The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  Would the course of the conflict have been different if Lansdale’s advice had been heeded? There is, of course, no way to know. Historical counterfactuals—“could have beens” and “might have beens”—must always remain a matter of speculation.

  Lansdale was at his least convincing when he regretted the American failure to do more to undermine the Hanoi regime. Washington did try to paint the North as the aggressor, but that hardly lessened its success at destabilizing the South. Nor did it lessen opposition to the war on the home front, which was primarily driven by anger at American casualties and the lack of progress by American troops on the ground. Lansdale was downright delusional when he suggested that an American-led information campaign could have so discredited the Politburo that it “could well have lost its control of the people and been overthrown.”33 He should have known better given his experience with Operation Mongoose and with his operations to destabilize North Vietnam itself in 1954–55. The only realistic way to topple the Hanoi regime would have been an American invasion. But this was an option Lansdale opposed, and for good reason. It is unlikely that it would have led to a quick and complete victory, as so many right-wingers of the Curtis LeMay type imagined. More likely, it would have resulted in an endless guerrilla war, of the kind the French had previously endured, with the Communists retaining the advantage of secure supply lines from China. Even worse, an American invasion of North Vietnam could have sparked a war with China, just as the American invasion of North Korea had done in 1950. Mao Zedong had 300,000 troops in North Vietnam, manning antiaircraft batteries and building roads, and he made clear that an American move across the seventeenth parallel would trigger a Chinese response.34

  Lansdale was on considerably firmer ground in arguing that the Kennedy administration made a tragic mistake in backing the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem. Admittedly Diem was deeply flawed—he was not a man of the people like Lansdale’s other protégé, Ramon Magsaysay—but there was no better alternative on offer. As Lansdale had warned, the rulers who succeeded Diem shared his shortcomings while lacking his strengths—in particular, his incorruptibility and his nationalist record. Whereas Diem had managed to achieve at least a tenuous stalemate against the Communists, his successors presided over a rapid unraveling that, for the Johnson administration, necessitated the Americanization of the war. Diem might have been even more popular if Lansdale had succeeded in the mid-1950s in his attempts to limit the authoritarian tendencies that Diem’s paranoid brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, only encouraged. But it would have been difficult to persuade Diem under any circumstances to rule in more consensual fashion and impossible without Washington’s support, which Lansdale lacked in this case.

  Lansdale had a good point in arguing that the American authorities, from Eisenhower to Nixon, had erred in disregarding his advice to strengthen the accountability and reduce the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime. He may have been overly idealistic in imagining that democracy could blossom in the tropical soil of South Vietnam even as a war raged all around, but his critics were overly cynical in imagining that the unpopularity and the corruption of the regime did not matter or that there was absolutely nothing the United States could do to constructively influence a regime so dependent on American aid. Unfortunately, Lansdale’s attempts to use his patented methods of friendly persuasion were effectively stillborn after 1956 in large part because he was persistently undercut by bureaucratic rivals—and after 1965, all other considerations were subordinated to the military imperatives of the American war machine. The result, as Lansdale later wrote, was that “the political rot in the selfish corruption of GVN [Government of Vietnam] and ARVN leaders . . . grew worse and worse in the post-1968 period.”35 In the end, that political rot left only the husk of a state that rapidly collapsed under the pressure of the 1975 invasion.

  In fairness, South Vietnam might not have survived even if Lansdale had enjoyed more success in implementing his agenda; North Vietnam would have been a tough and determined adversary under any circumstances, with more will to win than the United States had. But at the very least the war’s loss would have been less painful all around if Lansdale’s advice had been heeded. He had never wanted to see half a million American troops thrashing around Vietnam, suffering and inflicting heavy casualties. His approach, successful or not, would have been more humane and less costly.

  36

  The Family Jewels

  The visit to Senator Church’s committee is what every red-blooded American boy should dream of doing some day. It has all the charm and fun of going to a dentist to have root canals.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THE year 1975 was an annus horribilis for Edward Lansdale. It saw not just the fall of Saigon but also the fall of the CIA, at least as it had existed since its founding in 1947, as a freewheeling organization with no accountability to any outsider other than the commander in chief.

  Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Republican from Massachusetts, summed up the prevailing attitude during the CIA’s early years when he said, “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead, it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.”1 By the time Saltonstall spoke those words in 1966, the outlook he described was already changing. The bungled Bay of Pigs landing in 1961 had dented the CIA’s aura. The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal further tarnished all governmental institutions, including the CIA. The depiction of spies in the popular media moved from the glamour days of James Bond, Mission: Impossible, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to the paranoia of The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and The Osterman Weekend (1972 novel, 1983 film), which depicted American agents as murderous villains.

