by Max Boot
In search of female company, off-duty soldiers and contractors dressed in Hawaiian shirts would gambol around the bars spreading like a fungus from the city center all the way to Tan Son Nhut Airport—as they had once spread in Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and other Asian cities with a large American military presence. Bar girls would beseech prospective clients: “GI, buy me one drink?” Actual prostitutes would be cruder: “Boom-boom, GI? Fuck-suck?” Pimps with pompadours would be hovering nearby, ready to skim part of the day’s take. An entirely new argot developed between GIs and the profusion of Vietnamese eager to separate them from their piastres. “Gimme cigarette,” kids would beg passing American troops. “You numbah one.” (Number one meant “very good.”) If the GIs refused, the street kids would denounce them: “Cheap Charlie, number-ten cheap Charlie.” (Number ten meant “very bad.”)7
The free-spending American ways were driving up inflation and creating an anomalous situation where prostitutes were making more than army majors.8 Many Vietnamese soldiers succumbed to corruption to supplement their incomes. More honest officers would hang up their uniforms at the end of the day and use their personal cars or motor scooters to act as cab drivers for big-spending GIs out for a good time on the town, a necessity that was deeply humiliating to the proud Vietnamese, always mindful of their “face,” or reputation, in this Confucian society.9
Americans were not the only newcomers. Refugees fleeing the fighting in the countryside were also inundating Saigon, transforming this once elegant French provincial capital into an urban gallimaufry of every possible ingredient. The ramshackle South Vietnamese government simply could not cope with the influx. Garbage was piling up, potholes were not being repaired, bus service was becoming unpredictable. Surveying the scene, the USIA’s Howard Simpson concluded, “The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.”10 Lansdale thought that “Saigon looks a bit run-down and war-weary right now but maybe,” he added, with typical optimism, “we can put some spark back in.”11
THAT WAS a tall order—to revive the spirits of a deflated city and a country ravaged by war—but, then, great expectations accompanied Lansdale on his return to Vietnam. Upon hearing of his appointment, many friends wrote with some version of the sentiment expressed by retired Admiral Arleigh Burke: “I and a lot of other Americans took heart when we heard that you were returning to Viet Nam.”12
Practically every major American newspaper—and most of the minor ones—ran breathless accounts of Lansdale’s new role. Mentions of The Quiet American and The Ugly American were obligatory. There was even a new fictionalized version of the Lansdale legend to read: the English-language translation of Yellow Fever, a novel by the French journalist Jean Larteguy, came out in 1965. Its characters included an American colonel named Lionel Terryman, clearly based on Lansdale (terre means “land” in French), who is advising a Diem-like president named Dinh-Tu. Larteguy wrote of Terryman, “He could get hold of the most bigoted old scoundrel, the most inexperienced novice and, out of a gang leader, make a president of the republic; out of an odious and tyrannical old fogey, an all-powerful dictator.”13 Little wonder that the New York Times wrote that Landale had “made a rather legendary reputation in Asia in the nineteen-fifties.”14 Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post wrote that, like T. E. Lawrence, “Lansdale has inspired admiration, ridicule—and, above all, controversy.” He quoted “one U.S. official” as saying, “If he doesn’t produce a miracle, his friends will be disappointed and his enemies delighted.”15
When Lansdale landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport, wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and skinny tie, he was met by a gaggle of fifteen reporters and photographers who surrounded him as if he were a visiting movie star—Cary Grant, perhaps, or John Wayne. He had been expecting this and delivered a brief statement he had prepared en route: “When Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge asked me to join him on his mission to Vietnam, I had the happy feeling that he was asking me to come back home again. Vietnam and Vietnamese friends have been so much in my thoughts, so close to my heart, even while I was 10,000 miles away, that Vietnam truly seems like home to me. So now I am home again.”16
It was a good statement; it struck just the right note to win over the Vietnamese. As Lansdale subsequently wrote in a diplomatic cable, “Arrival statement about being members of Great Vietnamese Family stirred heart-warming emotional acceptance among wide circle Vietnam.”17 His statement did not engender such warm feelings in Helen Lansdale, who was not amused to read a news clipping of her husband proclaiming that he was finally home when he was thousands of miles away from the house they shared in Washington. “You sounded as though hurt a bit,” Ed wrote to her apologetically a few days later. In his defense, he pleaded insincerity: “I have to make like a real feather merchant to get us all set in here again just the right way, so I know you’ll understand when I sound off, it’s for a real cause.”18 (“Feather merchant” was old military slang for someone who talked a lot but said little.) In fact, there is every reason to think that Lansdale was being sincere in what he had said at the airport. He really felt Saigon was where he belonged.
