-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Marcos Dynasty
Sterling Seagrave�1988
Harper & Row, Inc
ISBN 0-06-015815-8
out-of-print
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Six
COWBOYS IN THE PALACE
IT WAS A BIT LATE in the day when President Truman received the following
top-secret report from his National Security Council:
Failure of the Philippines to maintain independence would discredit the U.S.
in the eyes of the world and seriously decrease U.S. influence, particularly
in Asia.... Although on the basis of military factors alone the Huks lack the
capability to acquire control ... their continued existence, growth, and
activities reflect the ineffectiveness of the Philippine armed forces and the
generally unsatisfactory social, economic, and political situation in the
Philippines.... Denial of the Philippines to communist control depends not
only upon military measures but even more upon prompt vigorous political and
economic action.... Inequalities in the Philippines, always large, have
become greater during the past few years while the standard of living of the
mass of people has not reached the pre-war level. The profits of businessmen
and the incomes of large land owners have risen considerably. The
deterioration of the economic system has caused a widespread feeling of
disillusionment.... The communist-led Huk movement has taken advantage of the
deteriorating economic situation and exploited the antagonistic attitudes of
the people toward the government in order to incite lawlessness and
disorder.... The extent and manner in which the necessary influence is
brought to bear on the Philippine Government to accomplish essential reforms
presents to the U.S. Government a most difficult and delicate problem.
Extreme care must therefore be exercised in the methods used to persuade the
Philippine Government to take the necessary action, to do nothing would
result in disaster.
This refreshingly candid report acknowledged that half a century of American
colonial rule had resulted in dismal failure. Living conditions were much
worse for the majority of Filipinos, while the handful of rich had become
very much richer, encouraged by MacArthur's postwar favoritism. The economy
was being abused and exploited by those MacArthur had put in power, and most
Filipinos had lost any hope of reform. Misery, desperation, and antagonism
were creating a dangerous situation, which was being exploited by the
Communist leadership of the Huks. The Huks were not a serious danger, the
report noted emphatically, because they were in no position to seize power.
But the Philippine Army was incompetent, the government was corrupt, and the
country could simply fall apart. If something was not done soon, Washington
would be embarrassed.
This warning was sounded in 1950, but it could just as well have been the
1980s. All Washington's efforts during the intervening decades were expensive
failures. Disinformation campaigns portrayed the crisis as a bold struggle
against communism, which it never was. No matter how many crash efforts were
mounted, they failed for the same reason. Under U.S. colonial rule,
expediency always overruled principle�a lesson not lost on Filipinos, who
demonstrated an uncanny knack for caricature.
The cure recommended by the NSC report was to introduce "essential reforms."
Instead, expediency triumphed again. To rescue a thoroughly corrupt regime of
its own invention, and to protect privileged U.S. investment, America
returned to Manila clandestinely. The CIA and the Pentagon stepped into the
breach and once again made a fool of Tom Paine.
World War II had been America's first heady experience in largescale covert
operations. When the war ended, Truman disbanded the OSS on the grounds that
paramilitary operations, psychological warfare, and political manipulation
were not acceptable in peacetime, in a nation nourished on the premise that
principle was important. However, Truman accepted the need for a permanent
organization to coordinate intelligence gathering. In 1947, he created the
Central Intelligence Agency. Despite his efforts to prohibit the CIA from
undertaking covert operations, there was already a covert action cell within
the State Department, jealously guarded by the old OSS fraternity. A rush of
antiCommunist anxiety overcame Truman's restraint. This existing covert
action cell was grafted on as a clandestine part of the new CIA, with a
secret charter based on National Security Council directives and presidential
executive orders.
It was all done surreptitiously because everyone involved recognized that
conducting foreign affairs without the awareness of Congress and the American
people was at odds with the intent of the Constitution. This lack of
accountability set the covert professionals apart, as a priesthood, and gave
them a sense of something bordering on supernatural power. There were those
who were covert, and then there was everybody else. As their numbers
multiplied, simply being in the covert club encouraged an explosive growth of
amorality.
"In a government of laws," Justice Louis Brandeis observed, "the existence of
the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law
scrupulously.... If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for
law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself."
