by Max Boot
YET THE schism between the sanctioned diplomats of the Establishment and the new guild of covert operatives intent on saving “Western freedom from Communist darkness” continued to widen. Despite the support of Dulles and Spruance, Lansdale still complained of “sniping at me (verbally) by several folks at our Embassy to whom I am somewhat lower than a skunk.”50 Major General Albert Pierson did more than just snipe. He insisted that Lansdale’s continued presence in JUSMAG was an embarrassment and a violation of the embassy’s decree that U.S. personnel stay neutral in the election. (Spruance, who knew and approved of Lansdale’s behind-the-scenes machinations, had issued a disingenuous “warning” on March 13, 1953, to “all Americans resident here to refrain scrupulously from any kind of participation in the election.”)51 Pierson was not able to expel Lansdale from the country any more than Quirino could. But he did manage to expel Lansdale from JUSMAG’s organizational chart and its housing compound. Lansdale would soon get his revenge; his complaints to Allen Dulles contributed to Pierson’s dismissal and replacement in August 1953 by another general, Robert M. Cannon, who was more accommodating.52
In search of a new cover, Lansdale transferred to the Thirteenth Air Force at Clark Air Base, where he masqueraded as deputy command historian. He received a room in the bachelor officers’ quarters in a concrete building that he described as “shaped coyly like a long cracker box, ultra modern and functional, but still a cracker box.” Lansdale also rented a “little one-bedroom sawali house in Angeles close by, to put up guests and visitors,” he informed Helen. (Sawali is a woven bamboo used to build nipa huts.) “Angeles is still quite a honky-tonk town and I dislike it as much as ever (the first town I ever really knew in the Philippines). The amusing rumor is that I’ve taken a house in town for nefarious love affairs . . . a rumor that is actually helpful. How about flying over for a weekend and give the rumor mongers something to really talk about?”53 Lansdale knew, of course, that his wife hated to fly and hated the Philippines, so she would never take him up on his offer. Moreover, he was still passionately in love with Pat Kelly and still seeing her regularly. Given his continuing relationship with Pat, it’s likely that the gossip was right and that Ed’s house in Angeles really was nothing more than a love nest, even as Ed was also working to repair his relationship with his distant wife. Helen was trying to promote a rapprochement with her faraway husband by sending him notes she had taken during Christian Science classes. “The lessons recently scare this poor old sinner, but then maybe I need the scaring,” Lansdale told her.54
To the extent that Lansdale had any religious faith, it would have come in handy in dealing with mounting personal attacks during this period that were not just bureaucratic in nature. Tony Quirino was the president’s brother and political enforcer, performing much the same role that Ngo Dinh Nhu later would play for his brother Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. During the 1953 campaign, Quirino was recalled to active duty as a lieutenant colonel in the Philippine army and given charge of a special command in the Military Intelligence Service manned by his thugs. His men got on Lansdale’s tail a couple of times in Manila, making plain to Lansdale that he was “to be shipped home in a coffin.” Lansdale recalled “one wild nighttime chase all through Manila before I eluded them.”55 Another time, he was shot at in his car with a .30-caliber rifle. “Incredibly,” he wrote, “the bullets missed me.”56 As a precaution, he had to change his license plates and repaint his vehicle.57 “It’s not much fun to be under attack all the time,” Lansdale admitted, “telephones tapped, followed night and day, threatened, asked by your commanding general to get out, have the general commanding the base I’m supposed to move to say he doesn’t want a ‘trouble maker.’ ”58
In light of the controversy that now surrounded him, Lansdale thought, “Maybe it’s just as well if I hole up for a few days and be quiet as a little mouse.”59 It was an understandable reaction, a form of self-preservation. But Lansdale could not stay out of the action for long—not when an election with momentous consequences for the future of the Philippines and the Cold War was about to occur. Before long he would be the mouse that roared.
10
“A Real Vindication”
This is the way we like to see an election carried out.
—PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
UNTIL the late nineteenth century, most politicians considered the act of campaigning to be sordid and unseemly. As late as 1896, William McKinley refused to go on the campaign trail at all, preferring to receive visitors at his home in Canton, Ohio. The Philippines, like most other countries, had even less history of stumping for votes. It did not hold its first legislative elections until 1907, and its first presidential election had to wait until the creation of a commonwealth in 1935. Most of the leading politicians were scions of the landed elite who disdained what was perceived as the grubby process of asking the hoi polloi for votes as much as America’s Founding Fathers did. In the 1935 campaign, Manuel Quezon won the presidency after delivering only two speeches. In 1941, he won reelection without making a single speech.1
Ramon Magsaysay was different. A man of the people, he kept up a frenetic pace of campaigning in 1953, traveling by airplane, car, train, boat, and even carabao to places that no previous presidential candidate had ever visited. “Breakfast was at twelve noon, lunch at six in the evening, and supper at two or three o’clock the next morning,” wrote one of his supporters.2 Many members of his entourage got sick and run-down as the unrelenting pace continued—but not the tireless candidate. He kept going, trying to shake as many hands as possible, in no small part to draw a contrast between his youthful energy and Elpidio Quirino’s advanced age and infirmity. Everywhere he went, he was greeted by adoring crowds shouting, “Mabuhay, Magsaysay!” (Hurray, Magsaysay!)
Magsaysay was no great orator or deep thinker, but he had a talent for connecting with ordinary people in a way that Lansdale’s next protégé, Ngo Dinh Diem, could never master. One of his biographers wrote that Magsaysay “was perfectly at ease mingling with the people, shaking their hands, flashing his smile, talking in simple English, or in Tagalog or Ilocano, impressing everybody with his tall, big frame and rugged looks, heartily enjoying his meal with whoever happened to be his hosts.”3 At the same time that Magsaysay was courting the common people, he was also wooing powerful interests, including sugar and coconut growers, the American and Chinese business communities, regional power brokers, and the Catholic Church.4
His ability to balance both parts of his coalition—the man in the street and the dealmaker in the boardroom—was a sign of his political skill. So, too, was his ability to parry the Liberals’ insults. They accused him of being stupid and ill-informed—“fit only to be a garbage collector,” in one caustic critic’s stinging rebuke. When he heard this, Magsaysay grinned and fired back, “A garbage collector is just what this nation needs, to clean out the dirt and filth of graft and corruption.”5
The biggest threat to Magsaysay’s election was the worry that a third-party ticket led by the Liberal defectors Carlos Romulo and Fernando Lopez, who had resigned as Quirino’s ambassador to Washington and vice president respectively, might split the anti-Quirino vote. But that danger was removed on August 21, 1953, when, following tortuous backroom negotiations, Romulo and Lopez decided to end their long-shot campaign and endorse Magsaysay in exchange for cabinet and congressional seats for their supporters.6
Thereafter, Magsaysay’s victory seemed assured, provided that Quirino’s men did not steal the election—or even try to assassinate him. Security was a constant worry for Magsaysay’s aides, given the way their candidate exposed himself. His welfare was looked after by a bodyguard of fifty former guerrillas—his old troops—bristling with weapons. One of them later recalled, “We ate dust on roads so hidden under it that you could not see the car ahead. I lost ten pounds in ten days, during one phase of the campaign.”7 But even if Magsaysay’s guards could keep him alive, could anything be done to prevent Quirino from stuff
ing the ballot boxes in his favor?
