by Max Boot
The result, from Washington’s perspective, was entirely satisfactory: the Christian Democrats won 48.5 percent of the vote in 1948, up from 36 percent in 1946, and acquired an absolute majority in parliament. It is not clear, admittedly, how much of the outcome was due to CIA efforts. American economic aid such as the Marshall Plan, signed into law just weeks before the vote, and efforts by the Vatican to mobilize church members were also of considerable importance—to say nothing of De Gasperi’s own appeal. But in the minds of policymakers the 1948 Italian election established a covert-action template that could be followed successfully in other elections where the Communist threat loomed large. Arthur Krock of the New York Times spoke for many when he commended officials for the “perfect handling of the American interest . . . in the peninsular roughhouse.”1
Such operations became much easier to execute after the establishment, just two months after the Italian election, of Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, expressly designed and amply funded for waging “political warfare.” Thus, by the time that Lansdale submitted a request to his superiors at the OPC to influence the 1951 Philippine congressional campaign, the institutional resources for such a project were in place—along with the determination to use them. America, it was clear, was far removed from pre-1941 isolationism. Yet the manipulation of foreign politics remained a controversial project within the American foreign-policy establishment. Naturally, it was more contentious still in the countries whose destiny lay in the balance. Before long, Lansdale would find himself at the center of political storms in both Washington and Manila.
THERE WAS, admittedly, a crucial difference between the situation in Italy in 1948 and that in the Philippines in 1951. In the former instance, the Truman administration had been worried about Communists’ winning power outright at the ballot box, because the Italian Communist Party was the largest in Western Europe. In the Philippines, by contrast, the Communist Party was prevented by law from contesting the election. The concern was that abusive, corrupt, and reactionary anti-Communists would win the election by fraud and thereby inadvertently strengthen the Communists’ attempts to foment a revolution.
Charged with safeguarding the vote was the ineffectual Philippine Commission on Elections. In the summer of 1951, Lansdale hatched a scheme with Ramon Magsaysay to have the commission request the assistance of the armed forces. President Elpidio Quirino’s Liberals had been the worst offenders among vote stealers the last time around, so Lansdale was careful to ensure that the request from the election commission came while Quirino was out of the country receiving medical care at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
To further safeguard the elections, Lansdale set up an OPC-funded organization, the National Movement for Free Elections, known by its acronym, NAMFREL. It was ostensibly run by three Filipino war veterans. Its real guiding light, in addition to Lansdale himself, was another CIA operative, named Gabriel L. Kaplan. He first came to Manila in 1951 on behalf of a CIA-backed Committee for a Free Asia, which eventually changed its name to the Asia Foundation. Later he would masquerade as the representative of yet another CIA front, the Catherwood Foundation.
A short, stocky man with a taste for giant Churchill cigars, Gabe Kaplan was a liberal Republican lawyer and politician from New York who had failed in a bid for Congress in 1938 and for the state supreme court in 1940. He used to say of his unsuccessful campaigns, “Fortunately I’m Jewish. But even that wasn’t enough. I needed just a bit of Italian blood besides.” (The dominant New York City politician of the day, Fiorello La Guardia, was both Jewish and Italian.) Kaplan was recruited for the OPC by a fellow liberal Republican lawyer from New York, Desmond FitzGerald, who had joined the Office of Policy Coordination’s Far East Division after battling alongside Kaplan against the corrupt Democratic Party machine. He thus became one of the few Jews in an organization that still resembled a WASPy men’s club. Kaplan’s New York political experience proved invaluable in foiling Tammany Hall’s Philippine counterparts. He also brought exactly the same perspective to dealing with Filipinos that Lansdale himself had, treating his contacts with “trust and respect,” rather than trying to bribe or blackmail them in the way that CIA case officers normally were taught to do. But he was more outspoken than his quiet boss: “Gabe was short but very glib of tongue,” Frisco “Johnny” San Juan, one of the founders of NAMFREL, recalled decades later. “You put him in a room, he would always dominate the conversation.”2
Employing NAMFREL volunteers as well as Philippine troops, the unlikely tag team of Lansdale and Kaplan orchestrated an ambitious scheme to protect the election. “Philippine Army troops guarded public meetings to guarantee free speech and later patrolled the vicinity of polling places to prevent harassment of voters and electoral officials,” Lansdale recalled. “The polling places themselves were guarded by high school and college ROTC cadets, who were often taken to the precincts by army transports or by members of Namfrel; and the latter also served as poll-watchers under the direction of the Commission on Elections.” While some cheating undoubtedly occurred in 1951, it was much less than in 1949. That most of the winning candidates belonged to the opposition party—the Nacionalistas—attested to the election’s honesty.