It is the nature of covert action to be beyond the law, so it requires
extraordinary restraint. Too often, the end justifies any means. Since the
private lives of agents also must remain covert, it takes abnormal restraint
for them to avoid enriching themselves. During the period from 1950 to 1988,
the Philippines provided classic examples of both-one in the form of a CIA
officer who became carried away by his own omnipotence, the other in the form
of a secret team of senior American officers who became entangled with
Ferdinand Marcos and Yamashita's Gold.
America's new proconsul in the Philippines was Edward G. Lansdale, the Walt
Disney of covert action. Lansdale was a peculiarly American mixture of
naivete and aggressiveness; some thought him a dangerous adolescent (Graham
Greene characterized him as such in his Saigon novel, The Quiet American).
Lansdale was the first in a long line of postwar secret agents totally
dedicated to apple pie laced with blowfish toxin. He was a pleasant, warm,
good-natured man, with a sincerity that disarmed all but his most determined
critics. A former advertising executive, Lansdale had the spontaneous
imagination of a copy writer, an instinctive grasp of modern psychology,
behavior modification, and psychological warfare. Many of his ideas now seem
harebrained, but on unsophisticated people they sometimes had surprising
effect. The age of media mystification made him a guru to those looking for a
quick fix overseas. His techniques were so admired in the CIA and the
Pentagon that they became routine procedure a decade later in the Vietnam
War. He tried them out first in the Philippines. There was a straight line
leading from Lansdale's persecution of the Huks in the 1950s to William
Colby's Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, which resulted in assassinating perhaps
as many as forty thousand civilians.
Lansdale had found a niche in psychological warfare with the OSS during World
War II as an intelligence officer on MacArthur's staff, working for General
Willoughby. By the war's end he was their chief of intelligence in the
Philippines. During this period Willoughby was seeing Bolsheviks under every
bed, and the men working for him did their best to prove that it was not
hallucination. Lansdale left the islands in 1948, ostensibly to be an
instructor at the Air Force Strategic Intelligence School in Denver, but he
was actually in Washington being considered for a role in the CIA. He was put
to work setting up a Philippines desk for the new agency.
Lansdale understood very clearly the temper of his times and the anxieties of
his new clients, the generals and bureaucrats of the McCarthy era. While
President Truman was being told that the Huks posed no real military threat
to the Philippines, Lansdale was doing everything he could to make the Huks
look like a large and extremely dangerous guerrilla army personally guided by
secret agents of Stalin and Mao.
Much of Lansdale's strategy was built around the promotion of a bearlike
Filipino congressman named Ramon Magsaysay, destined to be America's new hero
in Manila. At -the time, Magsaysay was in Washington "conferring with the
U.S. Congress about Filipino veterans' benefits." But he found time to join
CIA planning sessions in which Lansdale argued that the Philippines was about
to go Communist like Yugoslavia, Albania, and the rest of Eastern Europe.
"Mindful of the part played by Americans in the recent Greek struggle against
Communist guerrillas," Lansdale wrote years later in the oily language of
Foggy Bottom, "I talked to United States leaders about giving similar help to
the Philippines.... It was suggested that I draw up a modest plan for simple
measures that could be added to the United States' military and economic
assistance already being given.... I went to work on a plan for ... less
conventional actions against the politicalmilitary tactics of the Huks." As
the first step in the CIA program, President Quirino was pressed by the U.S.
Embassy to name a new defense minister, Lansdale's friend Magsaysay.
Ramon Magsaysay was an uncomplicated man of great energyhigh-strung,
restless, and brusque. For the islands he was a big man, at five feet eleven
inches, and hefty. He did not gamble, drink, or smoke. Magsaysay liked to
claim that he was a man of the people, with a humble background; he said his
father was a poor carpenter in Zambales Province, 85 miles northwest of
Manila, his mother an Ilocano woman who had to struggle to make ends meet.
The truth was that his family owned a general store and several farms, one of
over 1,000 acres, and employed tenant farmers to work their fields. In 1927
he entered the University of the Philippines, but dropped out to go to work
for a bus company. As a guerrilla during the war, Magsaysay became very
popular with his American advisers, and at war's end was rewarded with an
appointment as military governor of his native province. This encouraged him
to run for Congress and, with a bit of nudging from Lansdale, he was soon
listening to the CIA's long-range plans for his career.
