by Max Boot
The major difficulty that Lansdale encountered came when the senators asked him about interviews he had given to the press suggesting that he was aware of Bobby Kennedy’s complicity. On July 3, the Washington Star had run a headline: “Lansdale Names RFK in Castro Plot.” The story, by the reporter Jeremiah O’Leary, confirmed an interview Lansdale had given to the Associated Press reporter David Martin on May 31. The AP article quoted him as replying “in the affirmative to the specific question of whether assassination was one of the means he considered.” It also quoted him as saying, “I was working for the highest authority in the land. . . . It was the president.” Lansdale told Martin that he did not deal directly with JFK but rather through an intermediary. Asked whether that intermediary was National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Lansdale replied, “No, it was someone much more intimate.” He told Martin, off the record, that he was referring to Robert Kennedy.
Asked by the Church Committee to reconcile those interviews with his sworn statement that Bobby Kennedy had not ordered him to kill Castro, Lansdale claimed the reporters misquoted him. “I never did receive any order from President Kennedy or from the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy—no order about taking action against Castro personally.”16 The committee subsequently called in both O’Leary and Martin to swear under oath that the accounts they had written were accurate. How to reconcile Lansdale’s divergent statements?
He was telling the truth, but not the whole truth, when he told the Church Committee that neither of the Kennedy brothers had directly ordered him to kill Castro. They would never do something so . . . gauche! But the bulk of the evidence suggested that, as Lansdale told O’Leary and Martin, the Kennedy brothers were aware of the plots and did not object. It is unclear why, in testifying before the committee, Lansdale recoiled from drawing the obvious inference about the Kennedys’ complicity, but he may have been trying to tamp down the outrage he heard from Kennedy partisans after his interviews were published. Robert McNamara, who had never cared for Lansdale, blasted him in his own testimony to the Church Committee “for what I consider loose and irresponsible and at times contradictory testimony in the press. . . . I am damn annoyed at the damage he has done to dead people.”17 McNamara was, of course, being less than truthful in denying his own support and the Kennedys’ for Castro’s assassination. The myth of Camelot died hard.
Joseph diGenova, a future U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who was then a young lawyer on the Church Committee’s minority staff, recalled that Lansdale “did a good job,” although he was not as much of a showman as Bill Harvey had been during his testimony. “Lansdale did not want to be there, but he came,” diGenova said. “I don’t remember anyone pouncing on him or grilling him. He was treated very respectfully.”18 Lansdale’s own recollection was less favorable:
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. I had two long days of it—the first with staff and the committee’s legal counsels and the second with the committee itself—with questions being shot at me by the majority and minority counsels as well as the 13 senators. I think some of them had been watching too many Perry Mason shows on TV or the old Watergate trials. From the way they tried to badger and intimidate me about minutia from 13 years ago—getting sarcastic when I couldn’t remember who said what at a meeting, I must admit I did a little lecturing in return, although I barely kept my temper at some of the nastier questions.19
It was hardly surprising that Lansdale had such a negative reaction. It was the first time he had testified to Congress since leaving his Pentagon position in 1963, and in those days he was used to far more genteel treatment at the hands of deferential lawmakers.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE continued its investigation into the fall. On September 16, 1975, it held its first televised hearing. The highlight was Chairman Church, in the glare of klieg lights, holding up a dart gun that Colby had obligingly provided to him from the CIA’s vaults—a weapon that could have been, but never was, used to kill someone. This caused a media sensation, but by the third day public interest had waned, with Church’s biographers noting that “seats in the huge room were half empty, and many reporters had turned to other stories.”20
The committee’s report, entitled “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” was publicly released on November 21, 1975, over the protests of President Ford. The major finding was incontrovertible: “The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots.”21 On the crucial issue of whether these assassination attempts had been authorized by the president, the committee equivocated; the hallowed doctrine of “plausible deniability” made it impossible definitively to ascribe ultimate responsibility for the CIA’s most sensitive operations.22
From Lansdale’s standpoint, the major interest in the committee report lay in the fact that it provided the fullest public accounting yet of Operation Mongoose and his role in it—something that he had tried to keep hidden from even his closest associates. Given that Mongoose had been a failure, the details that now emerged were hardly flattering. A footnote on page 143 of the committee report, which was to be much quoted in newspaper accounts, recounted the CIA officer Tom Parrott’s sarcastic testimony about Lansdale’s “Elimination by Illumination” scheme—that is, having a U.S. submarine surface off the coast of Cuba to shoot star shells into the night sky to convince Cubans that “the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro.” Lansdale indignantly fired off a letter to Church assuring him “that this is absolutely untrue.”23 In fact, as we have seen, it was true. Lansdale had either forgotten, or was lying about, a classified memorandum he had written on October 15, 1962, that proposed just such a scheme. The publicity that this scheme received did further damage to Lansdale’s already frayed reputation. By 1975, at the height of détente, few remembered how prevalent such “nutty schemes” had been during World War II and the early days of the Cold War, when a feeling of wartime necessity prevailed. Lansdale was suffering the public humiliation that could just as easily have been meted out to numerous others.