  Embarrassing revelations about the real-life CIA began to emerge in the mid-1960s and continued into the mid-1970s. In 1964, the journalists David Wise and Thomas B. Ross published Invisible Government, which provided details about CIA involvement in coups in Guatemala, Iran, South Vietnam, and Indonesia. In 1967, the radical magazine Ramparts revealed that the National Student Association and other private groups had taken CIA funds. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers revealed CIA operations in Vietnam. Soon thereafter, the CIA turncoats Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee published unauthorized accounts of their careers. The CIA was able to redact the most sensitive information out of Marchetti’s 1973 book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, but Agee published his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary in Britain, where it appeared full of the names of CIA officers and agents.

  The CIA was even caught in the periphery of the Watergate scandal. Although CIA officials had refused to help Nixon with a cover-up (a decision for which CIA Director Richard Helms paid with his job), they had supplied, at White House request, equipment, including disguises and cameras, that was used by the Plumbers to break into the Watergate building and into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. CIA experts then worked up a psychological profile of Ellsberg for the White House. When the CIA connection emerged during Ellsberg’s trial in May 1973, the newly appointed CIA director, James Schlesinger, and his deputy director for operations, William Colby, launched an investigation into what other activities outside its charter the agency might have been involved in. The result was what came to be known as the “family jewels”: a 693-item list of questionable CIA operations. It was all there: opening international mail to and from the Soviet Union, reading international cables, LSD experiments on unwitting subjects, surveillance of antiwar activists to establish possible foreign connections, wiretaps of journalists implicated in leaks of classified documents, and, most embarrassing of all, unsuccessful assassination plots against foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Rafael Trujillo. Colby was later to write “that the most remarkable thing about the list was that it was not more serious, that it did not include more widespread dangers to the
lives and liberties of our citizens.”2 But it was still explosive material—and it blew up in his face eighteen months later, by which time he had succeeded Schlesinger as CIA director.

  On Sunday, December 22, 1974, the New York Times splashed a big article by the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh across its front page. It began, “The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources.” The article, based on the information contained in the “family jewels” memo, went on to note “evidence of dozens of other illegal activities of the C.I.A. inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail.”3

  There was no mention of assassination plots, but those could not stay hidden for long. President Ford worried—and he was not the only one—that “the CIA would be destroyed” if this secret came out.4 In fact, the leak was Ford’s own doing. On January 16, 1975, the president mentioned at an off-the-record lunch with editors and writers from the New York Times that the CIA had been involved in assassinations. On February 28, Daniel Schorr of CBS News took to the airwaves with this blockbuster revelation.5

  By this time, Ford had already appointed an eight-person commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to study the CIA’s dubious activities. In early 1975, both the House and the Senate created select committees to hold hearings on the intelligence community: the Senate panel under Senator Frank Church of Idaho, its House counterpart under Congressman Otis Pike of New York.

  All of these investigations, coming in the wake of the Watergate scandal, would combine to make 1975 the “Year of Intelligence,” that is, the year when the future of the intelligence community hung in the balance. At the start of the year, it hardly seemed far-fetched to imagine that the result could be the abolishment of the CIA. Ed Lansdale was not alone among old CIA hands in thinking that, as he wrote to Charles “Bo” Bohannan, “We are seeing the subtle wreckage of some national necessities that we hold dear, being done by a new breed of terrible infants. Hardly a noble sight.”6 In March 1975, he foresaw a “witch hunt on intelligence”: “I suspect we’re in for a lull before the storm, the latter coming when the Hill committees start vying for publicity. I imagine that our friend Luigi [Lou Conein] might get caught up in their meshes then. I doubt that I will.”7

  Lansdale was right to expect a storm ahead. But he was wrong in thinking that he could avoid being drenched.

  WITHIN WEEKS of writing that letter, Lansdale was summoned in March 1975 for his first, informal interview with David W. Belin, a bow-tied attorney from Iowa who was the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission. “Seems he wanted to know what I know about assassination attempts on Fidel Castro,” Lansdale wrote afterward. “I told him I knew of contingency planning, but no actual operations being attempted. . . . It struck me as a bit of Alice in Wonderland narrative. As far as I know, nobody seriously tried to bump off Castro under U.S. orders.”8

  Lansdale was probably displaying ignorance rather than duplicity in denying that anyone “tried to bump off Castro.” Even though Lansdale had been executive director of Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s gun-toting liaison officer William King Harvey had kept Lansdale in the dark about his attempts to induce mobsters to assassinate Castro. Few would believe, however, that Lansdale was innocent in this whole disreputable business. He would spend the next several months, as South Vietnam was in its death throes, being repeatedly questioned not only by Rockefeller Commission investigators but also by reporters and the Church Committee about his role in plots against Castro.