To heighten the impact of the voting, Lansdale orchestrated a typical bit of black propaganda. After the Military Intelligence Service arrested a Huk agitprop cell in Manila, Lansdale used their communications channels to write his own propaganda on behalf of the insurgency. His theme was “Boycott the Election!” based on the assumption that the 1951 vote would be as dirty as its 1949 predecessor. He produced an entire fake directive along those lines “typed on a captured Huk typewriter on captured paper, with authenticating identification.” So realistic was Lansdale’s missive that soon it was echoed by the entire Huk propaganda apparatus. When the election turned out to be honest, the Huks were discredited.3
LANSDALE WAS shrewd enough to apprehend that one honest election by itself was hardly enough to win the war. Six months after the 1951 election, he wrote to his wife, Helen (“Tike”):
It looks like the Huks are really crumbling, the first country in the world to defeat the Communists this way. It isn’t over yet, but the end is in sight if we can just keep the pressure up. . . . Trouble is, democracy is not building up fast enough to replace the void created as communism crumbles, which presents new and complex problems. . . . There are indications that same old tricks of using forceful coercion on the electorate are being planned, even though this was licked in the last election of 1951. Friends are getting worried and jittery again and running in here with their tales of woe . . . and are getting bucked up, fannies slapped and sent out as men again.4
To maintain momentum, Lansdale decided that his friend Ramon Magsaysay would be the ideal candidate to replace Quirino as president, but he knew that it was important not to have Magsaysay campaign for office prematurely, so as to sustain the nonpartisan aura of the defense secretary. When speculation began about a Magsaysay-for-president campaign, Lansdale wrote to Helen, “[I] had him say he was too busy with a big job to have time to think of politics—go ‘way and let me work.’ ”5 All the while, Lansdale was plotting to raise Magsaysay’s political profile so as to position him for the presidential race.
Lansdale orchestrated a campaign-style trip for the defense minister to the United States and Mexico in June 1952. Magsaysay traveled on a four-engine Lockheed Constellation aircraft lent to him by the U.S. military. He was accorded practically the treatment of a head of state, welcomed with nineteen-gun salutes in San Francisco, Washington, and New York. He even met with President Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, General Omar Bradley, and major newspaper and magazine publishers. Newspapers hailed him as an “imaginative administrator” (New York Times), “a Pacific dynamo” (New York Herald Tribune), and other encomia.
The only glitch occurred on Magsaysay’s airplane en route to Mexico City to address a Lions International co
nvention. Lansdale’s team had prepared a speech for Magsaysay. Its author was David T. Sternberg, a chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound CIA officer who had initially arrived in the Philippines in 1939, endured Japanese incarceration during the war, and now worked for the CIA while posing as the Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Manila. Frisco San Juan described him as a “genius”: “His physical condition sharpened his mind. He was at a disadvantage physically but first-class mentally.”6 Sternberg’s draft speech stressed the need for “the highest type of fighting ideals and principles” to defeat “the Communists.” But Magsaysay had been sold on a competing draft written by a “right-wing party hack” in the Philippines that Lansdale described as a “tirade of negative invective against the Huks”—“one of those ‘they eat little babies for breakfast’ type of things” in which “the only good Huks were dead Huks.” There was no mention of the spirit of “brotherly protection and friendship” that animated the anti-Huk campaign Lansdale had devised. Yet aboard the airplane Magsaysay told Lansdale that this was the text he was planning to deliver.
“The hell you are,” Lansdale said. “You are going to use this speech that was written for you and that is you to a T.”
Peeved, Magsaysay shot back, “All right, I am going back to Manila then. To hell with them, I don’t need to give a speech anyhow.”
