The Road Not Taken Read online

  IN LIEU of a divorce, Helen and Ed agreed on a trial separation. She stayed at their house in Larkspur, a bedroom community in Marin County across the bay from San Francisco, where the family had moved in 1943. And she kept their two sons, now ten and eight years old, with her. They were joined for long stretches by Ed’s mother, Sarah, long since abandoned by her own husband.

  Ed moved by himself in February 1949 to his next assignment, teaching strategic studies at the newly created Air Force Intelligence School at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. During the war, when it had served as a training ground for bombardiers, Lowry had swelled to a population of more than twenty thousand people. More recently it had become a demobilization center, a last stop for airmen returning to civilian life. It was Lansdale’s bad luck that he went from the tropical Philippines to the frigid Rocky Mountains during a particularly severe winter. In December 1948–January 1949, there were eighteen snowstorms in twenty-seven days and temperatures fell to a dangerous forty below zero. In some states, snowdrifts were more than thirty feet high. On the way from San Francisco to Denver in February 1949 aboard a gleaming new train, Lansdale noted, “Snow and more snow and freezing cattle now in huddles in the snow.”

  “I’m just about the loneliest guy in the world the way I miss you tonight and keep on missing you,” Ed wrote to Pat not long after arriving at Lowry.18 “I’ve been feeling mighty low and blue ever since arriving here. The bluest I get is at 5:30 a.m. when I have to crawl out of a warm bed into a cold room, then go out into the night . . . and get breakfast at the Officers’ Club a half mile away.”19

  In his new job, Lansdale was expected to talk about the Soviet economy, U.S. national debt, and other subjects about which he knew little. He would regularly go to the Denver Public Library for long hours of research. An added inconvenience for someone who loved to “loaf” in the morning was that he had to report for duty at 5:45 a.m. and begin lecturing at 6 a.m.—“just about the time you’re rolling over for some more sleep,” he wrote Pat, “or coming home from the Luneta you rascal.”20 (The Luneta is a large park near the Manila waterfront.) “Bleary-eyed and sleepy,”21 he complained of his new job in his usual humorous way: “The school blithely loads me up with more lectures, talks, graduation speeches, briefings, seminars, forums, and other stuff than one guy can handle. . . . All I can do is shout an enraged ‘what!’ when told what the subject will be—and then be a good soldier and study like hell.”22

  While Lansdale did follow orders, he let his superiors know that he was unhappy with his oppressive workload.23 Little wonder, then, that by the time Lansdale read a borrowed copy of Elliott Arnold’s Everybody Slept Here, a lurid melodrama about intersecting lives and loves in wartime Washington, fellow officers at Lowry had already added marginal comments saying “This is Ed” and “Ed, note” alongside “descriptions of one of the characters who just doesn’t fit into the Army—his reports were too honest and he fought with all the brass for what he believed in.”24 Lansdale was developing a reputation as a military malcontent.

  Stuck in the freezing weather, doing a job he didn’t particularly like, separated from his family, all that Lansdale could think of was how to get back to the Philippines. “These months away from you seem like an unpleasant dream,” he wrote his inamorata, “and my life has lost so much of its flavor that I’ve crawled into myself with you.”25 He got particularly nostalgic when the mess hall at Lowry would play Latin tunes such as sambas or guarachas that were also popular in the Philippines. When he heard that familiar music, he told Pat, “I can hardly eat or taste my food, you seem so close so suddenly.”26 Lansdale remained so smitten that he turned down an advance from a “gal” who wasn’t “knockneed, pidgeontowed, bowlegged, pianolegged, peglegged or deformed with elephantiasis”—who was, in fact, in the language of the time, “quite a little provocative baggage.” That he told Pat of this opportunity spurned was evidence of his fidelity—and of his desire to pique her jealousy.27

  From the start, Lansdale was scheming to escape the dreary Air Force assignment, but it wasn’t easy. “If I do a good job,” he noted, “it means that I’ll have to stay here for a long time and no Philippines. If I do a lousy job, I get stuck running a laundry or in the Arctic Circle.”28 “I’ve written the career branch in Washington giving them 100 reasons why I should be returned to the Philippines pronto,” he told Pat, “except I didn’t tell them the main reason: P. Mathilda Y.K.yA., whom I love, adore and cherish, and who seems to be running around having the time of her life as soon as my back is turned and who needs me there to feed sandwiches to and to put her head right down in my lap for old-fashioned bug hunting (hey, I never found one, did I?).”29

  WHILE LANSDALE was pining to return to his “precious minx”30 in Manila, the Cold War was escalating with a virulent intensity that threatened the stability of the entire world. Winston Churchill had famously warned, as far back as 1946, that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” The U.S. response to the Soviet Union’s seizure of Eastern Europe and to its support for Communist movements in other parts of the world came to be known as the containment doctrine. It grew out of the so-called Long Telegram sent from Moscow in 1946 by the diplomat George Kennan, who elaborated on his thesis in an article he published in the journal Foreign Affairs the following year under the byline “Mr. X.” He argued that the United States had to enter into a “policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”31 This became the intellectual underpinning of the Truman Doctrine—the president’s announcement, on March 12, 1947, that he was asking for $400 million in assistance to Greece and Turkey to help fight Communist subversion. The following year, Secretary of State George C. Marshall unveiled a $12 billion initiative to rebuild Europe—an act of both selfless generosity and cold strategic calculation that came to be known as the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union tried to test the West by blockading West Berlin in 1948, but Truman rose to the challenge by dispatching the U.S. Air Force to deliver supplies to the beleaguered city for nearly a year. In April 1949, the United States and Canada joined with ten nations in Western Europe to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to resist Soviet aggression.

