Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Night of the Vampires

  As a veteran guerrilla himself, Magsaysay instructed his commanders to forget all they had been taught: ‘Gentlemen, I know you all have graduated from military establishments here and in the United States. Now I am telling you to forget everything you were taught at Fort Leavenworth, Fort Benning, and the Academy [at West Point]. The Huks are fighting an unorthodox war. We are going to combat them in unorthodox ways. Whatever it was that hurt me as a guerrilla is what we are going to do now to the Huks.’ They rather than the Philippine Communist Party were evidently the enemy. The Constabulary were brought under army control and large-scale operations were replaced by the constant pressure of smaller units.19

  Lansdale made his own unorthodox contributions. One of his earliest suggestions was to introduce doctored ammunition and faulty hand grenades into the military supply system, knowing that soldiers sold such materials to the Huks. Lansdale claimed that this stopped once Huks were blown up with their own grenades or had rifles explode in their face.20 It is a truism of revolutionary warfare that guerrillas command the night, while counter-insurgency troops dominate the day. The night was when the guerrillas ventured into populated areas, extorted levies of money or food, conducted kangaroo courts or proselytized their creed. Lansdale brought all the black arts of psychological warfare to bear on both the guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers. His favourite Filipino instruments were the 7th Battalion Combat Teams commanded by Colonel Napoleon Valeriano, once the leader of the notorious Skull Squadron. One of the teams, known as Force X, disguised themselves as Huk guerrillas carrying men supposedly wounded in a staged battle with police to get close to real Huk groups. Over a few weeks they killed over a hundred Huks, and induced two Huk units to shoot each other to pieces, each thinking the other was Force X. Lansdale also fitted Piper aircraft with Second World War-surplus naval loudhailers to broadcast messages to the Huks and their village sympathizers. As already noted, the content of these broadcasts could be unnervingly specific:

  You hiding down there. We see you. Yes, I mean you in Squadron 17. I mean you Commander Sol. I mean you, Juan Santos. And you Bulacan Boy. And you, Pepe and Ramon and Emiliano. Borro and Dario, Carmelo and Baby. We know all about you. We are coming to kill you. Stay there. And now I must go while our troops are coming to attack you. To our secret friend in your ranks I say thank you! Run and hide so you won’t be killed. Sorry I can’t call you by name but you know who I mean. Thank you and goodbye.21

  This not only caused Squadron 17 to relocate in panic but also triggered a witch-hunt for the fictional ‘friends’ within their ranks who had revealed such information. Lansdale had the further bright idea of making the ‘eye of god’ an icon, based on the all-seeing Masonic eye on the US dollar bill. Once he had produced a suitably menacing version, Philippine army troops were instructed to sneak into villages at night and paint the all-seeing eye on walls. Villagers would awake to find it glaring at them, the shock multiplied by a profound peasant belief in evil spirits so widespread that even Huk guerrillas wore amulets to ward them off.

  Building on the success of the ‘eye of god’ campaign, Lansdale exploited the notoriety of an old soothsayer called Ilocos Norte, who had accurately predicted the death of President Roxas. Taking the old man’s name in vain, Lansdale had it rumoured that Norte had said that men with evil in their hearts would perish in the fangs of a local vampire called an asuang. One night soldiers seized the last man of a Huk column entering a village from a jungle trail, throttled him and made two punctures in his neck before hanging him by his heels to drain off his blood. In the morning the Huks came across the blanched body sprawled across their trail and fled the area. Lansdale also did his best to curb indiscriminate killing. On one occasion he accompanied a unit which captured, killed and decapitated a Huk guerrilla. Seizing the head, Lansdale began to ask it questions, to which, obviously enough, there were no answers. He grew angrier and started slapping the head, until the Filipinos piped up: ‘Colonel, Colonel, it is dead. It cannot talk to you.’ Lansdale rounded on them: ‘No, you stupid son of a bitch! Of course it can’t! But it could have, if you hadn’t been so fucking stupid as to sever the head from the body!’ He threw the head to the ground.22

