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

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• 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
• Publication Date: April 1, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

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~
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