LANSDALE’S FIRST days back were predictably harried as he tried to make up for years away by insinuating himself into the labyrinthine structures of power in Saigon. He was confronted, he noted, by “all this tremendous seeming confusion and seemingly ineluctable problems that are flooding me from all quarters . . . with so many, many folks to see and so many demands on time.” With no quarters prepared for him, Lansdale took refuge temporarily in a series of hotels, where he checked in under an assumed name: “My sleeping arrangements have to keep being changed, because all the publicity of course aroused the other side—who now have all sorts of pictures of me. So, I just keep moving fast.”19
He was, in any case, not getting much shut-eye. Ten days after arriving, Ed wrote home, “Can’t sleep. Or, maybe just wide awake at the wrong time. I just was trying to figure out what the date is . . . and was shocked to find out how many days have gone by since I was here. It’s just sort of a blur to me, of seeing people, of moving around all the time, of getting our group in place and running, of security, and of having to be eternally diplomatic with Americans and Vietnamese who are artfully playing their dealings with us.”
Not surprisingly, the last thing on his mind was his twenty-second wedding anniversary on September 3. “I know you might have been expecting some word from me on our Anniversary,” he wrote to Helen (“Darling”), “but honest Injun, the day was just another 18-hour work grind of puzzling out a seemingly million loose ends here and how to fit them all together. But, my thoughts were on you during the day, and I’d sure have been happier home than here, to give you a big hug and kiss for the day. I miss being home! Miss you!”20 One wonders whether the exclamation points were meant to convince Helen or himself.
IN SEPTEMBER 1966, CBS would air a new show called Mission: Impossible. It featured a group of secret agents who would assemble every week to battle dictators, mobsters, and other enemies designated by their unseen supervisor, “the secretary,” who would deliver their orders via a self-destructing tape-recording that threatened to “disavow” any knowledge of their actions if they were caught or killed. As if anticipating the series, Lansdale was then in the process of assembling his own Impossible Missions Force in Saigon, known as the Senior Liaison Office, made up largely of the same individuals who had served with him previously in South Vietnam and, in some cases, before that in the Philippines.
“It is worth noting,” Rufus Phillips later wrote, “that for those with established government positions, going out to Vietnam with Lansdale was not going to enhance a career. It was obvious from prior experience that bureaucratic enemies would be generated. For those with families it was a considerable sacrifice, since dependents were no longer allowed in Saigon. For members of his original team, it was a display of loyalty based on firsthand knowledge of how effective Lansdale could be and how he dealt with those who worked for him.�
�21 Phillips himself joined the team only temporarily; he came to Saigon for the first month to help them set up operations before returning home to run his father’s engineering firm, which was negotiating to build a new airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the future, he would act as a Washington liaison for Lansdale.