  Feeding primitive fears and causing the Huks to doubt themselves was only part of Lansdale’s strategy. The other part was to encourage Huk defectors and to win over the peasant population. Cash rewards were used to encourage informants, while Huks were encouraged to give up after Magsaysay promised a general amnesty for past crimes. Lansdale and Magsaysay were acutely aware that the peasants had turned to violence because of a lack of land and justice. Justice was easier to provide: Magsaysay deputed military lawyers serving in the judge advocate’s department of the army to represent peasants pro bono in provincial courts, which tipped the balance in a system previously weighted against them. The Chinese business community, deeply grateful to Lansdale for curtailing police extortion, was prevailed on to advance peasant farmers affordable loans, further curtailing the power of the big landowners. The land issue itself was addressed by a variant of the ancient Roman system of military colonies, which became the template for an Economic Development Corporation established in late 1950. Army units were posted to remote areas of southerly Mindanao and encouraged to develop agricultural plots which became their property once the conscripts had completed their term of service. Some of the plots were reserved for captured or surrendered Huks and their sympathizers, who found themselves farming alongside men of unimpeachable loyalty to the government.

  Many Huk prisoners did not want to become farmers, and vocational training in such trades as carpentry or mechanics was laid on within their detention camps. Attention was drawn to the fact that one of the trainees had tried to assassinate Magsaysay, symbolic of forgiveness of past sins to the truly repentant from the highest level.23 Lansdale also attacked the high moral ground claimed by the Huks by publicizing the fate of babies abandoned when the Huks had to make a rapid retreat from a threatened camp. The plight of these ‘Huklings’ did much to discredit the Huk ‘Amazons’, whose neglect and abandonment of their young was underlined by photographs showing the children being tended by army nurses or by soldiers armed with milk bottles, and gazed on lovingly by Magsaysay’s fetching daughter Teresita.24

  Lansdale’s larger aim of getting Magsaysay elected president required resolving one of the Huks’ key recruiting grievances. In 1949 the Huks had used the slogan ‘Your ballot isn’t counted. Join us and use a gun to get a new government. It’s the only way.’ In fact one of Magsaysay’s political associates had been tortured and murdered during that notorious election, and a picture of him cradling the mangled body was used when he subsequently bid for the presidency. As a preparatory step Lansdale determined to prevent fraud and intimidation in the elections of December 1951 – while still ensuring a favourable outcome – when a third of the seats in the Senate and many local elected posts were in play.25 Summoning US experts to help him prevent electoral fraud Lansdale created a new National Movement for Free Elections to teach voters how to leave clear thumbprints on their polling card to avoid the ballots being disqualified, and to take pictures of government thugs loitering around polling stations. The lay organization Catholic Action deployed the discreet power of the Roman Catholic Church, while the no less influential Iglesia ni Kristo did the same among evangelical Protestants.

  At a time when President Quirino was out of the country on one of many trips to the US for medical treatment, Lansdale persuaded Magsaysay to substitute his soldiers for the police supposedly guarding the polling stations. A million more people voted in 1951 than in 1949 and the results were gratifying. The presence of the soldiers undoubtedly strengthened the vote for those candidates favoured by Magsaysay, without the traditional coercion. Even the ‘Huk’ leaflets that Lansdale and his team had printed inside Clark Air Force Base in fact reflected a genuine call by the Communists to boycott the elections.
Thoroughly manipulated by the Americans though it was, the election almost certainly reflected genuine public opinion.