WHILE THE campaign was reaching a climax, Edward Lansdale, having already played the role of a Boss Hague or Rasputin, was still lying low, trying to stay out of the public eye. It was, in some ways, a stroke of fortune that in June 1953 he was invited by a visiting American general to go to Indochina on a trip that, as we shall see, would last three weeks. When he returned, he once again took up a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in supporting his friend Monching. He had been officially instructed by Washington that he could go ahead and help “on clean elections,” but he was supposed “to have nothing to do with candidates.” He thought these instructions were nonsensical—“How in hell can a guy fight for a free election without getting close to a candidate and having him do the in-fighting on the dirtiest phases of fraud?”—so, as was his wont, he skirted the rules.8 George Aurell, the CIA’s Far East Division chief, later complained that Lansdale got “money for political funding, propaganda schemes and so forth” by disguising them as “requests for new filing equipment or air-conditioning repairs.”9
Lansdale used “cut-outs,” that is, covert intermediaries, to advise Magsaysay “on the conduct of the campaign” and to provide him “with his major speeches and themes.”10 (David T. Sternberg, the wheelchair-bound CIA officer, continued to be the main author of Magsaysay’s speeches.)11 His philosophy was always “helping the Filipinos to help themselves.” Therefore, he wrote of his CIA team (code name KUGOWN) in a top-secret report for Allen Dulles: “We taught, encouraged, but kept our direct assistance as covert as possible.”12
Years later, Lansdale was to claim that the “U.S. government gave no funds, secret or otherwise, to any of the candidates in the 1953 Presidential election in the Philippines.”13 He dubbed widespread tales of secret American spending a “fantasy” and a “fairy tale,” and said disingenuously, “I only wish I were wealthy enough to have disbursed so many millions.”14 (Of course no one was claiming that Lansdale used funds from his own checking account.) In internal government documents, however, he was more forthcoming. In 1961, for example, Lansdale wrote to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric that “Magsaysay’s own story of receiving 3-million-dollars from the U.S. to help him campaign was untrue and was told by him only to impress political leaders into supporting him, yet it still has currency.” And what was truth? “Since I had those U.S. funding responsibilities in 1953,” Lansdale continued, “I know how much smaller U.S. expenditures actually were and for what, and so do the proper U.S. fiscal authorities.” He added, “Almost all U.S. political actions and the relatively small U.S. funds were expended” on ensuring “ ‘free elections’ through truly secret balloting and an honest count.”15 Note that in this secret memorandum, not declassified until 2014, Lansdale did not dispute that he had provided funding to Magsaysay; he merely said that he had provided a lot less than three million dollars.
Lansdale later recalled being offered five million dollars by Allen Dulles for use in the campaign. But he was “uneasy about this amount of money and asked if he was supposed to buy votes with it.” He “felt that such an action would be of short-term value [only], and that the important thing was to teach the Filipinos new ways of governing themselves that would stay with them forever.” In the end, Lansdale accepted one million dollars in cash, which he stashed in the JUSMAG liquor locker, but he claimed to have spent no more than sixty thousand dollars.16
Even if Lansdale did not hand Magsaysay bags of greenbacks, he served as a conduit between the campaign and American citizens and companies.17 American firms provided an estimated $250,000 to Magsaysay, equivalent to $2.2 million in 2017 dollars. Some of the donors no doubt were content with keeping the Philippines from going Communist; others probably desired special favors from a president they had helped to elect.18
WITH MAGSAYSAY’S campaign now running smoothly, Lansdale’s main focus, given his awareness of a long tradition of political chicanery, was on preventing Elpidio Quirino from rigging the election. He uncovered, he later wrote, “plots to assassinate Magsaysay, the use of thugs to intimidate political workers, the location of a shipment of a million fake ballots printed in Hong Kong and secreted in the Philippines in readiness for stuffing ballot boxes, and the surreptitious moves of political bosses to gain control of the electoral machinery.”19 Of course, Lansdale himself was hardly innocent of charges of manipulating the election, but he drew a clear distinction in his mind between campaigning to win votes and intimidation of voters or stuffing of ballot boxes.
