IN THE MIDEST OF WARS: AN AMERICAN'S MISSION TO SOUTHEAST ASIA

Document Type: 
Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010048-4
Release Decision: 
RIPPUB
Original Classification: 
K
Document Page Count: 
2
Document Creation Date: 
November 16, 2016
Document Release Date: 
April 24, 2000
Sequence Number: 
48
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
April 1, 1972
Content Type: 
NSPR
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PDF icon CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010048-4.pdf157.09 KB
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FOIAb3b 1 APRIL 197P _-- CPYRGHT CPYRGHT CPYRGHT Re1eas(92=l05%IA-RDP75- y is this important? Because if C.~ IN THE MIDST OF WARS: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia by Edward Geary Lansdale Harper & Row, 386 pp., $12.50 Reviewed by Jonathan Mirsky tit a is one word Lansdale uses e- pe tedly it is "help"-and he uses it pe sonally, simulating a Lone Ranger- lik urge to offer spontaneous assist- ance. Thus, the first day he ever saw ? Di m, "... the thought occurred to m that perhaps he needed help.... I vo ced this to Ambassador Heath... . H ath told me to go ahead." The in- fo mal atmosphere continues when upon actually meeting Diem, 1 -1 sdale , w With the exception of the Pentagon i mortalizes him as "the alert and Papers, Edward Geary Lansdale's el est of the seven dwarfs deciding memoir could have been the most valu- w at to do about Snow White." able eyewitness account of the inter- Further desires to serve inform L.ans. ? nationalizing of the Indochinese war. d se's concern for the "masses o Lansdale, a "legendary figure" even in p ople living in North Vietnam wh his own book, furnished the model for w uld want to ... move out before th the Ugly American who, from 1950 - mmunists took over." These unfortu down the Huk revolution in the Philip- y s "small team" of Americans in two pines. He then proceeded to Vietnam nsdale saw to it that "One half where, between 1954 and 1956, he stucK 1 der Major Conein, engaged i close to Ngo Dinh Diem during Diem's fugee work in the North." first shaky years when Washington "Major" Lucien Conein, who was t couldn't make up its mind whom to lay the major role the CIA had in th tap as the American alternative to Ho urder of Diem in 1963, is identified I ' Chi Minh. Lansdale's support insured he secret CIA report included by t Diem as the final choice for Our Man Times and Beacon editions of t in Saigon. While the book's time span entagon Papers (see SR, Jan. 1, 197 is, therefore, relatively brief, the period s an agent "assigned to MAAG [Mi nam is genuinely important. over purposes." The secret repo There is only one difficulty with In efers to Conein's refugee "help" the Midst of Wars: from the cover to ne of his "cover duties." His real jo the final page it is permeated with lies. responsibility for developing a pa That Harper & Row finds it possible ilitary organization in the North, to foist such a package of untruths on e in position when the Vietminh to the public-and for $1250!-severa vet ... the group was to be train months after the emergence of th nd supported by the U.S, as patrio publication of other authoritative! also attempted to sabotage Hano trying to understand the realities o wreck the local bus company. At t our engagement in Vietnam. beginning of 1955, still in Hanoi, Me The lie on the jacket describes Lans CIA's Conein infiltrated more age s dale merely as an OSS veteran wh into the North. They "became nor 1 spent the years after World War II as citizens, carrying out everyday ci '1 "career.oflicer in the U.S. Air Force. pursuits, on the surface." Aggress' n er of the Hanoi region in early October [1954] including items about property, money reform, and a three. day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled." T he refugees-Catholics, many of whom had collaborated with the French-were settled in the South, in communities that, according to Lans- dale, were designed to. "sandwich" Northerners and Southerners "in a cultural melting pot that hopefully would give each equal opportunity." Robert Scigliano, who at this time was advising the CIA-infiltrated Michi- gan State University team on how to "help" Diem, saw more than a melting pot: Northerners, practically all of whom are refugees, [have] preempted many of the choice posts in the Diem government.... (The) Diem regime has assumed the as- pect of a carpet bag government in its, disproportion of Northerners and Cen- tralists ... and in its Catholicism.. , . The Southern people do not seem to share the anticommunist vehemence of their North- ern and Central compatriots, by whom they are sometimes referred to as un- reliable in the4communist struggle. . [While] priests in the refugee villages hold no formal government posts they are gen- erally the real rulers of their villages and serve as contacts with district and pro- vincial officials. Graham Greene, a devout Catholic, observed in 1955 after a visit to Viet- nam, "It is Catholicism which has helped to ruin the government of Mr. Diem, for his genuine piety has been exploited by his American advisers until the Church is in danger of sharing the unpopularity of the United States." Wherever one turns- in Lansdale the accounts are likely to be lies. He re- ports how Filipinos, old comrade from the anti-Iluk wars, decided t "help" the struggling Free South. The spontaneity of this pan-Asian gestur warms the heart-until one learns fro Lansdale's own secret report to Presi dent Kennedy that here, too, the CI had stage-managed the whole business The Eastern Construction Compan turns out to be a CIA-controlle "mechanism to permit the deploymen of Filipino personnel in other Asia countries for unconventional opera. tions.... Philippine Armed Forces an other governmental personnel were 'sheep-dipped' and sent abroad." Elsewhere Lansdale makes much Diem's success against the variou sects, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Bin Xuyen. (At every step Diem was a _V.14M 00100010U at one patheti 001 explicit evidence to the contrary. 1 Lansdale expresses particular pie: s- deed, on page 378-the last of the text ure with the refugee movement o he states that at the very time Dien ~ the South. These people "ought to e was being murdered in Saigon, "I ha provided with a way of making a fr h been retired from the Air Force." start in the free South.... [Vietna l For all I know Lansdale drew his pa was going to need the vigorous r- from the Air Force and, as the phot ticipation of every citizen to mak a graphs in his book attest, he certaini success of the noncommunist par of wore its uniform. This is irrelevan . the new nation before the propo d Lansdale was for years a senior oper, - plebiscite was held in 1956." Lans le tive of the Central Intelligence Agenc ; modestly claims that he "passed alo g" on page 244 of the Department of D,.- ideas on how to wage psycholog al Tense edition of the Pentagon Paper , warfare to "some nationalists." The Lansdale, two other men, and All Pentagon Papers, however, reveal at Dulles are identified as represents g the CIA "engineered a black psy ar the CIA at a meeting of the President s strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by he Special Committee on Indochina he Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on on Januar4 ,jJFdved For Rele ehH60 ?r Avl W~ FOIAb3b Approved For Release 2000/05/23 : CIA-RDP75-00001 R000100010048-4 MISSING PAGE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT MISSING PAGE(S): ~J (9IV 7'/Nt/f~ i io;d s h/Er' i Approved For Release 2000/05/23 : CIA-RDP75-00001 R000100010048-4