Once he was in position as defense minister, Magsaysay and Lansdale set about
purging top echelons of the Filipino military establishment. With the
discreet backing of the U.S. ambassador and the chief of JUSMAG (the joint
U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group), Magsaysay pressed President Quirino
to get rid of the politicking army chief of staff, General Mariano Castaneda,
and the corrupt boss of the Constabulary, Brigadier General Alberto Ramos,
who were both cronies of the president.
"Each night we sat up late discussing the current situation," Lansdale
recalled. "Magsaysay would air his views. Afterwards, I would sort them out
aloud for him while underscoring the principles or strategy or tactics
involved. It helped him select or discard courses of action."
Magsaysay was not interested in the world at large, nor was he especially
concerned about due process of law. Thanks to Lansdale, he had a tight focus
on what needed to be done each day. At his urging, reinforced by the U.S.
Embassy, President Quirino suspended the writ of habeas corpus to enable the
arrest and imprisonment of anyone remotely suspected of communism, Hukism�or
simply being stubborn, and therefore subversive. Suspending the writ was
essential for the CIA program to succeed. Providing evidence was
time-consuming or impossible, so Magsaysay had to be free to arrest,
imprison, and interrogate suspects without evidence. The writ was restored in
1953, but only as a legal pretense that could be dropped again momentarily.
Once dishonored, it is a difficult legal tradition to re-establish.
Lansdale then set up a psychological warfare unit euphemistically christened
the Civil Affairs Office. His enemies were the poor, so for inspiration
Lansdale studied peasant superstitions. One result was the "eye of god."
"The idea," he wrote, "was to get exact information about the enemy and then
broadcast it through loudspeakers in combat situations, making individual
enemy soldiers feel that they couldn't hide from an all-seeing eye." In areas
where villagers were thought to be helping the Huks, a psy-war team crept in
at night and painted an Egyptian-style evil eye on a wall facing the house of
each suspect. The mysterious appearance of the evil eyes (Lansdale claimed)
had a sobering effect. Another operation played upon peasant dread of the
asuang or vampire. In an area thought to be harboring a team of Huk
guerrillas, Lansdale's ambushers snatched a peasant one night, punctured his
neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, hung the body by the ankles to drain it
of blood, then put the corpse back on the trail. When the peasants found the
toothmarked bloodless corpse, the entire Huk unit moved away. The novelty of
these games amused Lansdale, who slyly passed them on as combat anecdotes to
his superiors in Washington, disguised in his unctuous prose, enchanting his
CIA superiors. This was a period when the CIA was busy engineering
cobra-venom dart guns and building cigarette lighters with cyanide jets. The
very real grievances of Filipino farmers were forgotten. Lansdale's
experiments were given top priority.
The anti-Huk campaign was fought mostly on that old agrarian reform
battleground, the rice bowl outside Manila. At Lansdale's urging, Magsaysay
politicized his job by roaming the provinces in car or jeep, often with
Lansdale beside him, visiting troops and talking with farmers and villagers,
a burly man always in an aloha shirt. Poor people liked him because he made
personal contact and because he corrected some of the worst abuses of the
army and Constabulary: rapes, theft, and bullying. These minor reforms were
promised everywhere, but implemented selectively. They were window-dressing,
as part of Lansdale's scheme to build Magsaysay up for the presidency.
Success was measured by the attention given Magsaysay by American
journalists. Lansdale knew that few correspondents were in a position to
check the facts, or had the patience to do so in the stultifying heat. One
story given wide publicity then (and repeated many years later in praise of
Magsaysay) was that he had arranged for thousands of safe-conduct passes to
be dropped to the Huks by plane over the islands.
These passes supposedly meant any Huk could come in and surrender without
fear of being killed. This made persuasive copy for feature writers in New
York. The catch was that passes were, dropped only in areas where the Huks
were not operating. Meanwhile, the real scoops of Magsaysay's war against the
Huks were kept hidden from the press. Magsaysay offered "cash incentives" or
bounties for Huk bodies�preferably identifiable Huks, but any peasant would
do. The "incentive" of 5,000 pesos represented ten years' wages for a
Filipino farm worker. A bounty of 100,000 pesos was offered for the body of a
Huk leader, the money apparently coming partly from the CIA and partly from a
I million peso "Peace Fund" raised from big landowners by Vice President
Fernando Lopez.
