By Benjamin Wetmore

For Dr. Robert Griffith

5 May 2003

History Major Thesis

Preface:

The level of scholarship on Lansdale and Mongoose is frustrating in that so much of it exists before the information age. Cecil Currey wrote the "Unquiet American" before the JFK declassification marathon in the early 90s, and without access to the mounds of documents now digitized and available at the click of a mouse. The system and chronology of declassification and substantial redactions also make for a botched, spotty history- especially of the intelligence community. In using previous works and scholarship, one must acknowledge that they are always confused guesses lacking the release of classified documents. We do not even know what history and events we could be completely missing. The intelligence community represents the greatest obstacle to history, and the greatest treasure trove waiting to be opened.

When Edward Lansdale wrote his 1972 memoirs, In the Midst of Wars, he completely omitted Operation Mongoose. His subtitle was about America's mission to Southeast Asia he purposefully omitted reference to the most ambitious project of his career, the effort to topple Castro. Daniel Ellsberg remarked to Cecil Currey that one of the Lansdale talents he most admired was his ability to keep secrets. No amount of booze ever caused Lansdale to let slip out the words about Cuba. Even years after working on Mongoose, Lansdale would not confess his earlier position on Mongoose to his Vietnam team. Ellsberg said he never even knew, until after 1975, that Lansdale had worked with Robert Kennedy.

Such is the state of the intelligence community, and the code of silence that makes writing any historical piece about it most frustrating, challenging and rewarding. The tales told are battles not only with time, but with secrecy, classification and the powerful mythmakers known only as redactors. Answering a question in history usually leads to several other questions, but yet in the intelligence history, they often put into doubt a dozen other premises upon which previous answers were based. A lonelier job than the Maytag repairman must assuredly be historian at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The JFK Assassination archive is a diamond, historical treasure escaped from the tight grip of the mystical black marker redactors. It sought to be the one stop shopping center for documents related to the assassination, and as some historians have noted, has resulted in much more. The digitization of these materials, lowering the opportunity cost for researchers to get access to the material, also propels the scholarship several steps further. The future, especially for material as controversial as the JFK archive, will be very active. It provides history with a snapshot into the secret world of the intelligence community, and allows historians to delve deeper than ever before into such intriguing history. The last decade of development of this archive has made the scholarship fresh and new, and allowed for a whole new generation of Cold War debate. Without the tool given to researchers found in the Freedom of Information requests, best utilized by the trailblazing scholars at the National Security Archive, Cold War history would be vastly different. This debate has more facts, but still plenty of secrets waiting to be answered. The declassification of these documents will provide more debates, arguments and scholarship for the foreseeable future.

Thus, one is left with a spotty history. Books are written that may, sometime in the near or distant future, be found to have been based on wholly false factual foundations. For now, we have the access and documents given to us, always wishing to have access to a few more. And so we have history as it is given to us, incomplete and spotty, waiting to be debunked. Continually writing it because, as is nowhere more true than in the intelligence community, it is so poorly and incompletely written about previously.

Lansdale and Cuba: The Counterinsurgent Lessons Not Applied to Operation Mongoose

A young college student at the University of California Los Angeles, Edward Lansdale started his career as an advertiser of ideas from his background as an editor and cartoonist for his college humor magazine. His ambition was to become a journalist, as his experience in both high school and college in journalism attracted him to the craft. Lansdale would not complete his UCLA degree, partially due to his inability to complete the requisite foreign language. He tried, after UCLA, to get a job in journalism in New York City. Never getting one in journalism and dissatisfied with his life in New York, Lansdale's interest in journalism waned and was filled by another passion that he would pursue on the other coast, advertising. That transition would then, later, move from advertising to counterinsurgency. In his biography of General Lansdale, The Unquiet American, Cecil Currey writes Lansdale's early history, and brings his early experiences into view as compared with his later history. All three, however, strike a common chord of political persuasion, a rhythm of crafting thought and ideas.

