Edward Lansdale's Cold War

3. The Power of Secrets

77 3 ThePower ofSecrets We all have a trace of James Bond . . . in us. We would all like to go on secret missions, known as covert operations in CIA language. We would all like to be mysterious, with a shirt marked “S” for Superman hidden beneath our regular clothes. —James Munves, The FBI and the CIA, 1975 (children’s book) “ E d t o l d m e that he was never in the CIA.” This simple statement, said with a bit of a chuckle by Lansdale’s second wife, Pat, is noteworthy for a variety of reasons.1 The disclaimer reflects Lansdale’s cover as a U.S. Air Force officer, which he maintained throughout his public career. Although it is true that he was never an actual employee of the CIA, since he received his paycheck from the air force, the document trail linking him with the CIA is extensive and goes far beyond the odd yet instructive detail that although he eventually rose in rank to become a major general in the air force, he never knew how to fly a plane.2 Given this evidence, it seems strange to find that he preserved the air force cover with his wife and that she insisted upon this polite fiction years after his death. The consideration of other contexts, however, illuminates the parallel worlds Lansdale inhabited. In a self-revealing letter to his biographer, Cecil Currey, writtenin1985— years after he retired from the U.S. government—Lansdale sought to downplay his CIA involvement. It includes long passages of soul-searching about his relationship with the agency, and concludes, “Therefore, it should be 78 Chapter Three said that I served part of my career as a military man as a volunteer on CIA duties. The period when this happened was only in a short span: 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956.”3 His admission has an almost charming quality considering that few people still believed that he was the “innocent” air force officer he masqueraded as during his government career. It is also in contrast to the sense of bravado that Lansdale’s name sometimes invoked when his relationship with the CIA came up among insiders. For instance, his superior officer in Vietnam related their first meeting in typical fashion: “Hells fire,” wrote General Samuel Williams, “when I finally arrived in Vietnam I was greeted by Col. Ed. Lansdale, USAF, who told me he had a team of eleven CIA agents in the country.”4 And within the government Lansdale ’s background was no great secret. “I want to make it clear to this group that Lansdale is not going over there for us. Lansdale was with CIA for a long time, but he’s retired now and this is not one of our operations,” declared William Colby of the CIA at an interdepartmental meeting in 1965 in an effort to reassure his State Department colleagues that Lansdale was not returning to Vietnam with some secret agenda known only to the CIA.5 Clearly, Lansdale occupied these double identities with ease, perhaps even to the point of becoming blind to their contradictions. In one of the odder, if comical, moments in its history, though, the CIA sent investigators in 1981 to the Hoover Institution, to which Lansdale had donated his papers; they combed through them for CIA-related material and took back to Washington a host of documents. In 2000, in response to my Freedom of Information request relating to Lansdale, the CIA sent me the records of its efforts to cleanse Lansdale’s archives of CIA-related material—but the documents themselves continue to be classified.6 Lansdale had sought to cover his association with the CIA for years on end. In countless interviews and in his memoirs he liked to retell the story of how Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had sent him to Vietnam in the first place. Recalling the meeting in Washington, Lansdale wrote, “Dulles turned to me and said that it had been decided that I was to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese much as I had helped the Filipinos.”7 Yet it was Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, who first requested Lansdale to go, not John Foster. As noted in The Pentagon Papers, “Mr. Allen Dulles inquired if an unconventional warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale, could not be added to the group of five liaison officers to which [French...