Although it became customary in the American press to refer to Magsaysay with
the veneration reserved for heroes, and to take Lansdale seriously as a cold
warrior, some of their antics were comic. To create the impression that his
man was personally brave, Lansdale had soldiers dress up as Huks, so that
Magsaysay could safely lead government troops to victory. CIA technicians
forged Huk documents for Magsaysay to capture, while false reports were
planted. in the press that repression of peasant farmers in the Philippines
was coming to an end. These tricks, orchestrated as part of a slick
promotional campaign, had an impact on individual members of the Huk
rebellion. Many Huks stopped fighting because they wanted to believe what
-they heard. Few of them cared anything one way or the other about Marxism,
so they were not ideologically committed enough to stay in the movement as
things actually grew worse militarily.
To increase military pressure, Lansdale and Magsaysay announced that they
were making the Constabulary part of the armed forces. It would be more
accurate to put it the other way around: they began turning the army into a
police force, something that the CIA would eventually make part of its Third
World doctrine. Despite the talk of Stalin and Mao, the Philippines were not
threatened by foreign enemies, only by internal misery. The main job of the
armed forces was not national defense but population control. Combining the
Constabulary with the army brought total strength up to fifty thousand men,
and permitted the deployment of troops in larger units under a single
command. The old Nenita death squads became death battalions, consisting of
three infantry companies, 110 men each, a heavy weapons company, a
reconnaissance company with armored cars, a headquarters and service company,
and a battery of artillery. When its training by JUSMAG was complete, each
Nenita battalion was made responsible for part of a province, creating much
larger free fire zones where they were licensed to kill anything that moved.
Colonel Valeriano, the inventor of the Nenita, became Lansdale's chief
peasant killer, now assisted by tactical fighter support and napalm. Local
oligarchs participated enthusiastically in his campaigns, as if they were
fox-hunting to hounds, and posed for commemorative photographs beside dead
peasants. On one killing spree, Valeriano's men murdered eight farmers who
were attending a funeral and displayed their corpses beside a highway with
crudely painted signs reading "HUK." By summer 1951, Lansdale noted with
satisfaction that the Huks were showing the strain of being under constant
attack. So, for that matter, were all the impoverished farmers in the rice
bowl around Manila. It was open season on peasants.
Other CIA operatives were busy arranging the 1951 Philippine congressional
elections. Internationally, these elections had to be seen as exceptionally
honest, in order to inspire the right press coverage, to undercut peasant
grievances further. A secret State Department memo to Truman summed it up:
"Our Embassy at Manila is seeking to convey indirectly the intense interest
of the U.S. in fair and honest elections. A repetition of the intimidation
and fraud of 1949 would provide great impetus to the Huk movement and would
add even more to the Filipinos' already cynical attitude about the type of
democracy they now have."
Onto the scene came Lansdale's alter ego, Gabe Kaplan, New York lawyer,
politician, and public relations man, who understood the many levers of a
political campaign and how to pull them. Kaplan's first operational cover was
the Asia Foundation, later the Committee for Free Asia, and then the
Catherwood Foundation of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He had a knack for dealing
with civic groups, chambers of commerce, Rotary Clubs, and veterans'
organizations. With a team of eager and well-paid young Filipino CIA
employees, Kaplan persuaded these middle-class organizations to support a
nationwide effort to "educate" the public about the importance of free and
honest elections. Kaplan's umbrella was the National Movement for Free
Elections (NAMFREL), which Lansdale and the CIA set up with the help of some
Filipino friends-Terry Adevoso, Jaime Ferrer, and Frisco Johnny San Juan, all
former guerrillas and national commanders of the politically powerful
Veterans Legion.
President Quirino was conveniently out of the country for medical reasons
white these CIA maneuvers were set into motion on the political front. The
U.S. Embassy had generously offered to arrange for Quirino to have an
operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, after which he was
encouraged to take a long vacation in Spain. By the time he got back to
Manila, the stage was set.