His first west coast job after leaving New York was in a Los Angeles retail store, working under his brother Phil. The store, Silverman's, hired Lansdale as an entry-level advertising assistant to his brother. His talents and ideas were able to more freely flow in this position. As Cecil Currey wrote in his biography of Lansdale, the Unquiet American, this was the first moment where he was able to muster and collect his abilities. He was able to create and craft a message, and work toward selling a product. The skills and time Lansdale had spent up to this moment were finally coming to fruition. During this time, his main accomplishment was putting together an employee magazine containing profiles and images of those working for the store. It was an effort that boosted employee morale and told the stories of one another in a way that built a relationship between the store and its personnel. His magazine was the first step in advertising, and advertising would become his first effort at psychological war. This term would mean many things for Lansdale, not merely the application of morale lowering operations during wartime, but rather accomplishing government objectives by appealing to the minds of those in the conflict. Silverman's would give him time to develop his talents and give him a foundation from which to understand the nature of persuasion. This was psychological operation, albeit one with no casualties. Lansdale would never shake his association with advertising, and both his fans and his detractors are quick to note his relationship to the thinking war that he started learning early in southern California. The Quiet American was known as an advertiser, and one who engaged the war of ideas that was being fought, later, during the Cold War.

Taking his experience at the department store, Lansdale got a job as an advertising executive in San Francisco. His first advertising position gave him a great flexibility and creative control over his work, and his talents flourished. He took such a liking to his new career that he moved to another position with another group, under a man named Theodore Segall. Cecil Currey quotes Lansdale's clients under Segall as Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss, Nestle's Nescafe and others. His experience was marketing products and persuading people on a constant business basis. Later, when placed in a situation interacting with bureaucrats, military officers and politicians, Lansdale's experience offered a constant persuasive role that contrasted with the military men on a timetable and politicians on an electoral calendar. His first major career position was in persuading average people to actively purchase products in a competitive way against other markets. This was the real world experience that others would later lack. In that Lansdale was more attuned to the interests of people and how they accept ideas, it was due in no small part to his experience selling products and persuading customers. In the Cold War tension between developing nations choosing a government of Communism or Democracy, Lansdale's point of reference was always the people. Whether in the Philippines, Vietnam or Cuba, he framed his efforts as how they would affect and be seen to the people. If he was losing the support of the customers to his political act, he was losing the battle. His goal was to sell American ideas and values in place of the totalitarianism required by Communism. His product, therefore, would constantly be on sale.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Lansdale enlisted in the Army in order to serve his country in the time of need. He gave up his position in advertising in San Francisco in order to pursue his military obligations in the wake of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Currey relates that Lansdale was fired from his advertising position for enlisting. He tried to use his UCLA ROTC experience and advertising experience as the basis for his acceptance into the military. His previous experience as a combat Intelligence Officer in the ROTC made him a candidate for an intelligence position, but even then it took the military until the end of 1942 in order to process his application and give him the mandatory physical. It was there that a goiter almost prevented his entry into the military. Upon an appeal to the surgeon general of the Army, Lansdale was granted a waiver explicitly for "limited service only." That limited field service would take him to the Philippines and Vietnam for the next two decades.

Those two decades would often be working for the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which was founded by William Donovon during World War II and later became the Central Intelligence Agency. Lansdale would work for the intelligence agency in various ways. After his success in the Philippines, his reputation would cement his place in the intelligence community as a rather independent operator, still reporting to the CIA through the Office of Special Operations, one of the many bureaucratic agencies of the intelligence community that would later be completely fused with the CIA. The Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, serving as respectively the Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State under Eisenhower, thought of him as a way to drop an independent operator into an area threatened with an insurgency. A Lansdale myth would grow after the Philippines, and policymakers would think they could use the Lansdale 'magic' in place of policy. Policymakers were using Lansdale as a substitute for policy. They saw him as an ends into himself.

