The Road Not Taken Read online

  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 n
o 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 La
nsdale 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