The action phase started with a formal request by the Commission on Elections
(COMELEC) to Secretary of Defense Magsaysay asking for the assistance of the
military in policing the polls. NAMFREL and "a group of public-spirited
citizens" (plus some publishers friendly to the U.S. Embassy) encouraged
citizens to get out and vote, while Magsaysay's army transported and guarded
ballot boxes until the final official count was completed. The declared
objective was to prevent cheating by anyone. The biggest cheating in the
previous election had been carried on by President Quirino's supporters, so
he returned from Spain to find the dice loaded against him.
Lansdale meant business. Colonel Valeriano headed one of the pollwatching
units. As balloting closed at each precinct, radio reporters obtained the
unofficial tally and relayed the numbers immediately to Manila, where
friendly newspapers and radio stations announced the results to the public,
forestalling the manipulation of ballots. As Lansdale put it: "The honesty of
the election was attested to by the fact that most of the candidates who were
elected belonged to [our side]." From America's viewpoint, the "clean"
election of 1951 served notice to the world that genuine democracy was
restored in the Philippines, that there was no need for anyone to join the
Huks. Because it had all been done so cleverly, many Filipinos were persuaded
that it was true. Good had beaten evil. Sympathy for the Huks had been
growing not only on the left but in the political center. But the "clean"
election so impressed the Filipino middle class that middle-of-the-road
support for the Huks dwindled to a trickle.
Following the election, Magsaysay's popularity grew enormously. He acquired
the reputation of being the one honest man in the Manila government. American
magazine readers were told again and again that he had all the makings of a
presidential candidate who could restore confidence and, more important,
would not hesitate to cooperate with American interests in the islands. In
Washington, the formal decision was made to remove Quirino like a bad tooth
and to put Magsaysay in his place.
A high-powered international media campaign was launched. In New York,
Lansdale and Kaplan's associates held meetings with publishers, editors, and
journalists. Soon Magsaysay was on the cover of Time and other magazines as
"the man who broke the back of the communist rebellion in the Philippines."
If you have imaginary enemies, it is possible to have imaginary victories.
It was necessary to project Magsaysay not only as a great anti-Communist
fighter but as a man of large ideas capable of leading a nation. Here his
image makers had a problem, for he was not articulate, and most of his ideas
came from Lansdale. In mid-1953, an invitation was arranged for him to
deliver the keynote address at the world conference of the Junior Chamber of
Commerce in Mexico City, with controlled press coverage. For many days
beforehand, Lansdale had Magsaysay locked with a language instructor in a
hotel room in Los Angeles, learning to read a speech in Spanish. His
performance was a resounding success. Whatever his delivery lacked in
eloquence could be attributed to the language problem.
Before Magsaysay could be run for president, he had to be eased out of
Quirino's cabinet and set up with a rival political machine. An oust-Quirino
pact was negotiated by the CIA with the aging bosses of the Nacionalista
party-Jose Laurel and Claro Recto�and with Lorenzo Tanada of the idealistic
Citizens party. All were eager to tar-and-feather the Quirino brothers right
out of Malacanang Palace, eager enough even to strike a bargain with
Washington, which all three detested. Accordingly, the Citizens party
temporarily merged with the Nacionalistas, Magsaysay resigned from Quirino's
cabinet and from the Liberal party, and became the presidential candidate of
the Nacionalista/ Citizens alliance.
For years, Washington had been keeping Laurel and Recto out of Malacanang by
regurgitating the issue of their wartime collaboration, a tiresome device but
one that inevitably worked on a population with bitter memories. Both Recto
and Laurel were gentlemen of extraordinary guile, for whom one need not feel
pity, only compassion. They thought they were taking this opportunity to lay
the collaborator issue to rest by joining forces temporarily with the CIA.
Years later Recto told a CIA agent, "I thought it amusing to arrange a deal
with the American military who spent most of their time unjustly defaming me.
As for Ramon [Magsaysay], he was so dumb I knew I could handle him."
The Philippine presidential election campaign that followed was incongruously
American. Filipinos were coaxed by slick radio jingles, children sang
"Magsaysay is my Guy," and couples danced to the "Magsaysay Mambo." Planted
news photos showed the overweight candidate sharing humble meals with
peasants and workers. Lapel pins, wall posters, and bumper stickers appeared
everywhere. Nobody thought to ask where Magsaysay had gotten all the dough.