This imagery of Lansdale is intertwined within his reputation. The lack of scholarship available due to the secrecy of the intelligence community made for such a myth. His clearest role, though, was his belief in American values and the export of those ideas to fight Communism. Lansdale believed that American values were universal and a counterweight to the Communist values penetrating Southeast Asia. Graham Greene had fashioned his "Alden Pyle" character in "The Quiet American" after Lansdale. Pyle was one who was willing to do almost anything to achieve American goals in Vietnam, and was too naïve and oblivious to history to realize his own ignorance. The connotation of the 'quiet' American was a way in which to categorize not only his covert role in 'black' operations of intelligence and psychological operations, but also functioned as a way to characterize the latent, soft power of the United States and its anti-imperialistic imperialism. The tyranny of forced freedom, though refuted by Lansdale in his vision that American ideals of freedom were universal, was the Quiet connotation that Greene was making. This foreign adventurism, mainly in areas of Southeast Asia, was justified under the rubric of stopping the Communists at every step. George Kennan's containment demanded U.S. intervention to prevent the much-vaulted dominoes of third world nations from falling. Even though Kennan later opposed the war, the realists that followed his logic justified their actions on the basis of his ideas. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, in a 1979 article in Commentary, makes the point of the ends justifying the means in the Cold War when she explains why 'moderate' despots are still preferable to totalitarian regimes since the despots can die or be overthrown but that totalitarian regimes cannot as easily be done away with. Lansdale, then, became a way for policymakers to fight Communism through one man. JFK was rumored to have called Lansdale "America's James Bond" and though that phrase may have been overblown, it speaks to how policymakers regarded his talents. Instead of being part of a strategy to counter insurgencies, he was the policy. His reputation would prove to be more fiction than fact.

When Castro took power, though, there was no clear policy on how to react. The U.S. was left in a confused state of supporting a despot they had been relatively happy with, but also celebrating the gradual decolonization which also suited U.S. interests. The confused response of the United States to the fall of Batista was due to that tension, a sincere U.S. desire to end colonialism, but also prevent such decolonialization that led to Communism. The U.S. was unsure how to approach this new insurgency against Batista, initially it seemed to be a generally positive development. Due to the relationship with the Batista government, though, the U.S. ambassador to the island did not engage the rebels. Batista had been such a good cold warrior against the Communists, that parting with his regime was too difficult. As the people turned against the Batista government, the U.S. policymakers were unsure how to approach this development. The intelligence as to Cuba was exceptionally poor, and it would cause a crisis in how to respond to Castro. When Castro initially announced his cabinet, Lyman Kirkpatrick said there was 'hope' in the American government, "because it included some of the most respected political figures in Cuba." Thus, the United States government initially greeted Fidel Castro with a reluctant welcome after he had taken power, but drastically changed its approach when Castro declared his ties to Moscow and asserted his revolution as distinctly Communist. The Soviet Union told Castro that the United States would never allow a Communist state so close to its own borders, and that it was only a matter of time before it took action.

That action would be the Bay of Pigs. The momentum of the Washington bureaucracy and intelligence community could not be outweighed by the reasoned and rationale arguments against the invasion. Even Lansdale himself chided Allen Dulles, speaking very frankly that the invasion force was too small and that an assumed uprising was not assured. Currey quotes Lansdale as upsetting Dulles before the Special Group, a senior group of policymakers responsible for covert operations, and that Dulles was so upset with Lansdale's criticism of the plan that he rebuked him sternly by saying he was "not a principal in this." Lansdale specifically criticized, according to Currey and Grose, the figure of 700 soldiers, saying that it should be three times as much. Also criticized in the plan was the automatic acquiescence of the local population, Lansdale commenting that it should not be assumed that they will accept the invading force with open arms. As Peter Wyden writes in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA was woefully ignorant of the fact the locals in the area, and the Cuban population, were rather accepting and acquiesced to their bearded dictator. The lack of thorough intelligence on all of these issues, and the failure of the invasion, would certainly prove Lansdale correct. The Kennedy brothers would blame the intelligence community for this failure, and it would cost the careers of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Deputy Director of Intelligence Richard Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

There had been no way in which to recall the invasion once it began. Wyden describes this as Kennedy accepting CIA assurances that if anything went wrong, the operatives could simply slip into the mountains, 'melting' into an insurgent force. The lack of intelligence, however, precluded policymakers from realizing the high level of support for Castro among the locals, and obviated the important fact that Castro was intimately knowledgeable of the area, since it was his favorite fishing spot. Wyden makes a thorough case for the blunder of the Bay of Pigs, and the counterproductive end result. In that Kennedy and others were unwilling to defend the invasion with warplanes and equip it with a greater number of soldiers for fear it would be revealed as an American invasion, is now undone as the invasion fails and the American involvement is clear. The operation managed to wrench defeat from the jaws of victory, and come out of the situation losers on every point. The greatest military debacle of modern American history had all been for naught. The Kennedy administration was discredited, disenchanted, and disemboweled from taking overt military action again.

