military and political advisers in history. Among twentieth-century advisers, his influence was rivaled only by that of T. E. Lawrence, and his example is arguably more important for the present day because, while “Lawrence of Arabia” was an insurgent, Lansdale was a counterinsurgent par excellence. His practices could be emulated by contemporary advisers in countries ranging from Mali to Mexico.
Lansdale’s greatest gift was for establishing a rapport with foreigners even if he did not speak their language. His close connection with President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines and President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam was crucial to all that he accomplished in those countries—and stands in stark contrast to the inability of subsequent American representatives to establish ties of trust with leaders not only in the Philippines and South Vietnam but also, in the modern age, in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the great failures of post-9/11 American foreign policy was the inability to deal adequately with Hamid Karzai and Nouri al-Maliki, who were installed as president of Afghanistan and prime minister of Iraq, respectively, by the United States and its partners and then grew so estranged from the United States that many in Washington came to see them as the chief obstacles to American success. The frustrating U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, with its uncanny and disturbing echoes of America’s relations with Diem–era South Vietnam, might have taken a different course if U.S. ambassadors and commanders had studied Lansdale and his techniques for winning the trust, and shaping the policies, of foreign leaders.
In the final analysis, however, Lansdale’s story was more sanguinary than sanguine and some of his most valuable lessons are ultimately cautionary. His experience shows how difficult it can be to apply counterinsurgency theory in practice and how hard it is to move a giant bureaucracy such as the U.S. government, which too often is driven by internal imperatives to follow self-destructive policies. In fact, Lansdale was truly “the American T. E. Lawrence.” Like his eccentric and rebellious predecessor, whose dreams of Arab nationhood were suborned by British and French imperialists, Lansdale ended his days with a haunting sense of failure.
LANSDALE’S IMPROBABLE saga—the story of how this laid-back advertising man from California became a guerrilla-warfare guru, covert-action specialist, and one of the most unconventional generals in the nation’s history—has been told before but only in broad brushstrokes and never with the kind of accuracy, detail, in-depth knowledge, and context so pivotal and intriguing a figure demands. He has been the subject of a biography by the army chaplain and college professor Cecil Currey and of an academic monograph by the historian Jonathan Nashel, in addition to numerous descriptions in larger volumes devoted to the Vietnam War, the Philippines, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the Kennedy assassination, and other topics—including this author’s own Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. Lansdale, moreover, published an engaging, if evasive, memoir of his experiences in the Philippines and Vietnam between 1950 and 1956, and his close associate Rufus Phillips published a more complete account of their work together in Vietnam. Yet no book or article has ever given Lansdale adequate credit for his pioneering role in the history of counterinsurgency, for his prescient advice to policymakers during the Vietnam War, or for the applicability of his teachings in a new era of advisory work for the U.S. and allied militaries. Lansdale’s legacy stands as a rebuke both to anti-interventionists who assume that fragile states should stand or fall on their own and to arch-hawks who believe that massive commitments of American military forces are necessary to win any war.
The Road Not Taken is based on a thorough review of the relevant documents, many of them unavailable to any previous writer. The most important of these new sources are letters written by Lansdale to his first wife, Helen (provided to the author by their son Pete Lansdale), and to his longtime mistress and second wife, Pat (provided by her granddaughter Patricia Pelaez-Yi), which cast a fresh and unexpected light on some of his most consequential decisions, such as his return to the Philippines for a second, history-altering tour in 1950. I am the first person after Lansdale himself who has ever read both sets of letters, to Helen and to Pat, many of them written contemporaneously. Together, they provide the most intimate and complete account that will ever be available of Lansdale’s thinking—and they reveal the hitherto unrevealed importance of his love affair with Pat to the narrative of his life. I was also given access for the first time to family correspondence between Lansdale and his brothers (thanks to his niece Ginger Brodie), which provides fresh information about their upbringing, including their father’s shocking (and hitherto unknown) abandonment of their mother, which occurred when Lansdale was but a young man.
These personal missives, which show the inner man, are an invaluable supplement to Lansdale’s official papers and the papers of those he worked with, many of them newly declassified. Once-secret documents obtained by the author provide more information than ever before available about Lansdale’s role in such crucial events as the 1953 Philippine election, which made his close friend Ramon Magsaysay president, the creation of the state of South Vietnam in 1954–56, and Operation Mongoose in 1961–62 to oust Fidel Castro. Among the most important of these documents is the full report of his Saigon Military Mission from 1954 to 1955, roughly a fourth of which was excerpted by the New York Times in 1971 along with the Pentagon Papers but the full text of which, amounting to fifty-six pages, was not declassified until 2014. The full text of the Pentagon Papers itself, some seven thousand pages in all, was not released until 2011.