The volatile Manila press, tired of the monotonously single-minded Quirino
brothers and their legions of thugs and triads, universally favored
Magsaysay, especially the American-owned Manila Daily Bulletin and the Manila
Times. With CIA assistance, newsman Teddy de Los Santos and his staff
generated pro-Magsaysay articles for newspapers all over the archipelago. The
CIA unabashedly published and distributed a monthly "Digest of the Provincial
Press," featuring articles that it wanted to emphasize as the dominant views
in the provinces, all favorable to Magsaysay.
Lansdale and, Kaplan were pouring millions of dollars and pesos into the
campaign, buying the archipelago back from the forces of darkness, but
Magsaysay resolutely denied that he ever received a single contribution from
any foreigner, insisting that his campaign was financed entirely with
voluntary and unsolicited contributions. In his memoirs, Lansdale remained as
pious as ever: "I was surprised to hear my name included in the rumors as
having given Magsaysay three million dollars for his campaign. The
rumormongers certainly didn't know the tiny budget of government and personal
funds on which I was operating."
Outwardly, the Magsaysay-for-President Movement was billed as an independent
political group. But the organization, headed by Lansdale protege Colonel
Terry Adevoso, had a more sinister role. If Quirino's Liberals, to ensure his
re-election, again resorted to cheating and murder on the scale of 1949,
Adevoso's team was to take over radio stations and military installations
throughout the country. Secret planning sessions were held at the Del Monte
pineapple plantation, MacArthur's old haunt, and at the homes and estates of
landed gentry. One of the CIA's favorite estates was the Cojuangcos' Hacienda
Luisita in Tarlac, which provided the Agency with facilities to train agents
for conspiracies throughout Southeast Asia. Some Filipino elite were offended
by the suggestion that they should participate with the CIA in a military
conspiracy. In deference to their sensibilities, Lansdale was careful not to
be present at any of the secret briefings.
To prevent any possible "misuse" of the Philippine Army and Constabulary
during the election, JUSMAG's General Robert Cannon sent American military
officers on inspection rounds of all Philippine Army units in areas of
potential trouble. Several days before the election, a flotilla of American
destroyers and a light aircraft carrier appeared in Manila Bay, seeming to
confirm rumors leaked slyly by the Magsaysay camp that a U.S.-backed coup was
in the works in the event of "largescale fraud and coercion of voters." The
naval exercise was stagemanaged by the CIA's Far East Division to frighten
Quirino. When polling began, Magsaysay and the Nacionalista party bosses were
guarded at the U.S. Navy's Subic Bay base.
With so much backstage help, Magsaysay won by the biggest landslide in the
nation's history, taking 68.9 percent of the vote. At noon on November 12,
1953, Quirino conceded defeat and went home to count his bank balance.
Everybody at the U.S. Embassy and at JUSMAG felt that it was a memorable day
for democracy.
One of the CIA's post-election contributions to the democratic process was
the passage of President Magsaysay's new Anti-Subversion Act, under which
many Filipinos were stripped of jobs and reputations, or sentenced to prison.
McCarthyism suffocated dissent in the islands; subversion thereafter became
whatever Malacanang Palace wanted it to be. Lansdale's many Filipino proteges
remained politically powerful behind the scenes; anyone running for office
for the next thirty years had to take them into consideration. Whenever a
leading leftist was murdered, the running gag of the Lansdale gang was that
he had been executed by his own supporters to create ill-feeling against the
entrenched right.
One of the persistent myths about Magsaysay was that he was an enlightened
man who brought the Huk movement to an end by making genuine concessions to
the embittered rebels, offering them land and a chance to start a new life,
trading plowshares for rifles. It was Lansdale, not Magsaysay, who created
the land resettlement program, as a media device to impress journalists. The
first farm showplace was established on 4,000 acres in Mindanao. There, nine
hundred fifty families were resettled, but less than two hundred fifty had
any remote connection with the Huk peasant movement. The Magsaysay government
hoped that few Huks would accept this offer of land, because only a little
land was available-why waste it on Communists? The gentry could not be
persuaded to part with more, and except in the most extreme cases Washington
considered land redistribution a dangerous manifestation of Marxism. Jose
Crisol, principal Filipino architect of Magsaysay's "agrarian programs,"
candidly described these efforts as .1 psych-war aimed at the soft core of
the Huk movement." Crisol was not an expert on agrarian policy but a secret
policeman.