After the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers would try to craft a way in which they could achieve the same ends as the 1961 invasion, without the international consequences that had created. They had the Special Group set up a subcommittee that would become the Special Group for Cuba, and would take the form of Operation Mongoose. It would exist as a state of low-intensity war against Castro, and seek to achieve the overthrow of Castro without the obvious negative international affects the Kennedy's had seen after the Bay of Pigs. This scheme would be run by General Taylor, and operations run by General Lansdale. The choice of these two by the Kennedys was from their previous experience. Taylor was a retired Army chief of staff who had been brought on the Kennedy team after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Wyden quotes Taylor as saying he "sensed an air which I had known in my military past, that of a command post that had been overrun by the enemy. There were the same glazed eyes, subdued voices, and slow speech that I remembered observing in commanders routed at the Battle of the Bulge or recovering from the shock of their first action." Taylor was meant to lend his experience and prestige to an administration grappling with a disaster in international relations. He was the experience and credibility that the Kennedy's lacked; Taylor filled the credibility gap from having lost so miserably at the Bay of Pigs. Edward Lansdale, on the other hand, lent the operation the 'swashbuckling' status it needed in order to feel as though things were getting done. National Security Historian James Bamford, in Body of Secrets, relates that Lansdale played on the Kennedy need to feel masculine and macho, he was the version of 'America's James Bond' that others had mythologized. Bringing him in to coordinate and command the Castro operation was a way to patch up the mistake that the Bay of Pigs had been. In that his reputation was more myth than fact seemed a secondary concern to the Kennedy need to take action. They would go after Castro with General Taylor and the Quiet American, and action would be considered better than results.

Selecting Lansdale to run the operation was a misuse of Lansdale's experience in counterinsurgency gained in the Philippines and Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked on the Lansdale team in Vietnam and is most known for his role releasing the Pentagon Papers, says of Lansdale that he was too poor an administrator to have done much against Castro. Ellsberg speaks to Lansdale the advisor and counterinsurgent, and the different mission he was tasked with in order to create an insurgency. Lansdale lacked the ability to create a legitimate social and political revolution. Roswell Gilpatric, in a 1975 deposition before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, came to the same conclusion, that the Cuban operation had been a "total waste." The main success that Lansdale had was in fighting the Huks, giving advice of reform to Diem and helping Magsaysay. The lessons and experience from the Philippines were hard to export to Vietnam and Cuba, since circumstances in the latter countries were so vastly different.

Some of these differences were huge in consequence. Perhaps Lansdale and his handlers felt as though he could adapt, but his experience had been limited to a situation and circumstances that he would not face again on such easy terms. He pocketed an easy win in the beginning, continually struggling to repeat his early victory. Vietnam had no definable borders and Cuba was not in a state of revolution. In both instances, Lansdale was asked to achieve a task greater than he could accomplish. He was not an expert at undermining governments; he had merely helped establish Magsaysay as a legitimate one. Though Lansdale had a reputation as a "swashbuckler" during what Douglas Blaufarb calls the "Counterinsurgency Era," he was a poor choice to lead the campaign to undermine Cuba.

