The Road Not Taken Read online

  Before long, thanks to Wisner’s “intense drive,” his organization would become bigger than the rest of the CIA combined. In 1949, the OPC had just 302 personnel and a budget of $4.7 million. Three years later, it had nearly 6,000 full-time and contract employees and a budget of $82 million.44

  AS THE OPC was expanding its operations, Edward Lansdale was still struggling to find a way to get back to the Philippines. At the end of October 1949, after graduating from a monthlong Air Force instructor’s course in Alabama as the third-best student out of ninety-eight,45 he took a short leave of absence to go to Washington. “Hq. there balked at my scheme to get back to the Philippines,” Ed explained to Pat Kelly, “and I have to see what I can do to unbalk them.” 46 The task of unbalking was made considerably easier when Lansdale ran into an old friend, Colonel George Chester, an army intelligence officer for whom Lansdale had worked back in Manila. Chester had been highly impressed by Lansdale—he described him, in purple prose, as having “the highest potential value of any AF [Air Force] Officer I have known, with a steel trap mind and a driving purpose in a relaxed body. . . . I would rather have Col. Lansdale with me than any other Officer I know.” 47 When Lansdale explained his dilemma, Chester, who unbeknownst to Lansdale had just joined the OPC, told him “yes, something was coming on, he would stick [Lansdale’s] name in the hopper and see if there would be some way of getting out of” a return to duty as an instructor at Lowry Air Force Base.

  A couple of weeks later, by which time Lansdale was back in Denver, an Air Force colonel from the OPC personnel office came to see him and started talking to him about “a group forming in Washington for Cold War duty.” Lansdale’s “ears pricked up.” It sounded exactly like what he was looking for. He volunteered immediately. While in later years it could take a recruit years to be vetted, hired, and trained by a more bureaucratized CIA, in those days the hiring process was expedited by the urgency of the moment and the lack of bureaucratic layers. Only a few weeks later, in November 1949, Lansdale relocated to Washington to report for duty at OPC.

  JUST AS they did not accompany him to Denver, Helen Lansdale and the boys did not make the trek cross-country. On his own in the capital, Lansdale took up residence in the bachelor officers’ quarters at Fort Myer, Virginia. From his bedroom window, he could peer across the river to see “all the tombs for the dead and living that distinguish the city of Washington.” His neighbors on this military compound included a number of the nation’s most-senior generals. One day, he said hello to a man walking by, “wondering where I knew him from. After he’d waved good morning with a big smile it came to me.” 48 The passer-by was none other than General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Washington was still an overgrown, not to mention segregated, village in those days, one that had four daily newspapers but no truly good restaurants—and no Beltway.49 Lansdale would walk forty-five minutes across Arlington Memorial Bridge into Washington each morning to the OPC’s offices in seedy, rat-infested temporary wooden buildings erected along the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial. The occupants of the “Tempos” shivered in the winter and sweltered in the summer. Employees who brought their lunches to work had to suspend the food from strings on the ceiling to guard against rodents and ants. The future CIA director Allen Dulles called the Tempos “a damned pig sty,” but they would be the agency’s home until the opening in 1961 of Dulles’s dream palace—a new “campus” complex in suburban Langley, Virginia.50

  Although assigned to a civilian intelligence agency, Lansdale did not stop serving in the Air Force. He had just been promoted to lieutenant colonel and soon would become a full-bird colonel. He would spend the next six years working for two masters, civilian and military, covert and overt, while trying to serve one interest—that of the United States.51

  Lansdale’s efforts to fit in were further complicated by his lack of an Establishment pedigree in an organization that was as full of Ivy League, upper-crust spies as the OSS had been. Admittedly, one of the defining features of the American establishment was its openness to talent. Even John J. McCloy, president of the World Bank, high commissioner in Germany, and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations—a man who would come to be seen as the very symbol of the foreign-policy elite—hailed from a relatively modest background, having been raised by his widowed mother, a hairdresser in Philadelphia. For most of these men (and it was a male-only club in those days), an elite education, rather than elite birth, served as an entrée to the world of influence. McCloy, for example, had gone to Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Lansdale would be unusual not because he came from a middle-class background but because he had managed to rise without having spent any time in the Ivy League or on Wall Street.