Others came out for longer periods in spite of their misgivings. Joe Redick, the French-speaking CIA officer, reprised his role as translator. He earned the nickname Mother—“an appellation that he does not precisely cherish,” wrote another team member22—because he showed “so much solicitude” toward his teammates. Lou Conein, the covert operator who had overseen the coup that toppled Diem, was looking forward to a promised new assignment as a military attaché in Venezuela when he was called in by the CIA’s deputy director, Richard Helms, and told, “Lou, you are going to Vietnam.” Lou replied that he didn’t want to go. Helms put a stop to that: “This is a directed assignment and you cannot refuse and you cannot let the agency down.”23 Once in Saigon, the hard-drinking Luigi would be referred to by his teammates as “the I & I (Intelligence and Intoxication) Officer.”24
Other Lansdale associates from his 1950s heyday included the eccentric archaeologist-turned-intelligence officer Charles “Bo” Bohannan, his onetime deputy in the Philippines; the cautious CIA operative Joe Baker, who left his posting in Paris to become the team’s executive officer, or second in command; the Army colonel (and Christian Science practitioner) Sam Karrick, who had helped direct South Vietnamese pacification in 1955; the former Philippine army officer Napoleon Valeriano, who was now on the CIA payroll and had helped train the Bay of Pigs invasion force; the erstwhile Shanghai symphony conductor and anti-Japanese guerrilla Bernie Yoh, “an extremely brilliant and energetic man,” in Henry Kissinger’s estimation;25 the economist Michael J. Deutch, a warmhearted Russian-Jewish refugee who had arrived in America by way of Belgium in 1940 and helped the war effort by developing synthetic rubber out of petroleum; and Hank Miller of the U.S. Information Agency, who at six feet six inches towered over the Vietnamese. One of the few team members with whom Lansdale did not have a long relationship was the white-shoe Boston lawyer Charlie Choate, who had been recommended by Henry Cabot Lodge’s son. With no experience in Vietnam but lots of idealism, Choate arrived bearing a letter of introduction from the president of the Boston Bar Association to the president of the Saigon Bar Association.26
Lansdale’s team was a good one, but, like Lansdale himself, it sometimes seemed trapped in the past. The gonzo war reporter Michael Herr, then of Esquire magazine, called Lansdale and Conein—the best-known team members—“spook deities,” but added, “As sure as heat rises, their time was over. The war passed into the hard hands of firepower freaks out to eat the country whole, and with no fine touches either, leaving the spooks on the beach.”27
BY THE end of September 1965, all of the members of the Senior Liaison Office had arrived and settled in. Lansdale moved into “a big barn of a house, really two flats, or a duplex,” located at 194 Cong Ly, on the road to the airport. The four bedrooms were used as living quarters and offices and the large living room as a conference and entertaining space. Joining Lansdale were Joe Redick, Michael Deutch, and Hank Miller. The team commandeered another house at 35 Nguyen Thong for Sam Karrick, Bernie Yoh, and Charlie Choate. Just as at Cong Ly, they had a cook and a “houseboy” to take care of them. As a pet they kept a ten-foot boa constrictor, named Baby, given to them by Father Nguyen Loc Hoa, the “fighting priest” defending the village of Binh Hung. Bo Bohannan took up residence with the Filipino workers at the Eastern Construction Company compound in Cholon; Eastern Construction, or Eccoi, was the successor to the Freedom Company. No longer CIA funded, it was now working as a contractor for the Saigon government.28
The only team member who got his own villa, oddly enough, was its youngest and least experienced member. Writing a letter home to the wives of the team members, Mike Deutch described him jocularly: “Now I don’t want to alarm you girls unduly—but I cannot dissimulate from you the skeleton in the team’s closet—a young, handsome, presently unmarried team member (in fact, brace yourself—he is divorced—but he’s only one exception that confirms the good rule of married men on the team, and it will never happen again). He is Dan Ellsberg of Rand and the Pentagon. It is his first trip to Asia, and he is free to enjoy the sight of the alluring ao-dais [dresses], but he is beginning to learn, and in time we will get him married.”29 Deutch was more prophetic than he could have realized in describing Daniel Ellsberg as the “skeleton in the team’s closet,” since five years later he would gain worldwide notoriety as the leaker of the top-secret Pentagon Papers.