The Kennedy operation to overthrow Castro, given many names but most often known as "Mongoose," was a very unique phenomenon. Never before had the relationship between the President and the Attorney General been as direct and personal as it was with John and Robert Kennedy. This had obvious consequences for Mongoose, in that Bobby was the one reporting its proceedings directly back to the President. Bobby would serve as the proxy President, and would use that position to demand faster and greater results than Mongoose could provide. The time idealized as "Camelot" was one in which the role of America in the world was constantly redefined and the efforts at combating international Communism was applied with the blunt end of the military. Camelot created a round table of Arthur's men to slay the insurgent Castro. Mongoose would be a blunt use of international politics, and the Kennedys wanted its use to take out their greatest annoyance, Cuba. Kennedy tasked his brother as the unofficial head of Mongoose. Though General Taylor would chair the meeting, most understood that they all reported to the President through Bobby. The Mongoose group understood Robert Kennedy to be serving more than in the capacity as the President's trusted brother, for he was heading the operation because of its supreme importance to the Kennedy administration. Mongoose was top priority. The Kennedy brothers combined the prestige and austerity of Taylor with the illusionary reputation of Lansdale. The quiet American was a favorite of the Kennedy's, having earned a reputation as a "soldier-of-fortune type" and "kingmaker" for his role with Magsaysay in the Philippines. Taylor's prestige, Lansdale's machismo and Bobby's temper would be thrown together to topple Castro.

This reputation of Lansdale's carried a brash and arrogant connotation, that the Asian people were incapable of choosing a leader on their own, without the guidance of the American advisor. This was not Lansdale's opinion, yet those who chose him clearly had it themselves. This attitude, that the people of the third world where the Cold War was being fought, were incapable of understanding and accepting the American value of liberty and freedom from government tyranny, was seen in the application of U.S. military intervention in order to achieve objectives that could not be won through argument. Later, even Lansdale, in his own 1972 biography In the Midst of Wars, would downplay his role in the Philippines in order to "give the Asians some more of their heroes" to them, even if it meant bending the truth. His was a reputation that he tried to get around, but those who knew him as a kingmaker would not accept the multitude of reasons that Magsaysay ascended to power in the Philippines. It was easier and more convenient to classify it as the successful operation of an American who had outfoxed the Marxists. The Lansdale reputation, therefore, is due to a misunderstanding of his role and the reasons for his early success. His repeated failures, later, would not dent this myth and bloated reputation. Which is not to say that he was not correct in his analysis or actions. His preference for American values and the unabashed sale of those ideas to third world people was effective and admirable. The failure, however, is more complex than the relationship between any one act in one place. The post-world War history of the United States is too often broken down into understandings of convenience, and this began with the idea of Lansdale the kingmaker, and continues with critiques of Lansdale the expression of American imperialism. Lansdale's true role, and the extent to which he controlled and installed Magsaysay is still unclear, 50 years later. What is known is that his role was greater than he said in his 1972 biography In the Midst of Wars, but still largely cloaked in the secrecy of the intelligence community.

Of the role as Filipino kingmaker, one of the greatest allegations against Lansdale was that he bankrolled Magsaysay's election. Lansdale spent many years refuting this claim. In examining the documents around his time in the Philippines, though, one surfaces that is a request for half a million U.S. dollars for "psychological operations" that appears to be politically based. The timing conveniently coincides with the election campaign for Magsaysay. This Cold War battle for the 1951 Philippine election was less about tanks and guns as it was about 60 sound trucks, 36 35mm still cameras, a printing press and 30 16mm movie projectors. All were equipment that Lansdale requested funds from U.S. officials to help elect Magsaysay. He may have tried to downplay his role, and even his request and influence may have been slight, but his influence was present and undeniable. These funds were to help sell another product by Lansdale the advertising executive, American ideas through a Filipino President. The lines between a psyop and politics were continually blurred by Lansdale. It seems clear, though, that Lansdale helped Magsaysay secure significant resources for his 1951 election. The guise of "kingmaker" that the Kennedy brothers would believe later was not well suited to what he accomplished with Ramon Magsaysay, and Lansdale's efforts to replicate his earlier Philippine success met with repeated failure. His reputation was at least partially based in truth, and no one would believe his denials. They would accept the easy definition of Lansdale as larger than life, and able to accomplish enormous tasks beyond the capabilities of normal agents.