  SWORN TO secrecy, Lansdale could not tell either his faraway wife or his overseas mistress about his new assignment except in the most general terms; it was a vow he would keep for more than three decades, until, nearing the end of his life in the 1980s, he finally confessed to a biographer that he had worked for the CIA—a fact that by then was common knowledge. The OPC, however, was more secret than the CIA; its very existence was not declassified until decades after the fact. In speaking to friends and family, Lansdale offered not a hint of what he was up to. “My job is merely the usual headquarters stuff of wrestling papers around and sitting behind a desk to make the room look full,” Ed wrote to Pat Kelly. “I’d like to tell you that I have a key spot in the nation—such as advising Mrs. Barkley [wife of Vice President Alben W. Barkley] on how to handle her old man for best results—but I’m out of practice in such matters—so I have no such importance.”52 (The seventy-one-year-old vice president, nicknamed “Veep” by his young grandson, had captivated the nation in 1949 when, following the death of his first wife, he married a thirty-seven-year-old widow.)

  Although the matters Lansdale was working on were more important than he let on, there is no doubt that he was sincere in his frustration with Washington bureaucracy. He complained to Pat about “the long hours and the crazy gobbledygook official language I have to deal in.” “Once in a while,” he wrote, “I get mad and let loose in straight, plain, blunt English and scare the pants off all the nice little gentlemen. I only hope the Russians get just as balled up in official dealings as we do.”53

  While Lansdale told Pat that he hoped his relocation to Washington would be “a big step to the Philippines,”54 initially he worked on Soviet affairs for the OPC, which had been impressed that he had delivered lectures on the Soviet economy at Lowry Air Force Base. This was indicative of the scattershot nature of the new intelligence agency, since Lansdale did not speak Russian and had no real expertise in the Soviet Union. He was, in any case, eager to focus on the Philippines, and his superiors were willing to approve his transfer to the OPC’s Far East Division in 1950 because they were increasingly worried about the drift of events in the archipelago. Thanks to the exigencies of the Cold War, he was drawing one step closer to returning to Manila—and his beloved Patching.

  7

  “A Most Difficult and Delicate Problem”

  Extreme care must . . . be exercised in the methods used to persuade the Philippine Government to take necessary action.

  —NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL

  THROUGHOUT history, rulers have tried to crush rebellions with fire and sword. Sometimes it has worked. But just as often it has backfired by engendering more support for the rebels. Examples of this phenomenon abound, from the days of the Jewish Revolt against Rome in AD 66 to the early days of America’s war in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. Indeed, many guerrilla groups have staged raids in the express hope of provoking an overreaction. During World War II, for example, Josip Broz Tito would attack German forces in Yugoslavia in no small measure because he knew they would destroy nearby villages in retaliation—and thereby force the villagers to take to the hills to join his partisans.

  The Philippine army cannot be compared in brutality to the Nazis, but a similar phenome
non could be discerned during its ham-handed assaults against the Hukbalahap movement, typified by the offensive on Mount Arayat that Edward Lansdale had witnessed in 1947. President Manuel Roxas had sent the Philippine constabulary to crush the uprising with a “mailed fist.”1 But just as in Vietnam later, the guerrillas, with their excellent intelligence system and informers within the government ranks, usually knew of the army’s attacks well beforehand—and the lumbering pace of the army’s advance, announced by thunderous artillery barrages, gave them ample time to escape. The soldiers would vent their fury on the peasants left behind, stealing their rice and livestock, looting their homes, abusing their women. The consequences were predictable. As the Huk leader Luis Taruc wrote,

