Эдвард Лансдейл: АҚШ Әскери және барлау қызметіндегі өмірі мен қызметі

United States Air Force and CIA officer

Edward Geary Lansdale (February 6, 1908 – February 23, 1987) was a United States Air Force officer until retiring in 1963 as a major general before continuing his work with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare. In the early 1950s, Lansdale played a significant role in suppressing the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines. In 1954, he moved to Saigon and started the Saigon Military Mission, a covert intelligence operation which was created to sow dissension in North Vietnam. Lansdale believed the United States could win guerrilla wars by studying the enemy's psychology, an approach that won the approval of the presidential administrations of both Kennedy and Johnson.

Lansdale was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 6, 1908, and later raised in Los Angeles. Lansdale's difficulty meeting the foreign language requirement for his degree and lack of obvious career path prompted him to drop out of UCLA several credits short of graduation. He later moved on to better paying work in advertising in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Lansdale served with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, ultimately being promoted to major. He extended his tour to remain in the Philippines until 1948, helping the Philippine Army rebuild its intelligence services and resolve the cases of large numbers of prisoners of war. With most of Lansdale's prior Army intelligence officer experience being with U. S. Army Air Forces units, he transferred to the U. S. Air Force and was commissioned as a captain when it was established as an independent service in 1947. After leaving the Philippines in 1948, he served as an instructor at the Strategic Intelligence School at Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado, where he received a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1949. In 1950, President Elpidio Quirino personally requested that Lansdale be transferred to the Joint United States Military Assistance Group, Philippines, to assist the intelligence services of the Armed Forces of the Philippines in combating the Communist Hukbalahap. Lansdale was an early practitioner of psychological warfare. Adopting a tactic previously used in the Philippines by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, Lansdale spread rumors that Aswangs, blood sucking demons in Philippine folklore, were loose in the jungle. His men then captured an enemy soldier and drained the blood from his body, leaving the corpse where it could be seen and making the Hukbalahap flee the region. Lansdale became friends with Ramon Magsaysay, then the secretary of national defense, and with his help Magsaysay eventually became President of the Philippines on December 30, 1953. Lansdale is said to have run Magsaysay's campaign for the CIA in the 1953 Philippines General Election. Lansdale helped the Philippine Armed Forces develop psychological operations, civic actions, and the rehabilitation of Hukbalahap prisoners.

After the end of the left wing Huk insurgency in the Philippines and after building support for Magsaysay's presidency, CIA director Allen Dulles instructed Lansdale to "do what you did in the Philippines [in Vietnam]." Lansdale had previously been a member of General John W. O'Daniel's mission to Indo China in 1953, acting as an advisor to French forces on special counter guerrilla operations against the Viet Minh. From 1954 to 1957, he was stationed in Saigon as the head of the Saigon Military Mission. Lansdale during this time traveled to Vietnam with a young Daniel Ellsberg who would work in the U. S. Embassy there.

From 1957 to 1963, Lansdale worked for the Department of Defense in Washington, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations, Staff Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. During the early 1960s, he was chiefly involved in clandestine efforts to topple the government of Cuba, including proposals to assassinate Fidel Castro. Much of this work was under the aegis of "Operation Mongoose", which was the operational name for the CIA plan to topple Castro's government. According to Daniel Ellsberg, who was at one time a subordinate to Lansdale, Lansdale claimed that he was fired by President Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he declined Kennedy's offer to play a role in the overthrow of the Diem regime.

Lansdale retired from the Air Force on November 1, 1963. Yet from 1965 to 1968, he was back in Vietnam where he worked in the United States Embassy, Saigon, with the rank of minister. The scope of his delegated authority was vague, however, and he was bureaucratically marginalized and frustrated. His 1972 memoir, In the Midst of Wars. An American's Mission to Southeast Asia, covers his time in the Philippines and Vietnam up to December 1956. Lansdale's biography, The Unquiet American, was written by Cecil Currey and published in 1988; the title refers to the common, but incorrect, belief that the eponymous character in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American was based on Lansdale. According to Norman Sherry's authorized biography of Greene The Life of Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004), Lansdale did not officially enter the Vietnam arena until 1954, while Greene wrote his book in 1952 after departing Vietnam. It is more likely that he was the inspiration for the character Colonel Hillandale in Eugene Burdick's and William Lederer's joint novel The Ugly American published in 1958. Many of Lansdale's private papers and effects were destroyed in a fire at his McLean home in 1972. In 1981, Lansdale donated most of his remaining papers to Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Lansdale died of a heart ailment on February 23, 1987. He was twice married and had two sons from his first marriage.

Memo to Wesley R. Fishel (Sep. 6, 1955). Memo to Wesley R. Fishel (Dec. 19, 1954). Letter to Wesley R. Fishel (May 1, 1961).