  Yet despite these Western countermeasures, the threat from the Soviet bloc only seemed to be growing. On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb, breaking the American nuclear monopoly. Just eight days later, Mao Zedong announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China. America, it seemed, had entered a new age of insecurity. Two of the most powerful nations in the world were aligned against it and one of those nations possessed the ultimate weapon. Many feared that Armageddon was imminent. The well-informed British diplomat Harold Nicolson reflected the anxiety of the times when on November 29, 1948, he wrote in his diary that “Russia is preparing for the final battle for world mastery and that once she has enough bombs she will destroy Western Europe, occupy Asia, and have a final death struggle with the Americas.” He judged the odds of peace being maintained at “not one in ninety.”32

  In trying to figure out how the United States could have lost ground to the Communists, many Americans blamed a fifth column of traitors such as Alger Hiss, a paladin of the Eastern Establishment who was convicted on January 21, 1950, of perjury for denying that he had spied for Moscow. On February 9, Joseph McCarthy, the scowling junior senator from Wisconsin, appeared before the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, to charge that the U.S. government was permeated by “traitors from within.” McCarthy even claimed to have a list of 205 State Department employees “that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party,” thereby setting off the frenzy that became known as McCarthyism.33 The seemingly precise figure actually derived from a four-year-old internal investigation of security risks at State that included alcoholics, homosexuals, an
d others, not just Communists. In a subsequent letter to President Truman, McCarthy reduced the number of State Department “Reds” to 57. The number would continue to fluctuate, like the weather, seemingly at random.34

  McCarthy was an Irish Catholic small-town judge and a dipsomaniac with a vengeful streak and an exaggerated war record as a Marine tail gunner (he had not actually flown in combat). “Ignorant, crude, boastful, unaware of either intellectual or social refinements,”35 in the words of a reporter who socialized with him, he was also an opportunist of genius with an unerring feel for how to stir up fear and to exploit the anti-Communist mood of the day. He would ask witnesses appearing before his subcommittee such loaded questions as “What have you got against this country?”36 With McCarthy, always prone to hyperbole and innuendo, denouncing “a conspiracy so immense . . . as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man,”37 hysteria was in the air. As David Oshinsky, author of the foremost history of McCarthyism, notes, “Indiana forced professional wrestlers to sign a loyalty oath,” “Ohio declared Communists ineligible for unemployment benefits,” and “Tennessee ordered the death penalty for those seeking to overthrow the state government.”38

  Few were as immune to this paranoia as Lansdale seemed to be—or as levelheaded in trying to achieve a balanced outlook that avoided the extremes of both the most paranoid anti-Communists, who saw a Red under every bed, and the most idealistic liberals, who sometimes made it sound as if the whole Communist threat was a figment of McCarthy’s unhinged imagination. When news broke of Stalin testing an atomic bomb, Lansdale wrote to Pat, “The Russian atomic explosion had the US newspapers in a tizzy. . . . Some of the officers here asked me what ‘significance’ it had—so I told them it was a Russian plot to get our pay raised. Sure enough, our Pay Bill passed through the Senate tonight. Now I get $4 more a month.”39 Yet at the same time that he refused to panic about Communist advances, Lansdale had no illusions about the totalitarian depravity of Communist rule. In early 1949, he wrote, “It’s going to be a bloody future for a lot of Chinese. There’s been a lot of thinking, among folks I’ve talked to here, that the Chinese Communists are simple agrarian socialists (shades of the Huks!), and that it will be simple to continue doing business with China in the same old way. I think they will continue doing business with the U.S., etc.—but will be building up a real communist nation all the time—and it’s going to be a real sorry headache for us some day.”40

  Like many others at a time when any government employee deemed a security risk was liable to be fired or even prosecuted, Lansdale worried that he, too, might get into trouble with the Red hunters. In April 1949, for example, while stationed at Lowry, he was nervous when a guest seminar he gave at the University of Colorado was mentioned in the Denver Post. “These days, they take officers out and shoot them for mentioning foreign countries in public—and I mentioned practically the entire Far East,” Ed wrote to Pat. “The reporter was friendly enough to mention my ‘hedge’ words, so maybe my statements were careful enough not to get me shot at sunrise. However, if you hear any shooting in the general direction of Denver, that’s me, smiling and gallantly refusing a blindfold because they aren’t your panties and smoking a last cigarette while leaning against the wall in front of the firing squad.”41