  Every time a peasant was arrested and tortured as one of our suspected supporters, able-bodied men from his barrio fled to the hills. They would rather join the Huks than suffer the same fate. For every barrio woman raped by undisciplined and demoralized soldiers or civilian guards, more peasants, including women, would be driven by hatred and indignation to join the rebels. For every barrio looted and burned to the ground by troops carrying out their superiors’ scorched-earth policy, a new Huk unit was founded. Every prisoner “shot while trying to escape” led more strong young men and girls from the nearby barrios to join the dissidents.2

  After Roxas’s death from a heart attack in 1948, his vice president and successor, the sickly and stout Elpidio Quirino, tried a different approach. He declared a cease-fire and offered amnesty to the Huks if they would disarm. Taruc traveled to Manila to engage in high-level negotiation. But the talks broke down when it was time for the Huks to give up their arms. Instead, they restarted the guerrilla war.

  Quirino gave the Huks a gift of inestimable value by stealing the 1949 presidential election. In the wake of this fraudulent election, the Hukbalahap movement spread across Luzon and into neighboring islands such as the Visayas, as Filipinos increasingly came to conclude that political change could not be achieved peacefully. The Huks’ slogans were “Bullets Not Ballots” and “Land for the Landless.” Both were potent appeals. Huk strength increased to fifteen thousand fighters, backed by a support network of as many as a million people (out of a total population of twenty million).

  On April 28, 1949, a Huk unit a hundred strong ambushed a convoy carrying Aurora Quezon, widow of the late president, less than ninety miles from Manila. She was killed along with her daughter and son-in-law and eight others while traveling to dedicate a memorial to her late husband in his hometown of Baler. In Washington, Edward Lansdale was shocked at the news and worried about Pat Kelly’s safety traveling on nearby roads. “The ambush just seemed to point up that jittery feeling I get sometimes when thinking of you traveling around with me—although Lord knows I seemed to get you into more trouble that way than is normal for a human being,” he wrote to her.3

  The insurgency appeared to be an inexorable force that threatened to topple the government in Manila, just as another Communist movement had just toppled the Nationalist government in China. On March 20, 1950, Huks overran seventeen towns and villages in central Luzon.4 Five months later, on August 26, five thousand guerrillas struck twelve towns and villages in the same area. Tarlac City, the hometown of both Luis Tarluc and Pat Kelly, bore the brunt of the latter assault. Twenty-three soldiers and seven civilians were killed at Tarlac’s military base, Camp Makabulos. Among the victims were soldiers lying sick or wounded in hospital beds. The attackers also raped army nurses and freed nearly fifty prisoners from the Tarlac jail while making off with 140,000 rounds of ammunition.5

  When Lansdale read about the Tarlac raid back in Washington, his immediate reaction once again was not of a soldier or spy but of a man removed by more than eight thousand miles from the woman he loved. He wrote her, “Please, Pat, how did the raid affect you? Are you or the family planning on moving to Manila? If so, can I help out somehow, financially or in some other way? When I read the news, I did some quiet praying and you’ve been very much in my thoughts every moment since. You are precious to me, brod, and I don’t want anything to happen without my being close by to help.”6 Pat, it turned out, was safe—but her security, along with that of her neighbors, was precarious. The army had to deploy heavy forces to prevent Manila itself from falling. President Quirino was so fearful of attack that he anchored a gunboat on the Pasig River, bordering the grounds of the colonial-era Malacañang Palace, so that he and his family could make a quick escape in the event the compound was overrun.7

  Although a dedicated anti-Communist, Quirino was also an ineffective one. He was part of the problem, not the solution. A senior State Department official wrote on April 20, 1950, in scathing and undiplomatic, if accurate, language, that he “has demonstrated no capacity whatsoever to understand the problems of his country or the indicated solutions. His overweening vanity and arrogance compel him to ignore advice from those who do understand. His pettiness and vindictiveness prevent even his closest advisers from telling him anything unpleasant, or anything they believe he does not want to hear. His insistence on making all decisions himself has resulted in a virtual paralysis of his Government.”8 Similar issues would plague South Vietnam in the future under a series of leaders who would insist on reserving to themselves all the key decision so that no rivals could emerge. Secretary of State Dean Acheson feared that, as a result of its “shocking deterioration,” the Philippines might be on the verge of a “total collapse.”9