How did a future hero of the antiwar movement come to work for Major General Edward G. Lansdale, USAF (Ret.)? The answer to that question requires a brief recapitulation of Ellsberg’s life up to that point, a story told not only by Ellsberg himself but also by his biographer Tom Wells. Then thirty-four years old, he had grown up in Highland Park, the same municipality within Detroit where Lansdale had spent part of his youth, to Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science. Although he did not grow up to be a practicing Christian Scientist, this religious background as well as his childhood around Detroit gave him some common ground with Lansdale. His father even had the same first name as Lansdale’s father and, like Harry Lansdale, a connection to the automobile industry: Harry Ellsberg was a structural engineer who had helped design Ford’s vast Willow Run factory.30
The similarities, however, ended there. While Lansdale had been a mediocre student, Ellsberg was an intellectual standout. As a young man, he had been a musical prodigy who was relentlessly pushed by his mother, Adele, to practice the piano even though he displayed little enthusiasm for the instrument. He was only freed of the burden of musical practice by the great conductor in the sky. In 1946, the entire Ellsberg family was on a long road trip when Daniel’s father fell asleep at the wheel, and the car veered into a concrete bridge abutment. Daniel’s thirteen-year-old sister and his mother were killed. Daniel himself was in a coma for thirty-six hours. When he woke up and learned that his mother had died, his first reaction was, “Now I don’t have to play the piano anymore.”31 Daniel’s father survived, but they never had a close relationship again, leaving him to seek out a series of surrogate father figures as mentors.
First at the Cranbrook Academy, an elite boarding school in Michigan, and then at Harvard College, Ellsberg’s classmates discovered that he was brilliant, charming, fascinating—but also boastful, self-centered, and prone to exaggeration. An economics major, Ellsberg graduated third in his class at Harvard. He interrupted his postgraduate studies in economics to join the Marine Corps. He was drawn to the Corps because he was, in his own words, “a dedicated cold warrior”32 and had, as one of his professors said, “a kind of macho way about him.”33 He served as a lieutenant from 1954 to 1957 and even extended his tour in the hope of seeing combat in the Suez Crisis of 1956. He later called his years in the Corps “the happiest time in my life.”34
Ellsberg left the Marines in 1957 to assume a prestigious fellowship at Harvard and continue his graduate studies. Eventually, in 1962, he would complete his PhD. By then, he had already been working for three years at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the nation’s leading defense think tank, where intellectual heavyweights such as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, and Harry Rowen were becoming famous for applying social science methods to the study of nuclear deterrence. Even at RAND, where genius was common, Ellsberg stood out as a “supergenius,” possibly a future Nobel Prize winner.35 He was also a super-womanizer who openly bragged to colleagues about his conquests—and even passed around the RAND office nude photos of women he had slept with.36 His family, including two young children, did not command the same level of attention. By the end of 1963, his wife, Carol, had had enough and demanded a divorce.37
Reeling from the separation, Ellsberg in 1964 moved to Washington, where he became a
special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Although, as he later acknowledged, his job was “a very lowly one,” Ellsberg asked for and received a very high civil service grade, GS-18, equivalent to a two-star general. However, Ellsberg had trouble keeping up with the hectic pace of work in the Pentagon. By the summer of 1965, he was being encouraged to find employment elsewhere, the sooner the better.38
In August 1965, Ellsberg attended an interagency meeting at the State Department. William Colby, who was now in charge of the CIA’s Far East department, introduced Edward Lansdale, who proceeded to speak about his upcoming mission to Vietnam. Ellsberg had heard of Lansdale, the Quiet American. Everyone had. He had, as Ellsberg later recalled, “a great reputation.” After the meeting, Ellsberg approached Lansdale and offered to accompany him to Vietnam as a counterinsurgency “apprentice.”39 After checking him out, Lansdale decided there would be advantages to recruiting one of McNamara’s “whiz kids.” “I liked Ellsberg,” Lansdale later said. “But I had a sort of underhanded motive for putting him on the team. I wanted somebody to keep the bureaucrats off my back in Saigon, and here was this bright young man who could talk a mile a minute.”40