Lansdale replied firmly, “You are going down and you are going to give that speech.” Then, “shocked and angry,” he grabbed the other speech from Magsaysay’s hands and tore it into shreds.
As the argument escalated, Magsaysay shoved Lansdale, and Lansdale “slugged him real hard, and he went down.” Or so he recalled years later; in another version of the tale, he merely said they had a “brief tussle.” In both versions of the story, the two men looked up and saw that their fight had been witnessed by Quirino’s wide-eyed adult daughter, Vicky Quirino Gonzalez, who was traveling with the party.
She said to Lansdale in horror, “Papa told me about you!”
Lansdale replied that this was a “brotherly fight,” adding, “I am fighting because I love this guy very much.” Magsaysay saw things the same way. The two men quickly patched up their quarrel, and Magsaysay wound up delivering the speech that Lansdale wanted.
In fact, Magsaysay did pretty much everything that Lansdale wanted, not because he was a paid American agent but because he had such faith in his friend’s acumen. Magsaysay’s confidence was justified, at least judging by the consequences of the trip. He returned to Manila “as a conquering Caesar,” in the words of two early biographers.7
THE CHALLENGE was to convert Magsaysay’s popularity into a viable campaign—and to prevent Quirino from stealing the election. Magsaysay was a member of Quirino’s Liberal Party, but he knew that the president would not step aside for him. There ensued complex negotiations with the barons of the Nacionalista Party, the former president José Laurel and Senator Claro Recto, to secure its nomination for Magsaysay. This was not a natural alliance. Laurel and Recto were as anti-American as Magsaysay was pro-American. Moreover, they had served under the very Japanese occupation regime (Laurel as president, Recto as a cabinet minister) that Magsaysay had fought. But they were also professional politicians who could spot a winner when they saw one.
Lansdale was in the thick of all the wheeling and dealing. At one point, the Nacionalistas produced an agreement that would have given Magsaysay the nod in return for a promise that the party, not the president, would select his cabinet members. Magsaysay was willing to sign anything he needed to win, but Lansdale “prevailed on Magsaysay,” according to Magsaysay’s biographer José Abueva, “not to cut corners which would later compromise his moral position as a reform leader.”8 Finally, on November 16, 1952, Magsaysay and the Nacionalistas signed a secret agreement: they would support him in return for his resignation from the Liberal Party and his pledge to give them a say, but not a veto, in cabinet appointments. The agreement also pledged support for Magsaysay from a third party, the Citizens Party led by Senator Lorenzo Tanada, a prominent former Liberal known as a corruption fighter.
Lansdale subsequently detailed these negotiations in a top-secret cable to Allen Dulles, who had taken over as CIA director in February 1953. (The OPC had been merged with the CIA in 1952.) Referring to Dulles only as “Director, KUBark,” and signing himself “Geoffrey S. Villiers” (a pseudonym apparently picked at random from a telephone directory), Lansdale recalled that Tanada had come to him in 1952 “stating that he was ‘reporting for orders to save democracy in the Philippines.’ ” The marching orders Lansdale gave were to support Magsaysay, and subsequently “Citizens Party personnel helped construct the opposition structure under Magsaysay.”9
The secret agreement was so politically explosive that Lansdale could not leave it even in his preferred hiding spot, the JUSMAG liquor locker. Fearing it would be used to blackmail Magsaysay, he gave the only copy for safekeeping in a sealed envelope to Raymond Spruance, a retired admiral and World War II hero who had taken over as ambassador in February 1952. Spruance placed it in his bedroom safe, not trusting the main embassy safe for such a sensitive document. A few months later, after knowledge of the letter’s existence leaked out, he returned it to Lansdale, who secreted it under the floor of his house. Two decades later, and long gone from the Philippines, Lansdale said, “It’s still there today, as far as I know.”10
RAMON MAGSAYSAY resigned from the cabinet on February 28, 1953, with a blast at President Quirino. His resignation letter, carefully crafted by a group of supporters, including no doubt Lansdale, said, “It would be useless for me to continue as Secretary of National Defense with the specific duty of killing Huks as the administration continues to foster and tolerate conditions which offer fertile soil to Communism.”11
Now that Magsaysay was openly a candidate, Lansdale helped organize a Magsaysay for President Movement modeled on a similar campaign that had drafted Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952. Lansdale even composed a slogan for the candidate, “Magsaysay Is My Guy”; Magsaysay became known as “the Guy” throughout the country. Lansdale collaborated with the jazz musician and future foreign minister Raul Manglapus to compose a campaign song, “The Magsaysay Mambo.” Its first two verses:
Everywhere that you would look
Was a bandit or a crook
Peace and order was a joke
Till Magsaysay pumasok [entered]!
