The Road Not Taken Read online

  Given Lansdale’s own advertising background, it is hardly surprising that he immersed himself in psychological warfare. At his urging, Magsaysay created civil affairs sections in each battalion in direct counterpart to the political commissars that performed similar duties for the Huks. Lansdale was one of the few Americans of this period who had read Mao Zedong’s works. He knew that the Communist leader instructed his guerrillas to “keep the closest possible relations with the common people,” “be courteous and polite,” and “pay for all articles.”17 It was no coincidence that new army civil affairs offices set out, Lansdale explained, “to make the soldiers behave as the brothers and protectors of the people in their everyday military operations, replacing the arrogance of the military at highway checkpoints or in village searches with courteous manners and striving to stop the age-old soldier’s habit of stealing chickens and pigs from the farmers.”18

  Conventionally minded officers were often reluctant to undertake civic action, which they viewed as a political rather than a military mission. “To persuade them to try it,” Lansdale wrote, “I pointed out that one reward of brotherhood was the willingness of people henceforth to talk more openly with the soldiers. If a commander were to practice civic action honestly and thoroughly, I guaranteed that it would increase his unit’s ‘raw take’ of tactical intelligence by 100 percent in a week. It often took less time than that.”19

  Civic action, rather than the “search and destroy” missions that would become so common the following decade in Vietnam, became a hallmark of the campaign against the Huks. Soldiers were issued candy and chewing gum to hand out to kids and told to carry more food than they needed. This way they would not have to requisition rations from the populace and instead could give extra food to farmers who had been forcibly “taxed” by the Huks. Magsaysay, showing an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, also directed army judge advocate generals to represent poor farmers in property disputes against rich landlords. At Lansdale’s urging, he even created what would today be called an inspector general’s office, run by Colonel Jose “Joe” Banzon, a cousin of Magsaysay’s wife and yet another friend of Lansdale’s. Banzon would investigate complaints about the troops or other information provided by average Filipinos utilizing a cheap ten-centavo telegram. Magsaysay often told his troops, “I want every enlisted man of the Philippine army in uniform to serve as a public relations man for the Army and for our government.”20

  Such efforts to woo the population have a long pedigree, stretching back to the “bread and circuses” that the Roman Empire provided to keep its subjects compliant. But an emphasis on the softer side of warfare was a relatively recent development in modern Western military doctrine, which had been relentlessly focused on conventional warfare since the days of Marlborough and Napoleon. Tactics designed to win what another contemporary counterinsurgency commander, General Gerald Templer in Malaya, called “hearts and minds” were still seen as novel in Lansdale’s day, and it was his success in the Philippines, along with Templer’s success in Malaya, that would help convince many regular soldiers of their importance.

  There was, in fact, a remarkable, if largely coincidental, resemblance in the campaigns designed by Lansdale and Templer in different Southeast Asian nations at virtually the same time. Like Lansdale, but unlike the more brutal French forces in Indochina, Templer emphasized the political side of counterinsurgency. “The shooting side of the business is only 25 percent of the trouble,” he famously said, “and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of this country behind us.” To win popular support, Templer promised independence “in due course” once the Communist insurgency was defeated. And, like Lansdale, Templer frowned upon the use of artillery or air strikes—blunt weapons that tended to kill more civilians than insurgents. But Templer also understood, as did Lansdale, that measures to win over the undecided populace had to be accompanied by well-aimed actions to capture or kill hard-core guerrillas. Templer’s most sweeping tactic was to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of Chinese squatters into heavily fortified “New Villages,” where they could be prevented from supplying the guerrillas with food, money, or intelligence.21

  Lansdale and Magsaysay did not go that far, but they did start their own, much smaller-scale resettlement plan. Known as EDCOR (Economic Development Corps), it offered fifteen to twenty acres of free farmland on the distant island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines to guerrillas who defected. Because of budgetary limitations, fewer than 250 Huks were resettled. Yet such was the publicity that Lansdale generated for EDCOR that its psychological impact was much greater. EDCOR’s very existence helped combat the Huks’ appeal of “Land for the Landless.” Soon Huks were appearing in army camps asking to surrender and demanding to know how soon they could get a farm. Meanwhile, Malayans began complaining that the New Villages in which they were being resettled didn’t have electric lights “like EDCOR in the Philippines.” British officials came to the Philippines to investigate; they were startled to discover how small EDCOR actually was.22