  It was no easy matter to stave off disaster. The State Department memo outlined two basic options: “bring pressure to bear upon President Quirino for internal reform” or “encourage the Filipinos to force a change in the presidency.” A third option was also on the table: send U.S. troops to fight the Huks, just as they had already been sent to Korea and as they would be sent a decade later to Vietnam. The U.S. ambassador in Manila, Myron Cowen, urged Dean Acheson to give serious consideration “to stationing US combat troops (not less than a reinforced division) in the Philippine Islands.”10 The Truman administration, however, was anxious to avoid another major troop deployment, because U.S. forces were already committed in Korea and policymakers were cognizant of “the extreme sensitivity of Philippine officials and the people in general on the question of their national sovereignty.”11 The preferable path was to push the Quirino government in a more constructive direction, but this was, as the NSC recognized, “a most difficult and delicate problem”: “Extreme care must therefore be exercised in the methods used to persuade the Philippine Government to take necessary action.”12

  To put the Philippine economy in order, President Truman on June 27, 1950, dispatched to Manila a blue-ribbon panel of advisers led by the banker Daniel Bell. After an intensive study of local conditions, the Bell mission recommended a series of tax, legal, bureaucratic, and agricultural reforms in return for a U.S. grant of $250 million over five years. Quirino accepted the deal in November 1950 but implemented few of the promised changes.13

  There remained the thorny issue of how to improve the Philippine military’s ability to put down the Huk Rebellion. The Pentagon had already dispatched a Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG) composed of sixty-nine officers and enlisted men to Manila. The problem was that, as Vinton Chapin, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy, noted, “the JUSMAG is composed of officers who . . . are well-equipped to advise with respect to ordinary matters of military organization and operations but who have inadequate knowledge of and experience with political subversion and guerrilla warfare of the type with which the Philippine Government is faced.”

  The United States would encounter similar problems in South Vietnam just a few years later, with conventionally minded American military advisers creating a South Vietnamese army designed for countering a conventional military invasion, not the guerrilla threat that Saigon actually faced. To address this shortcoming in the Philippines, Chapin recommended “that there be assigned to the JUSMAG a substantial number of officers having actual experience in gu
errilla and anti-guerrilla operations, and particularly in operations involving Communist-led forces.”14 He suggested sending personnel who had served in China or Greece. Unknown to him, there was already an officer who had made a close study of the Huk movement at the OPC headquarters in Washington.

  WHILE HE was working in Washington, Edward Lansdale would take every opportunity to meet visiting friends from the Philippines. In February 1950, for example, he was delighted to find that Johnny Orendain, the lawyer who had introduced him to Pat Kelly, was in town. The two men stayed up all night talking and the next night took part in high-spirited revelry at the Fort Myer Officers Club along with some of Lansdale’s other friends, ranging from a Czech concert pianist to a Nevada miner. They “woke up the club”—“a deadly old hole”—“with laughing and singing and a serious Brahms concert in the dining room,” Ed wrote to Pat. This was the kind of gathering that the gregarious Lansdale liked best—“a wondrous mixture of high and low brow and all of us slightly drunk.”15

  The following month, Lansdale heard from another visiting friend, Lieutenant Colonel Mamerto Montemayor of the Philippine army. He was in town along with a congressman from Manila on a mission to win more aid for Philippine war veterans. Lansdale, he suggested, should meet his traveling companion. That night the three men had dinner together. The strapping congressman, a veteran of the guerrilla war against Japan who was now chairman of the National Defense Committee of the Philippine House of Representatives, was a “husky, intense man, his restlessness evident in his foot-jiggling.” He confided to Lansdale how worried he was about the “current morale of Filipino soldiers,” which was “sinking under the combination of physical and psychological attacks, the latter perniciously erosive since the Huks pictured the Philippine government as totally corrupt and told the soldiers they were suckers for risking their lives to defend it.”