That is why, that is why,
You will hear the people cry:
“Our democracy will die
Kung wala si [without] Magsaysay!”12
Lansdale had a master disc sent to the United States, where thousands of vinyl records were produced by the CIA and smuggled back into the Philippines.13 The song became so popular, Lansdale wrote to Helen on May 18, 1953, that “it has made a big hit around here, all the kids singing it, and of course radios turned on full blast so that the neighbors half a mile down the road can enjoy the pretty music. Some of the newspaper lads here claim I wrote the thing. As they say in Brooklyn,” he concluded wryly, “perish forbid.” When some of the officers at the mess at Clark Air Base asked Lansdale whether he had “heard that hit tune in the Philippines called the Magsaysay Mambo,” he simply played “dumb.”14
Lansdale had become, he wrote home, the ringmaster of “a twenty-ring circus, with each ring needing an eye kept on it and with me having to run several of the rings at the same time to boot.”15 He was getting used to being woken up early to be confronted with problems he had not expected when he went to bed the night before. As he told Helen,
It might be the use of napalm against Moro outlaws or the financial troubles of a newspaper or the replacement of a good combat commander or putting on a radio program at a moment’s notice to how to bring two Filipinos together despite mutual distrust or hearing about the latest rumor campaign to discredit me or how a close friend’s wife is being seduced by a band leader or a special operation against the Huk leadership or how to bring security for civilians al
ong the eastern shore of Laguna de Bay or doping out the intentions of intriguing politicos or, most often, the 1953 presidential campaign here.
With a mock-humble flourish, Lansdale concluded, “It will be good to just have to wonder whether I get orange juice or grapefruit on the breakfast table.”16
Far removed from the duties of an ordinary military officer or even secret agent, Lansdale had become a political power broker. “At times I feel like Boss Hague, at others Rasputin,” he wrote to Helen, adding cryptically, “but without entering into things the way they did.”17 This was not a model that most American government representatives would aspire to: Frank Hague had presided over a corrupt political machine as mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 1917 to 1947, and became notorious for proclaiming, “I am the law,” while Grigori Rasputin was a licentious mystic who gained a sinister hold over the Romanov family in the last days of the Russian czar. Presumably when Lansdale said that he was not “entering into things the way they did,” he meant that he did not abuse his power as Hague and Rasputin did. But that he would even invoke the comparison shows that his hidden influence was expanding in a way that many of his countrymen—to say nothing of ordinary Filipinos—would not have approved of.
IN RECOGNITION of the success he was having orchestrating the anti-Huk campaign, Lansdale was promoted by the Air Force to full colonel in January 1952, ahead of his peers. He was in many ways eclipsing the CIA station chief, Ralph B. Lovett, a mild-mannered and soft-spoken retired army one-star, as well as JUSMAG’s new commander, Major General Albert Pierson, a veteran of the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns in World War II. Lansdale was even assuming more prominence than Ambassador Ray Spruance, the victor of the Battle of Midway, who was dubbed “the Sphinx” by Filipino newspapermen because he was so reluctant to speak in public.18 (One of the ambassador’s aides recalled, “On the rare occasions when we were able to talk him into making a speech he approached it with far more nervousness than he ever did the Japanese fleet.”)19 Lansdale was dismayed by “the lack of firm and positive U.S. representation here” and decided he had no choice but to fill the vacuum—even if he was supposed to be a covert operative. “I’ve found myself time and again having to speak up strongly on U.S. policy—when Spruance or Pierson should,” Ed wrote to Helen. “That’s strictly between us, because a colonel can really be jumped on for some of the things I’ve had to say and do recently.”20