To head off such a possibility, Lansdale mounted an effort even more ambitious than the one he had assembled in 1951. He enlisted the papal nuncio, Cardinal Vagnozzi, as well as numerous civic groups such as the Jaycees, the Rotarians, and the League of Women Voters. All were told, in coordination with NAMFREL (the National Movement for Free Elections), to be on the lookout for election shenanigans. Meanwhile, Lansdale waged what he described as “a long, bitter, semi-covert struggle . . . to prevent the Armed Forces from becoming the personal instrument of the Quirinistos through officers subservient to the person of Quirino rather than the nation.” Lansdale and his team relayed messages that army officers who worked against Magsaysay could expect to suffer the consequences after the election, while those who resisted Quirino’s pressure could expect to be rewarded with promotions and assignments. He also launched “black” operations to block the Quirino machine; he later said he had arranged for the burning of warehouses that contained bogus ballots.20
Because Tony Quirino was threatening newspaper publishers in order to stop the publication of articles unfavorable to his brother, the relentlessly entrepreneurial Lansdale decided to put out a newspaper of his own. The Free Philippines was named after a publication of the same name that had been published covertly during the Japanese occupation. An eight-page tabloid, it was produced between September 28 and November 17, 1953, at first as a weekly and then, as the election approached, as a daily. Each issue had an average run of one hundred thousand copies. This newspaper exposed election “skulduggery” such as the “ominous transfers of honest constabulary commanders from big vote areas and their replacement by more pliable commanders” and “large-scale distribution of ink eradicator to henchmen who had access to the polls.” Lansdale thought this publication, secretly financed by the CIA, had a significant impact: “The fact that the entire editorial staff of the Free Philippines kept active, despite armed coercion and economic pressure, stirred up first admiration and finally emulation in other newspapermen.”21
Lansdale also took care to marshal foreign press coverage to counteract the pro-Quirino press. For example, a Scripps-Howard newspaper correspondent “asked for help in his pre-election reporting.” Lansdale sent him to Negros Occidental Province, where a friend of Ed’s could provide “first hand contact with citizen action against armed coercion.”22 Lansdale and his team arranged oleaginous profiles of Magsaysay in Time, Life, and other American publications that were widely read in the Philippines. A typical example was an April 20, 1953, article about Magsaysay in Life entitled “An Honest Man with Guts”; it described him as “the only man who could prevent the country from slipping.” Lansdale had the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer”—its propaganda apparatus—playing at full blast during the 1953 campaign.
ELECTION DAY came on Tuesday, November 10, 1953, and by the following morning it was obvious that Magsaysay was going to win—he was ahead of Quirino by a margin of three to one. But in those precomputerized days, it took a long time to count the ballots from such a sprawling country. There were still no official results by Wednesday evening. The following day, Thursday, November 12, Lansdale and Magsaysay sought to escape the pressure aboard the Marguerite, a motor yacht belonging to Rear Admiral Richard Cruzen, a noted polar explorer who was commander of U.S. naval forces in the Philippines. Along with Magsaysay’s family and some of his cronies, they cruised through Manila Bay past Corregidor while waiting for the results to come in. The day was gray, with, Lansdale noted,
“clouds coming down low on the bay over towards Arayat and Bataan.” The clouds lifted, at least metaphorically, when they received word shortly after midday that Quirino had conceded. More than 4.2 million out of 5.6 million registered voters cast ballots, and Magsaysay received a decisive 68.9 percent of the total.
Lansdale was exultant, calling it “a real vindication of the things we believe in.” For the first time in ages, he was “able to sit down and draw a big breath.” His immediate hope was to catch up on his sleep. “There’s a bunk here and I’m going to roll into it and see what that almost unknown luxury, a nap, feels like,” he told Helen. “The work has come out beautifully, constructively for the U.S.” He was particularly impressed that the election was largely violence-free: “Moral pressure had built up so greatly that the goons and toughies simply became ashamed of themselves at the last moment, and started becoming disobedient to their leaders, who were ordering all sorts of desperate measures. . . . I think the Philippines grew up maybe a couple of generations worth overnight in doing so.”23
Upon learning of the results, President Eisenhower delivered a coded compliment to the CIA’s man in Manila, whose full meaning would have been apparent only to someone like the president who had been briefed on Lansdale’s covert mission. “This is the way we like to see an election carried out,” he said.24 Vice President Richard Nixon, who arrived with his wife, Pat, in Manila a couple of weeks after the election, delivered his own congratulations in a meeting with Lansdale and his six-man team in which he said that the CIA’s mission in the Philippines had accomplished its objectives. Lansdale noted that Nixon, as a politician himself, had “almost an instantaneous grasp of the nuances of the problems faced and solved” by his team—“as though he were one of us.”25