The Magsaysay gambit was such a success that the CIA was encouraged to try
the same thing elsewhere-in Indonesia, where President Eisenhower was anxious
to end the flamboyant career of Bung Sukarno, in Cuba, in Chile, and in
Vietnam. The same Americans and Filipinos who created Magsaysay created the
Diem regime, tried unsuccessfully to remove Fidel Castro, and succeeded in
removing Salvador Allende.
Edward Lansdale arrived in Saigon in June 1954 to set up the Saigon Military
Mission after the French defeat at Dienbienphu.
"I talked to Magsaysay," he said, "about the conditions under which Prime
Minister Diem was working, particularly the inadequacies of the military
guard. Magsaysay agreed that, if Diem desired it, Colonel Napoleon Valeriano
might be spared to advise on ways to improve security for the prime
minister." Soon after Valeriano came to Saigon, opponents of Diem began to
experience fatal accidents. It was the start of an impressive international
career for the Huk killer. Through Lansdale, Valeriano became a favorite of
CIA covert operations specialists William Colby and Theodore Shackley, moved
on from Saigon to train Shackley's Cuban Brigade for the Bay of Pigs, then
back to Indochina as chief "gook-zapper" in Colby's Operation Phoenix. In
Washington, D.C., where he made his new home, he was something of a hero.
When he died years later, apparently of natural causes, his Washington Post
obituary portraying him as a national patriot of the Philippines was read
into the Congressional Record.
As for Lansdale, he was so much in demand in the cause of freedom elsewhere
that he was not in the Philippines when, shortly after midnight one Saturday
in March 1957, Ramon Magsaysay's presidential plane, Mt. Pinatubo, crashed
into a mountainside near Cebu City, killing all but one of the twenty-seven
aboard. The lone survivor was Nestor Mata, a reporter for the Philippine
Herald. The Mt. Pinatubo was an old C-47 given to Magsaysay by the CIA.
Despite its age, it was in excellent condition. Magsaysay's pilot had more
hours than any other Philippine aviator. The crash was said to have been
caused by failure of the electrical system-power failure.
Back in 1953, when it was arranged for Magsaysay to be nominated
for president by the Nacionalistas, the CIA had agreed as a trade-off to run
crusty Carlos Garcia for vice president. Garcia was a lawyer who had been in
politics since the 1920s as a congressman, a governor, and a senator, and he
owed everything to party bosses Laurel and Recto. The CIA considered him a
meaningless cipher. Magsaysay's men warned that Garcia was "a crook like
Quirino." But the Agency never anticipated a fatal plane crash. With
Magsaysay's death, Garcia automatically became president and the Nacionalista
old guard had no difficulty getting him elected to a full term in 1957. Once
Magsaysay was gone, the intricate electrical circuits set up by Lansdale
shorted out quickly.
Magsaysay's popularity with ordinary Filipinos had been great, but Recto and
Laurel had reason to regret their pact with Lansdale. They found it was
really the CIA that had taken over Malacanang. There were cowboys in the
palace. Claro Recto became the leader of an anti-Magsaysay (anti-CIA) faction
among the Nacionalistas. The Agency chose to interpret his opposition as an
obstacle to its sincere activities throughout Asia. When he ran for president
with Lorenzo Tanada under the Citizens party banner in 1957, Recto was
smeared by the Agency for his role as Laurel's foreign secretary during the
war-in support of fascism-and was simultaneously labeled a Communist. At one
point, CIA station chief General Ralph Lovett and U.S. Ambassador Raymond
Spruance considered poisoning him. Lovett later revealed that they decided
not to do it for practical reasons rather than moral scruples. When CIA agent
Joseph Burkholder Smith was assigned to the Manila Station, he discovered
envelopes containing defective condoms bearing the inscription "Compliments
of Claro M. Recto, the People's Friend." Looking back, former President
Truman mused:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way [the] CIA has been diverted
from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a
policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have
compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into
peacetime cloak and dagger operations.
... the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something
akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people ....
... I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original
assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can
properly perform in that special field, and that its operational duties be
terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our
ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way
the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historical
position, and I feel that we need to correct it.
pp. 140-154
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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