The Road Not Taken Read online

  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.

  PART ONE

  AD MAN

  (1908–1945)

  Lansdale (head down) and colleagues at the Theodore Segall Advertising Agency in San Francisco, c. 1940. (RSPP)

  1

  In Terrific Flux

  At all times and under all circumstances overcome evil with good.

  —HARRY LANSDALE, QUOTING MARY BAKER EDDY

  AT the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had just begun to assume a leading role on the world stage and, in particular, in Asia, where Edward Lansdale would spend most of his storied, if not unblemished, career. America’s growing military might was heralded by the Great White Fleet—sixteen new battleships, their hulls painted a glistening white—which departed on March 16, 1907, on a circumnavigation of the world. The battlewagons’ progress out of their anchorage at Hampton Roads, Virginia, noted a reporter, was marked by “the glistening of spotless hulls, the curl of foam-crested bow waves, the cheering of sailors afloat and friends ashore, [and] the breeze-blown strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ floating across the waters.” The spectacle was a thrilling one for a former assistant secretary of the navy attired in “top hat, frock coat, striped trousers” as he paced across the deck of the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Theodore Roosevelt was positively bursting with pride. “Did you ever see such a fleet? Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all feel proud?” he exclaimed to the gathered dignitaries, adding for good measure that the enlisted men were “perfectly bully.”1

  The battleships and their “bully” sailors were still making their way up the Pacific coast of South America when on February 6, 1908, in far-off, landlocked Detroit, Edward G. Lansdale emerged into the world, a child of the nascent American Century. “Teddy” Lansdale obviously was too small to be aware at the time of the naval voyage ordered by another Teddy; the Great White Fleet would return to Hampton Roads on February 22, 1909, when he was just a year old. But like other American boys of his generation, he would have imbibed, along with his Cream of Wheat and Grape Nuts, a sense that American power was spreading to every corner of the globe like milk filling up a bowl of cereal.

  The inexorable growth of American military might was hardly the only change that Edward Lansdale observed during the years of his youth. He came into the world just as the Wild West outlaws Robert Leroy Parker (“Butch Cassidy”) and Harry Longabaugh (“the Sundance Kid”) were dying in a shoot-out in rural Bolivia, and just as the first Model T, the automobile of the masses, was rolling off an assembly line in Detroit. Both were small but significant symbols of the transition from the old America to the new—from a land of pioneers seeking their fortune on the lawless frontier to a country of cities and suburbs, factories and offices, managers and employees. As Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel published in 1908, the year of Lansdale’s birth, “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now. The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society.”2

  Edward Lansdale was in many ways a rather typical product of early twentieth-century, middle-class America, a society struggling to cope with this “fearful” transformation that was just beginning. There was nothing elite about him: unlike the “Wise Men,” as the leading shapers of postwar American foreign policy came to be known, Lansdale was not a product of a New England prep school and the Ivy League; he would never work at an investment bank or a white-shoe law firm. His background was much more ordinary—middle-class, decidedly not upper crust. His childhood years were spent mainly in Detroit and Los Angeles, far from the corridors of what would become known as the Eastern Establishment. Like many other men of his generation, he grew up proud of his country, reluctant to speak about himself, more interested in work than in family, a chain smoker and a regular drinker, a firm believer in the value of self-reliance and assiduous toil. And yet there were aspects of his character—including his outspoken aversion to authority, his extreme informality, his embrace of “the Orient,” his rejection of the racism so prevalent in American society—that set him apart from his peers. There is seldom a straight line between childhood influences and adult behaviors, but there are clues in Lansdale’s upbringing to explain the man he became—and the impact he exercised on America’s deepening involvement in Asia.

  ON HIS father’s side, Edward Lansdale could trace his family’s roots in America back to late seventeenth-century Maryland, specifically to Montgomery County, close to what would become the District of Columbia. The family surmised that their ancestors had come originally from north Lancashire, England, where “Lansdale” and such variations as “Lonsdale,” meaning “of Lunesdale” or the vale of the Lune River, are common place-names and family names. Edward was one of four children, all boys, born to the peripatetic automotive executive Henry Lansdale and his homemaker wife, Sarah, whose own family had arrived from England far more recently and had settled in the West. The oldest of the siblings was Henry Philips (later simply Phil), who was born in 1906, eighteen months before “Teddy” (Ed’s childhood nickname).3 The younger boys were Benjamin Carroll, born in 1909, thirteen months after Ed, and David Brooke, the baby of the family, born in 1916, eight years after Ed.

  A major influence on their development was their maternal grandfather, Edward Philips, a legendary, Horatio Alger–type figure in the family. Born in England in 1850, he left home around age nine following the death of his father, a physician. His impoverished mother could not support her brood, forcing Edward, like Oliver Twist, to scrape a living on the streets of London’s East End. As a teenager, he enlisted
in the British army, but he did not like the onerous and brutal service, and so he deserted and made his way to the “land of opportunity.” He started off in Cleveland, where census records show him in residence by 1870 as an ironworker.

  It was probably in Cleveland that he met and married Sarah Adelaide Walker, who would become Ed Lansdale’s grandmother. By 1879, Ed and Sarah Philips, like an increasing number of newcomers, had made their way to California. After unsuccessful stints panning for gold in the Yukon and ranching in northern California, Edward Philips settled in San Francisco, where he made a fortune helping to rebuild the city after the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Once a penniless orphan, Edward Philips died in 1930 a wealthy man.4

  Grandfather Philips was a pugnacious, charming, and sometimes infuriating character who had no patience for the hypocritical conventions of polite society. Phil Lansdale recalled that he was an “extreme extrovert” who “tackled life with explosive energy.” He was also “semi-literate,” and liked to appall his daughter, Phil’s mother, by telling her “not just vulgar jokes but filthy jokes.”5

  Edward Lansdale inherited a “spirit of independence and wild humor” from his grandfather.6 He did not, however, follow his grandfather into the business world as his siblings did. His older brother, Phil, started his own advertising agency in Orange County, California, and later the nationwide chain 4-Day Tire Stores, becoming a multimillionaire. His younger brother Ben was a brilliant engineer who wound up owning a more modest automotive wholesale business in Sunnyvale, California, while the still younger David Lansdale spent his entire career as a midlevel manager with Scott Paper Company, manufacturers of toilet paper and tissues.