After digesting the Church Committee report, Lansdale wrote to Bohannan, “It’s fascinating reading—even astonishing reading in some places since it made me squirm to see some of the things in public print that are in this. Nauseating to see how far some of our politicos and journalists go to serve their own selfish interests and to hell with our country’s needs!”24
Many Americans shared Landale’s misgivings about the exposure of the intelligence community’s darkest secrets. The chorus of indignation grew when Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was assassinated by Marxist terrorists on December 23, 1976, after having been publicly outed in Greek newspapers and in Philip Agee’s magazine CounterSpy. Critics of the Church Committee accused it of contributing to Welch’s death, even though it had been careful not to publicly name any clandestine operatives. “In the Washington area, the swing is definitely that Congress and the press have been naïve, stupid, and unfair,” Lansdale wrote in January 1976.25 The House, appalled at the Pike Committee’s indiscriminate release of classified information, voted against publicly releasing its report on the CIA. (It wound up being leaked to the Village Voice.) The Church Committee released a final report on April 26, 1976, but it had, as the New York Times noted, “few disclosures.”26 In a rebuke to CIA critics, the committee concluded that the CIA “is not ‘out of control.’ ”27
The thrust of the committee’s findings was that there needed to be better controls on the intelligence agencies. This led the House and Senate in 1976 to set up permanent intelligence oversight committees—an arrangement that wound up working reasonably well. The “Year of Intelligence” led to other reforms, including legal limitations on domestic surveillance and an executive order prohibiting political assassinations, that, with some modifications, have stood the test of tim
e. But the cost of these convulsions was real—and it would only grow when veteran operatives were sent into the cold.
Sensitive operations that were perfectly legal, such as the construction of a ship called the Glomar Explorer to raise a Russian submarine off the ocean floor, were blown and morale at the CIA plummeted. The swashbuckling spirit displayed by Lansdale and other early Cold Warriors gave way to what Henry Kissinger described as “cramped caution”: “It became far easier and safer to bury oneself in bureaucratic paperwork than to stick one’s neck out in a profession in which the risks at home sometimes exceeded those in the field.”28 The CIA’s capacity for both covert action and intelligence gathering declined, with Lansdale lamenting in 1979, the year of the Iranian hostage crisis,“We no longer seem to have any operators worth their salt left in the old Company.”29
It would take the CIA years to recover. But that was no longer Lansdale’s direct concern. Having retired for good, he was now out in the cold himself.
37
The End of the Road
We shall not see his like again, but his ideas shall never die.
—RUFUS PHILLIPS
THE Church Committee hearings in 1975 represented Edward Lansdale’s last painful turn in the public spotlight.
At the instigation of his new wife, now known as Pat Lansdale, he tried halfheartedly to land the job of ambassador to the Philippines from Jimmy Carter, who narrowly defeated Gerald Ford in the 1976 election. In early 1977, Lansdale wrote to the Democratic Party elder W. Averell Harriman, one of the leaders of the anti-Diem faction in the Kennedy administration, “Although I’ve just turned 69, I’m in good health and spirits—and would welcome a chance to serve our country among the Filipino people, for whom I have a deep affection.” But even Lansdale was aware of how radioactive he was, especially in light of the revelations about Operation Mongoose. An ambassadorial appointment, he conceded, might stir a contentious confirmation battle and could even “strengthen the suspicions of President Marcos that Americans have been behind the plots to assassinate him and were sending me out to supervise such a task.” Accordingly, Lansdale suggested, he would be satisfied to be a special envoy or assistant to the ambassador—or to take any other job that “could make honorable use of my long-time ties among the Filipino people.”1
The lack of reply to his letter was a clear indication of the fact—hardly surprising—that the Carter administration had no use for his services. Lansdale took the hint and refrained from trying to gain any other governmental position.
IN THE midst of the Church Committee investigations, Pat and Ed, living comfortably, if hardly luxuriously, on their government pensions, moved in June 1975 from Alexandria to 2008 Lorraine Avenue in McLean, Virginia, a home on a winding street located closer to Washington. Founded in 1910, McLean was one of Washington’s wealthiest suburbs. Its close proximity to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, which had opened in 1961, had turned it into Spook Central, with bars such as O’Toole’s (jocularly referred to as the McLean Cultural Center) that were frequented by active-duty and retired intelligence officers.2 Lansdale fit right in among old friends such as Rufus Phillips, Lucien Conein, Joseph Baker, and Nick Arundel.
Ed’s Filipina bride was rapidly adjusting to life in the United States, although she was still thrilled by new experiences such as snowfalls. “Wonder if Pat will ever get her fill of seeing snow?” Ed wrote during the winter of 1975. “She’s like a little kid every time it snows.”3 Whereas Ed’s first wife, Helen, had never learned to drive, Pat approached the task with gusto, learning behind the wheel of a 1975 Mustang II that Ed bought for her. “[Ed] secretly hopes that with a car to take me around shopping, I will be out of his hair and leave him alone with Vietnam problems,” Pat wrote to friends in the Philippines. “As usual, he is wrong about me.”4
Ed and Pat traveled regularly, taking long drives across the country—to the South, West, Midwest, New England—so that Ed could give speeches at institutions such as the Air Force Academy or Air War College, and they could take in the sights. There were also annual reunions of Ed and his three brothers along with their spouses and children. And there were weeks spent at a small beach cottage that Ed and Pat built in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wright Brothers had launched the age of aviation.