  However exaggerated and undocumented, McCarthy’s charges continued to find a ready reception in a nation staggered by a continuing series of Communist blows—of which the most costly was the invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces in the predawn darkness of June 25, 1950. By September 1950, after having suffered heavy casualties, the U.S. forces had been pushed back to a shrinking perimeter around the port city of Pusan, on the southwest corner of the peninsula. General Douglas MacArthur’s audacious landing at Inchon, behind enemy lines, on September 14, 1950, abruptly reversed the course of the conflict and sent North Korean troops reeling back across the thirty-eighth parallel. But the brief prospect of victory disappeared as rapidly as the leaves of autumn when on November 26 some three hundred thousand Chinese troops launched human-wave attacks on MacArthur’s overconfident and overstretched forces. For the second time in less than a year, American and South Korean troops had to retreat in confusion. Eventually the lines stabilized again along the thirty-eighth parallel, the prewar boundary between North and South Korea. A long, costly, dispiriting stalemate was in the offing.

  CONFRONTING WHAT appeared to be an increasingly successful Communist offensive around the world, the Truman administration expanded its commitment to containment. The linchpin of its response was NSC-68, a top-secret paper completed in April 1950 by the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff under Paul Nitze, a wealthy and brilliant former Wall Street banker with a dark view of Soviet intentions. Along with his boss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, he called for a massive buildup of American military power. Defense spending would nearly triple between 1950 and 1953.42

  There was also a covert part of the American buildup, which had begun with the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. This was the successor to the OSS, which had been disbanded, over Bill Donovan’s vociferous objections, at the end of World War II because President Truman did not want to establish an “American Gestapo.”43 But the CIA in its early years was primarily concerned with espionage and analysis, whereas influential figures such as George Kennan, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1947–48, believed it was necessary to do more to covertly resist the Soviet Union and its proxies. National Security Council Directive 10/2, issued on June 18, 1948, created a new Office of Special Projects—shortly to be renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an even more anodyne euphemism—to wage war in the shadows.

  The head of the OPC was Frank G. Wisner, a wealthy Mississippian who had just turned forty. He had a gap-toothed smile, a compact frame, boundless energy, and a bald head bursting with ideas. Known to his friends as Wis, he had been brought up with an aristocratic ethos: “We were told that to whom much is given, much is expected,” one of his nieces recalled. He was a fierce competitor who tried to win at everything from football to mah-jongg. He had even been invited as a sprinter and hurdler to the 1936 Olympic trials; he was not able to go, because his father thought it would be more character-forming to work in a Coca-Cola bottling plant that summer. After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, Wisner went to work on Wall Street at a major law firm before joining the Navy and, in 1943, the OSS. He was galvanized by his experiences as an OSS operative in Romania from August 1944 to January 1945 when he watched the Red Army impose its brutal control, which included shipping trainloads of ethnic Germans to Russia to work in slave-labor camps. Wisner was later diagnosed as a manic-depressive; he would commit suicide in 1965. But in the late 1940s no traces of his mental illness were visible to associates. “Highly intelligent, experienced, energetic, and impeccably well-connected, he was uniquely well qualified for the job,” the future CIA director Richard Helms was to write.

  The OPC’s remit was as wide as the Cold War itself. NSC 10/2 had given it authority over “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” To finance its operation, the OPC had a pipeline straight into the Marshall Plan. Countries that participated in the Marshall Plan had to match the American contribution in their own currency. Five percent of those funds was secretly set aside for the OPC’s use, amounting to $200 million a year ($1.9 billion in today’s dollars).

  This secret fund, nicknamed “candy,” was symptomatic of the lack of controls over the OPC. This ultra-secret agency was supposed to “take its policy direction and guidance from State and the National Military Establishment,” and once a week Wisner duly met with officials of both. But the State Department an
d Pentagon representatives were hawks who had no interest in reining in the OPC’s covert plots against the Soviet bloc. In practice, therefore, Wisner had a large degree of discretion to create his own marching orders. That did not change substantially even when the OPC was merged into the new CIA Directorate of Plans in August 1952, with Wisner taking over as the CIA’s deputy director for plans—another euphemism, since the new organization was concerned not with planning but with acting. Policymakers in those days tended to give the CIA ample running room in order to preserve “plausible deniability” of its actions, and Congress was not interested in providing serious oversight for similar reasons.

  Wisner was well positioned to take advantage of all this freedom because of his social connections with a group of senior government officials, such as Allen Dulles, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and George Kennan, and journalists such as the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop and the Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, all of whom lived near one another in Georgetown. This Georgetown circle has been described as “one of the most extraordinary clubs the world has known, a natural aristocracy,” and Wisner was a charter member. He could craft new missions for his outfit in late-night conversations over steaks and martinis with his privileged peers.

  Similar to Lansdale in his contempt for bureaucracy and his willingness to take risks, in love with adventure for its own sake, and fired by anti-Communist zeal, Wisner was firmly in the mold of Will Bill Donovan. He dismissed the CIA’s intelligence analysts as a “bunch of old washerwomen, exchanging gossip while they rinse through the dirty linen.” He did not want to chronicle history; he wanted to change it. He created at the OPC and later at the Directorate of Plans, the future CIA director William Colby was to write, “the atmosphere of an order of the Knights Templar, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness—and from war.”