  CIVIC-ACTION AND resettlement programs were the salubrious side of the Philippine counterinsurgency campaign. But this was still a war and inevitably there was a more violent, coercive part to the military’s operations. Magsaysay’s slogan, most likely ghostwritten by Lansdale, was “All-Out Force or All-Out Friendship,” and the two parts were equally important.23

  Employing millions of dollars in American military assistance, Magsaysay enlarged the size of the army to fifty-three thousand troops, and transformed it from a ragtag vestige of the colonial era, creating Battalion Combat Teams, twelve hundred strong, to be its main striking force in place of the smaller and less effective Philippine constabulary units, which had been on the front lines before.

  Lansdale also wanted to create airborne assault teams that could be dropped to block the escape of Huk units on the ground, thus anticipating the “air cavalry” tactics employing helicopters that the U.S. Army would use in Vietnam in the 1960s. Helicopters were still a novelty in the early fifties and not available in the Philippines, but Lansdale got the U.S. Army high command to contribute a battalion’s worth of parachutes and instructors skilled in “smoke jumping” into forests in the Pacific Northwest. However, JUSMAG vetoed the idea because its commanders believed that it was too risky—even though, as Lansdale ruefully noted, “I was the only one among them who had gone on foot over the ground where the operation was to take place.”24 JUSMAG was more supportive of Lansdale when he argued “that a somewhat more liberal use of [American-made] napalm should be given to the Philippine armed forces,” but this proposal was blocked by Ambassador Cowen. He feared that the United States would assume moral responsibility “if any innocent Philippine citizens were inadvertently burned by the careless use of napalm.”25 The Philippine army was forced to use less effective, locally made napalm.26 That Lansdale, who would become well-known for his opposition to the excessive use of firepower in Vietnam, favored the use of airborne assault teams and napalm in the Philippines shows that he was capable of being more ruthless than most of his admirers or critics imagined—or than he himself cared to recall in later years.

  Magsaysay and Lansdale had more luck with another innovative concept for offensive action suggested in one of their coffee klatsches by Captain Rafael “Rocky” Ilito, a Filipino graduate of West Point who came up with the idea of creating Scout Ranger units—five-man teams of volunteers that would infiltrate enemy-dominated areas to monitor Huk movements. They could then either ambush a small Huk detachment or call in larger army units to deal with a bigger formation. This concept echoed the British SAS in World War II and anticipated the U.S. Army’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols (“Lurps”) in Vietnam. William Pomeroy, the American Huk, wrote, “There was a time when the forest was wholly ours and we lived in it as within a fortress, issuing forth at will to spread panic among our foes.” But, with the introduction of the Scout Rangers, “the forest is like a breached wall, through which the gove
rnment troops pour at their will.”27

  Later on in Vietnam, U.S. forces would kill far too many civilians, usually out of sheer carelessness and an abundance of caution rather than outright malevolence, and they would inflate “body counts” by claiming that everyone they killed was a Vietcong fighter. To prevent such abuses in the Philippines, Magsaysay and Lansdale imported cheap box cameras from Japan and handed them out to the troops. Patrols were ordered to photograph any enemy casualties. “This did two things,” Lansdale later said. “First of all it kept the casualty figures down to a point of reality that became remarkably accurate. And secondly . . . it taught the troops not to go out and shoot women and children and then claim them as enemy casualties.”28 By minimizing civilian casualties, Lansdale made sure that military operations did not backfire, a strategy that his many successors in Vietnam failed to heed.

  BY NO means focused only on military solutions, Lansdale felt the need to understand the belief system of the Filipino people and discovered that much of the populace, including his friend Magsaysay, was intensely superstitious. (The defense minister became angry when Lansdale scoffed at his belief in “ghosts and ghoulies.”)29 To take advantage of this credulity, a psywar squad from the Philippine army “planted stories among town residents of an asuang [vampire] living on the hill where the Huks were based,” Lansdale wrote.

  Two nights later, after giving the stories time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.30

  Lansdale was proud of this ruthless stratagem, which he recounted to many audiences in future years. It would become, indeed, a core part of his legend—recounted, for instance, in the 2007 National Book Award–winning novel, Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, the son of a U.S. Information Agency officer who spent part of his childhood living in Manila. One of the book’s characters, the former Air Force colonel-turned-CIA officer Francis X. Sands, cites the vampire story as evidence that it’s important to wage war “at the level of myth,” because the enemy is “more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.”31 What such celebratory accounts left out was that this operation constituted, even in the early 1950s, a war crime because the Philippine soldiers deliberately killed rather than captured an enemy fighter and then mutilated his corpse.