While Pat did not play the role of grandmother to Ed’s five grandchildren—she had four grandchildren of her own in the Philippines—he was a doting grandfather who tried to make up for all the time he had been absent during his own boys’ lives. Pat, for her part, spent a few months every year in the Philippines visiting with her daughter and grandchildren. Ed joined her only once, in 1974. Having spent so much of his career overseas, he now preferred to stay at home.
While apart, Pat and Ed wrote touching letters about how much they missed each other. On July 4, 1977, their fourth wedding anniversary, Ed surprised Pat in Manila with the gift of an anniversary cake and two dozen yellow roses—along with an overseas phone call, which was still an expensive luxury in those days. “Your voice is still the same as the very first time I heard it on the phone, a million years ago . . . ,” she wrote back. “I love you very much, just as I have all these past years and instead of waning, it’s getting to be more and more strong.”5
Back home, recalled Pete Lansdale, the married couple would get up late, spend a “quiet, lazy morning” together, play Scrabble for an hour or two, walk their dog, Canbo, and generally enjoy each other’s company.6 Ed spent the rest of his time either preparing for lectures, meeting with friends from the Philippines and Vietnam to swap stories about the “old days,” or answering a flurry of questions from historians, documentary filmmakers, and even a biographer—Cecil Currey, a chaplain in the Army Reserves and professor of history at the University of South Florida, who, at Pat’s urging, secured Ed’s cooperation to work on a biography in the 1980s. “One of the graduate students who write me letters noted that there is poison in some of the writing about Vietnam,” Ed wrote to Pat in 1979. “I guess maybe that’s why I keep working at trying to get a straight account of it made. I sure see the poison of some of the things said about me. Maybe I’ll never be able to get it all antidoted with truth.”7 He never did get the truth out to his satisfaction.
THE HISTORIC election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated a renewed push to win the Cold War. In the process there was revived interest in Edward Lansdale and his teachings, with some Reaganites eager to apply lessons from his days in the Philippines and Vietnam to fresh fights against Communist forces in Latin America—specifically, the FLMN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) in El Salvador and the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua.
Lansdale’s chief champion was a Special Forces reservist, Major F. Andy Messing Jr., who had served in Vietnam. He started a lobbying group called the National Defense Council, whose motto was “In Defense of Free Enterprise, Country and Constitution”; its chairman was “B-1” Bob Dornan, a hawkish Republican congressman from Orange County, California. Messing had read In the Midst of Wars, and on a whim in 1980 he called Lansdale up—he was listed in the phone directory—and then, at Lansdale’s invitation, drove out to McLean to meet him. Pat served finger sandwiches and soft drinks, and they began talking. “Whatever he said was brilliant and on-target,” Messing recalled, and “it was like E. F. Hutton, everyone listened.”8 Messing became a ceaseless preacher for Lansdale’s methods of fighting “low-intensity conflict,” the preferred name at the time for wars involving guerrillas. “The key to solving such conflicts,” he wrote, “is to address simultaneously the social, political, economic and military concerns of the countries in conflict.”9
Messing was a well-connected player within the Reagan administration. His friends included an obscure, square-jawed Marine officer, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, then laboring quietly on the National Security Council staff, and retired Major General John K. “Jack” Singlaub, like Lansdale a graduate of UCLA and a onetime OSS operative who had been relieved of d
uty in 1977 after publicly criticizing President Jimmy Carter’s call to withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea. Through Messing, Lansdale met both North and Singlaub. “I considered Lansdale a real hero,” Singlaub later said.10 North, too, was an admirer, and the attraction was mutual. When North was fired from the NSC in 1986 for his part in the Iran-contra affair—selling arms to Iran to win the release of American hostages and using the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan insurgents, known as the contras, in violation of the Boland Act—Lansdale lamented, “He’s a very decent guy and used good initiative on the NSC staff. Friends of mine have claimed that he is simply a current copy of me in today’s government.”11 But whereas Lansdale had also been a maverick, he had not violated the law and lied about his activities; if anything, he had a tendency to be too honest.
In 1984, Fred Iklé, the under secretary of defense for policy, asked Singlaub to convene a panel of outside advisers to provide advice on counterinsurgency in El Salvador. Lansdale, by then seventy-six years old, was among the ten experts who spent a couple of days at the Pentagon, May 22–23, 1984, getting briefed on the situation and providing their recommendations.12 Lansdale argued, as did other panel members, against sending U.S. combat forces or heavy weapons. “I don’t think conventional forces work,” he said.13 He and other panel members advocated keeping U.S. Special Forces in the lead and pressuring the government in San Salvador to crack down on corruption and human-rights abuses to address the “potent political element of the guerrillas.” “Ideas, not bullets, are needed to defeat this element of any Communist insurgency,” Lansdale counseled, just as he had in Vietnam and the Philippines.14