  However accomplished at engineering elections, Lansdale could have done nothing without the political astuteness of Magsaysay, who decided to run in 1952 as the Nacionalista candidate, even though until then he had been a Liberal. This swung some members of the traditional elites behind him and Lansdale kept a copy of a secret agreement by which the Nacionalista barons would be allowed to nominate most of the cabinet in US Ambassador Raymond Spruance’s safe. Meanwhile he set about raising Magsaysay’s profile in the US, planting a puff piece in the New York Times and persuading the magazines Newsweek, Fortune and Time to run cover stories of the tough guy with a heart of gold running for the Filipino presidency. The local news media were even easier to nobble, as Americans owned three of Manila’s main newspapers and the Voice of America controlled twelve of the country’s forty-one radio stations. Major US corporations active in the Philippines such as Coca-Cola were also encouraged to make campaign contributions, much of it in untraceable cash.

  The distinctive hucksterish flavour of the 1952 election was provided by Lansdale, employing standard US electoral techniques. A ‘Magsaysay is my guy’ button soon adorned many chests, and Lansdale composed a ‘Magsaysay Mambo’ as well as the hugely popular ‘Magsaysay March’:

  We want the bell of liberty

  Ringing for us once more;

  We want the people’s will to be

  Free as it was before!

  We want our native land to lie

  Peaceful and clean again;

  We want our nation guided by

  God-fearing honest men!

  Men who’ll serve without the nerve

  To cheat eternally;

  Who’ll do the job and never rob

  The public treasury!

  Only the man of destiny

  Our need will satisfy;

  This is the cry for you and me;

  We want Magsaysay!26

  Although the candidate was being sold as an antidote to endemic corruption, Lansdale had at his disposal a secret CIA fund of $500,000 as well as movie cameras, projectors and sound trucks provided by the Agency. He also employed a full range of dirty tricks to counter the dirty tricks of Quirino’s supporters, including incapacitating their speakers with drugs before they were due to make major speeches.27 His hyperactivity was not without risk, and on several occasions he narrowly avoided being beaten up or killed by gangsters sent by Tony, the President’s brother and chief enforcer. Quirino himself tried to get Ambassador Spruance recalled and Lansdale sacked, openly referring to him as the ‘mastermind’ of ‘an American Army party organized to foist a “man on horseback” on the Filipinos’.

  The dangers (and the accusation) were sufficiently well founded to cause Spruance – clearly an ambassador with clout – to reassign Lansdale to the lowly post of assistant to the underemployed historian attached to Clark Air Force Base, whence he continued to direct his covert activities until six weeks before the election. He took a working vacation in Indochina, which was to be his next major assignment, before returning to Manila to watch Magsaysay win the election with nearly three million votes to Quirino’s 1,313,991. Seventy per cent of the votes in Huklandia went to Magsaysay. The Indian Ambassador wittily suggested that ‘a certain American’ should change his name to ‘Colonel Landslide’. Just in case Quirino decided not to go quietly, the USS Wasp battle group appeared off the coast of the Philippines.

  The Huk rebellion petered out by 1955, with the capture, surrender and imprisonment of many Huk leaders. A mistake often made in reviewing counter-insurgency campaigns is to focus on what the winning side did right, without giving due weight to what the losers did to undermine their own cause. The Huk rising against the Japanese had been a visceral response to occupation by an alien and brutal enemy. Things were not so clear cut in a civil war that divided a society with densely meshed kinship structures, in which a policeman might be a rebel’s cousin. When, in April 1949, a Huk unit ambushed and killed Aurora Quezón, the widow of the exiled wartime President, and her daughter as well as several government officials, it was a seriously damaging blunder.

  But the insurgency dealt itself a death blow in late 1950, after Magsaysay had rounded up virtually the entire leadership of the Communist Party in Manila, including its leader Jose Lava. It is worth noting that this coup depended on intelligence gathering put in place by Quirino, for one should not exaggerate Magsaysay’s contribution. Lava’s brother Jesus took over as general secretary and promptly fell out with Luis Taruc, the Huk head of military operations, over revolutionary strategy. Divorced from the political leadership and sensing that the Huks were forfeiting the support of the barrios through increasingly onerous exactions, Taruc tried to initiate peace negotiations through the young journalist and future charismatic political leader Benigno Aquino. Under sentence of death for deviationism, Taruc eventually surrendered to the government. He would spend twelve years imprisoned until he was pardoned in 1968 by Ferdinand Marcos, his published memoirs in the interim inspiring Nelson Mandela, leader of the armed wing of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC).28 Taruc’s testimony on internal Huk discipline was revealing:

  A young nurse named Lita asked permission to go home, to rest and recuperate and to get a new supply of clothes. She was suspected of planning to surrender and was ‘liquidated’ on the orders of the leaders . . . A Huk women’s organizer who was known as a nagger was liquidated by a fellow Huk, allegedly for suggesting that her husband surrender. But it seems that he had grown tired of her nagging and was then living with another woman. Her brother, a Huk commander, turned against the movement when he learned of the murder . . . A minor error of an eighteen-year-old girl who was the number two of a cadre caused her death. She had committed her ‘crime’ when she had fallen into the hands of government troops and was interrogated [and] she revealed the address where she slept when she visited a nearby barrio. The storeowner was not killed and there were no official repercussions of any sort. But still, she was shot without a trial . . . Executed with her was a platoon commander of the GHQ security force named Etti. He had fallen ill one day and left his post, after appointing his assistant to take over. He was court-martialled, charged with dereliction of duty, and executed by a firing squad . . . Half a dozen young boys were executed for similar offences.29

  Since the Philippines are an oceanic archipelago there were no foreign sanctuaries where exhausted fighters could recuperate. Even within the Philippines the Huks were never very successful in extending their operations to islands south of Luzon, especially after one expeditionary team raped a local woman. Although there were unconfirmed reports of Chinese agents, in reality there was no external Communist involvement, except for occasional supportive articles in Soviet magazines. The US and Philippines had much history in common, and Filipino admiration for US institutions extended well into the ranks of the Huks. There was a unity of purpose in how the US dealt with the Philippines, which contrasted with the bitter domestic divisions over China. The US also directed huge sums of money into the Philippines, including from 1951–6 some $383 million in economic assistance, and a further $117 million in military aid. This was on top of around $700 million in reconstruction funds in 1946–50, although much of that was embezzled before the US learned how to target aid more discriminately. The US armed the Philippine army with modern weapons and deployed its own air power in their support.

  Helped by American advisers, Magsaysay’s reformed Filipino army also killed more Huks with less indiscriminate violence meted out to civilians, innocent or culpable. Between 1950 and 1955, the army claimed to have killed 6,000 Huks, with a further 2,000 wounded, 4,700 captured and 9,500 who voluntarily surrendered.30 Relentless pursuit by the Filipino military isolated the Huks from their sources of supply in the barrios, and left them grubbing for food in the mountai
ns or swamps. William Pomeroy, a former US soldier and war correspondent who joined the Huks, reported that he and his wife Celia Mariano were starving for months on end. Many Huks with less iron will than the Pomeroys were worn out by such an existence, in which betrayal and violent death were never far away. The fact that the Huks lacked a rear area in a neighbouring country critically impacted on their ability to withdraw to recover strength.

  But above all the rise of Magsaysay confused many of the Huks’ peasant supporters, as he seemed to promise (and practised) the simple virtues which had led them to support the guerrillas. He spoke to their concerns in ways that the elite Marxist intellectuals of the Communist Party who had latched on to the pre-existing peasant movement did not. Like Lansdale’s all-seeing eye, Magsaysay’s presence was felt everywhere, working to stimulate the dormant conscience of even a humble postmaster contemplating stealing a few stamps.

  Sadly, once he was in power Magsaysay found himself shackled by the deal with the old landowning elite brokered by Lansdale. It was not he and the Americans who had tricked them, but they and the Americans who had tricked him. He could not keep the promises made to get him elected and the betrayal pained him until his death, when his presidential aeroplane crashed into Mount Manunggal on Cebu in March 1957. The Americans were not about to tolerate structural reforms in the country that was the keystone of their policy of containment in Asia, least of all at a time when they were being drawn into the strategic black hole created by French defeat in Indochina.