  Two weeks after the fall of Saigon, on May 16, 1975, Lansdale was questioned again by David Belin, this time under oath. The deposition took place at 712 Jackson Place, an ornate townhouse across the street from the White House that was being used by the Rockefeller Commission as its offices. The questioning centered on a memorandum Lansdale had written on August 13, 1962, listing among various policy options the “liquidation of leaders”—words that Lansdale had excised from subsequent drafts after Bill Harvey became incensed at this breach of security. Lansdale told Belin, “I just don’t recall anything at all on liquidation of leaders,” but he did not deny that “there might well have been” a request for such an option. As for where such a request could have come from, Lansdale said, “Probably the president of the United States.”9

  The Rockefeller Commission finished its work on June 6, 1975, with a public report that found that “the great majority of the CIA’s domestic activities comply with its statutory authority” but that it had “engaged in some activities that should be criticized and not permitted to happen again.”10 The topic of assassination was relegated to a secret annex. The commission then turned over the entire assassination file to the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence. Its eleven members and 150 staff were more than happy to take this information and run with it.

  THE COMMITTEE chairman, Frank Church, was only fifty-one years old and still had a boyish, slightly puffy face and a thick head of hair. But he had already served in the Senate for nineteen years and was preparing to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. Like Lansdale, he had joined Army intelligence during World War II and shipped out to Asia in 1945—in his case, China rather than the Philippines. From this experience he drew conclusions very different from those of the “Ugly American.” Lansdale believed that the United States had to help the people of Asia maintain their freedom from Communism. By contrast, Church was convinced that nationalism, rather than communism, was “the great force of our times” and that the United States should not repeat the mistakes of the old colonial powers in opposing nationalist movements. In 1961, Church wrote an article arguing that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were not transportable abroad—the very opposite of what Lansdale believed. “We are an alien in Asia,” he warned, “a suspect, rich power, the only one that remains after the others have fled.”11 Lansdale was an idealist and interventionist. Church was a progressive isolationist in the mold of his boyhood hero, Senator William Borah of Idaho, a fixture in Washington from 1907 to 1940.12

  First elected to the Senate at the age of thirty-two, in 1956, Church acquired a reputation as a gifted orator and a devoted family man—but also for being egotistical and self-righteous, constantly seeking the spotlight, and being aloof from his colleagues. He was no Lyndon Johnson–style backslapper, and he was not well liked in the clubby atmosphere of the Upper House. During the 1960s, he became an increasingly vocal opponent of the Vietnam War—much to the consternation of President Johnson. He introduced a series of amendments that gradually forced an American military pullout from Southeast Asia. But Church frustrated those of more radical views, including his own son, by being willing to work within the system for change and seeking compromise with Republicans where possible.

  Church and the committee’s vice chairman, Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, negotiated an agreement with Bill Colby, who agreed to provide virtually unlimited information from the CIA as long as the committee took appropriate safeguards to keep it secret. The committee’s cavernous offices in the Dirksen Senate Office Building were guarded around the clock by armed Capitol police and stocked with heavy combination safes.13

  Being as eager for publicity as the average senator, if not more so, Frank Church focused the committee’s initial inquiries on the sexiest topic available: assassinations. On Monday, July 7, 1975, Lansdale met for hours with the committee staff to discuss his participation in anti-Castro plots. The following day, it was time for the main event—a hearing in which Lansdale would testify before the senators. This spectacle would not be televised or even open to the public. It would take place in executive session in room S407, a small, out-of-the-way hearing room located directly beneath the Cap
itol dome. “The low ceiling, windowless walls, and heavily insulated silence—disturbed only by the hum of fluorescent lights—gave S407 a bunkerlike atmosphere,” noted one of the committee staffers. The senators “sat in red leather armchairs around a curved bench.” The witness sat at a small table in the middle.14 Lansdale took his place at the witness table, which previously had been occupied by Bill Colby, Bill Harvey, and Lou Conein, among others, shortly before 2 p.m. on Tuesday, July 8. He would not leave until nearly 6 p.m.

  The initial questioning was conducted by the committee’s chief counsel, F. A. O. “Fritz” Schwarz, an “aggressive and strongly opinionated” litigator from a major New York law firm and scion of the toy store dynasty that had been founded by his grandfather.15 Soon, committee members joined in. Particularly aggressive were Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, a liberal Republican, and Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, a more conservative Republican who had gained fame on the Watergate committee for asking witnesses, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

  Lansdale testified that neither President Kennedy nor his brother Robert F. Kennedy had ever spoken to him about assassinating Castro. He admitted to having asked the CIA to investigate the “feasibility of the assassination of Castro,” but denied that anyone had ever told him that an operation to kill the Cuban leader was actually under way.