To ferret out the full written record—or as much of it as possible—the author has reviewed documents from more than thirty archives in four countries across three continents. Many archival requests uncovered unexpected treasures. In late March 2015, for example, I found myself sitting in the spacious, sunlit reading room of the U.S. National Archives in Maryland, poring over Lansdale’s voluminous office files from the Department of Defense in 1960–61. I was holding the actual documents left in their original manila folders by Lansdale’s own secretary. Those files had been declassified and made available to researchers for the first time just the previous day.
To supplement the written record, the author has walked in Lansdale’s footsteps. In both Vietnam and the Philippines, I have visited many of the places where he made his reputation, from the still-bustling streets of Manila and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to important locations in the provinces, such as the “Holy See” of the Cao Dai religion in Tay Ninh Province, which looks much as it did when Lansdale first moved to Vietnam in 1954. I have seen for myself the countryside of both countries, where rice farmers continue to eke out a living as their ancestors had done in Lansdale’s day—and since time immemorial. Mount Arayat in Luzon and Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam are by and large quiet today, eerily so, but in Lansdale’s time they were abattoirs where Communist and anti-Communist troops fought to the death. Visiting such remote locales gave me a sense of the challenges of topography and weather that confronted combatants on both sides, along with a sense of atmosphere that informs the following account.
My work in the archives and in the field was supplemented by a careful reading of the latest academic literature and interviews with numerous individuals who knew Lansdale. These included Americans such as the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg; the former ambassador Frank Wisner, son of a legendary CIA figure who mentored Lansdale; the former CIA director John Deutch, whose father also worked with Lansdale; Lansdale’s own sons, Pete and Ted, and their wives, Carolyn and Carol; Pat Kelly’s grandchildren, Patricia Pelaez-Yi, Leah Pelaez-Ramos, Manny Pelaez, and Francisco Kelly; and the retired covert operatives Victor Hugo, Richard Smith, Jerry French, Calvin Mehlert, and Samuel Wilson, all of whom once worked for Lansdale. In addition, I also sought out former aides to Presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu who sat down with me in their exile in California, Maryland, and Virginia, and Filipinos such as Frisco San Juan and Ramon Magsaysay Jr. who sat down with me in Manila. Many of them spoke to a historian for the first time, thanks to the invaluable help provided to me by Rufus Phillips, a former CIA officer who was one of Lansdale’s closest associates and who served as head of rural pacification programs in South Vietnam in the early 1960s. “Rufe” spent countless hours with me, both in person and via email, to set me straight about myriad matters big and small.
What I have found is that some of the tales of Lansdale’s successes, as told by previous authors—successes such as installing Ramon Magsaysay as defense minister of the Philippines in 1950, or luring the chief subordinates of South Vietnam’s army chief of staff out of the country in 1954 before they could carry out a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem—do not bear close scrutiny. Too many chroniclers have taken at face value Lansdale’s own, embellished accounts of his deeds when responsibility should more accurately be spread to include other pivotal actors. But while The Road Not Taken debunks some of Lansdale’s supposed achievements, it also controverts those who claimed that he was naïve or ill-informed, a credulous huckster bent on uncritically imposing American concepts on foreign societies he did not understand. Lansdale was a close student of both the Philippines and Vietnam, the two countries where he primarily operated. Far from being ignorant, he was a shrewd observer and operator who understood more than he often let on—and more than many of his critics did. Indeed, the kind of detailed, on-the-ground knowledge that he acquired should serve as a model for other soldiers, intelligence officers, journalists, aid officials, and diplomats who are dispatched to foreign lands.
The Road Not Taken is not meant to be a brief for or against Lansdale, nor for or against the big causes—counterinsurgency and nation building, intelligence gathering and covert action, the Vietnam War and the Huk Rebellion, the Cold War and the secret war on Fidel Castro—with which he is forever associated. It is intended, rather, to be a sympathetic, but dispassionate, account that will give a new generation of readers a better appreciation for Lansdale’s wisdom, as well as for his shortcomings and blind spots, to better understand his counterinsurgency era and our own.