  Another “combat psywar operation” that Lansdale instigated was less controversial, importing U.S. Navy bullhorns that had been used by beachmasters in amphibious landings and distributing them to Philippine officers. When a Philippine infantry company was pursuing a Huk squadron, the company commander went up in an aircraft. He grabbed a bullhorn and, based on intelligence reports he had received, began calling out the names of individual Huks, pretending that he recognized them from the air. As the airplane was about to fly away, he made a final broadcast: “Thank you, our friend in the squadron, for all the information.” The suspicious Huks wound up executing three of their own men in the search for a nonexistent traitor. Picking up on the “eye of God” theme, Lansdale had psywar teams sneak into towns whose inhabitants were known to be sympathetic to the Huks. The soldiers would paint a baleful eye on a wall facing the house of each suspected Huk sympathizer. “The mysterious presence of these malevolent eyes the next morning had a sharply sobering effect,” Lansdale wrote.32

  Another, far more lethal example of Lansdale’s deviousness was to provide the Huks with booby-trapped ammunition. Before long, he wrote, “Huk rifle barrels were exploding from the use of faulty ammunition” and hand grenades started “exploding right in the hands of Huk ambushers.” Either type of accident would send red-hot shrapnel flying into the guerrilla’s body, causing serious injury or death. Booby-trapped rifle ammunition would be likely to produce a fatal head wound, while a booby-trapped grenade would, at a minimum, reduce the arm to a bloody stump. If nothing else, these sabotaged weapons taught the Huks not to continue buying ammunition from corrupt suppliers who had been secretly funneling them government stockpiles.33

  COLLECTIVELY ALL of these measures—the field inspections to improve the army’s honesty and effectiveness, the expansion of the army’s size and its reorganization into Battalion Combat Teams, the creation of the Scout Rangers to hunt down rebels in the jungle, the raids to capture the Huk leadership in Manila, the expansion of civic action, the resettlement of surrendered rebels, the use of psywar tactics such as the “eye of God” and the “vampire” killing, the booby-trapped weapons—took a serious and growing toll on the Huks. By the middle of 1951—while, in Korea, weary American troops, now commanded by General Matthew Ridgway rather than the cashiered Douglas MacArthur, were repelling the latest Chinese and North Korean offensive—the Philippine insurgents were on the defensive for the first time since the beginning of their struggle in 1946. “It is no longer victory that preoccupies us,” wrote William Pomeroy. “It is survival.”34

  U.S. Ambassador Myron Cowen, a lawyer turned diplomat, knew where to give the credit. “Through a combination of guile, good luck, and brute force, Magsaysay and Lansdale inflicted severe defeats on the Huks,” he wrote to Secretary of State Acheson on September 19, 1951.

  [Lieutenant] Colonel Lansdale has been the right hand of the Secretary of National Defense Magsaysay and he has in a large measure been responsible for Magsaysay’s success in breaking the backbone of the Huk military forces and in dispersing the Philippine Communist organizational setup. It is inconceivable to me that the Philippine situation would be as favorable as it is without Colonel Lansdale’s superb performance. He has lived day and night with Magsaysay at very real risk to himself. He has guided and advised him. He has provided a driving power and when necessary a restraining one and furthermore he has been a better source of intelligence than all the rest of our intelligence efforts put together.35

  This was high praise from the American diplomatic establishment. But to convert the tactical successes that Lansdale and Magsaysay had achieved into a lasting strategic victory would require more than mere military action. It would require political action centered on two upcoming elections—the 1951 legislative and regional election and the 1953 presidential election. If these votes were as corrupt as previous ballots had been, the government could not win the confidence of the people. If, on the other hand, the elections could be conducted honestly, the Huks would lose a valuable rallying cry.

  Magsaysay, however, was only in charge of the army. How could he and his American adviser stop the president, Elpidio Quirino, and his corrupt Liberal Party machine from stealing more elections? And if they could not prevent more election fraud, how could they possibly defeat the Huks? Two men were now matched against an entire political system.

  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 polit
icians, 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.