No king would be made by Lansdale for Cuba. The funds he would spend for psychological operations against Castro would be ill-spent and have zero return. Looking at Lansdale's time on Mongoose now, 40 years later, the almost comical schemes to undermine Castro seem ridiculous. That they were so outlandish should speak to both the desperation of the Special Group and also to their reliance on 'dirty tricks' rather than anything substantive. Any actual Castro assassination plans are mired in the doublespeak and cryptic nature of the intelligence world. The schemes to undermine Castro, though, are abundantly clear and ridiculous on their face. The Kennedy administration wanted the rewards of the Bay of Pigs without taking the risks required to achieve it. They were unwilling to trust the only ones capable of undertaking the endeavor to head the operation, the intelligence community, and instead gave it to a retired general, a counterinsurgency man from Southeast Asia and the President's brother. There was little expertise in the group, and few options open to them that would accomplish the goals set by the President. To demand a military end using covert means, without the option or threat of force, was to ask revolutionaries in Cuba to act without force and achieve a revolution without blood. This is a demonstration of the Kennedy brothers as to their misunderstanding why the Bay of Pigs operation failed. They immediately assumed that any overt military operation was bound for failure because they had halfheartedly gone forward with the overt invasion. They had little sense of why they lost that conflict and a poorer understanding of what was needed to topple Castro. All they seemed clear on was that they wanted him gone, and were willing to do anything short of an outright unprovoked invasion to accomplish that end. Kennedy had a lack of historical understanding as to why the Bay of Pigs failed, and it resulted in the creation of Mongoose which made little inroads and created much greater consequences. At the moment in which the invasion of Cuba was no longer the American policy and the military option was off the table, Kennedy could not allow the Mongoose group the authority to pursue a repetition of another failed invasion or use of force. And without any chance for ground support other than simple sabotage missions, the group was limited to being a nuisance rather than any significant threat to Castro's existence. In the blunt and direct statement of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, "It didn't accomplish anything." If Lansdale did in face install Magsaysay, he never even found a replacement for Castro to begin with. From what Lansdale said to Currey, and what he wrote in his own memoirs, choosing the successor was the first decision that was made in the Philippines. After realizing that Quirino was corrupt and reviled by the people, they found another candidate to take his place and helped work towards Magsaysay's electoral sucess. Though he would become disenchanted with Diem, and upset at the series of Vietnamese leaders, there was no Cuban alternative candidate chosen to Castro. Mongoose and Lansdale could not figure out who would carry the ideas of freedom and liberty to the Cuban people, they were instead focused on trying to undermine Castro instead of building an effective movement. Any movement, and any threat to Castro, had to involve a candidate and an alternative political leader.

Philippines

The Huk rebellion is called the "largest and most important" "case of agrarian unrest in modern Philippine society" by Benedict Kerkvliet. His work, The Huk Rebellion, is interesting in that he interviews only those who supported and sympathized with the Huks. His is a bit incomplete, as though the efforts of the government and military were already covered, and, therefore, worth ignoring. A simple glossary check of his work shows 9 pages involving President Magsaysay and one mere reference to Edward Lansdale. The counterinsurgency that Lansdale detailed in his In the Midst of Wars was apparently not of concern to Kerkvliet, but Lansdale's application of those principles were certainly of concern to the Huks. Luis Taruc, who was the Huk leader, in his biography, talked about the operations undertaken by Magsaysay, but ignored Lansdale's contribution.

In a chapter called "A 'Revolution' That Failed," Taruc talks about Magsaysay's "intelligently conducted all-out psychological and military offensive. The new discipline he imposed within the army, his good public relations, and his treatment of Huks who had surrendered or had been captured and who were willing to turn over a new leaf, seriously threatened the morale of our rank and file…" Yet, even though Taruc chalked up a significant amount of his loss in the Huk struggle to Magsaysay, and therefore Lansdale, and yet it was not of concern to Kerkvliet.
From a strategic point of view, the Huks made poor military decisions. The terrain of the Philippines was well suited to fighting an insurgency in that specific islands could be ruled secure, and controlled more easily than an insurgency in a jungle area with political boundaries but few geographic ones. Fighting the Huks could prevent the classic Sun Tzu strategy of assuming formlessness. The Huks had a form, they could be found, and they could be fought. The classic counterinsurgent lesson is that of the British in Malay, where they took the island and made a grid of areas secure and insecure. The British were able to define the battle and fight the insurgents, rather than having them blend into the countryside, as had been the practice most notably in Vietnam and also in many other insurgent episodes. The terms of the Huk engagement were thus on much better terms for the government to fight than the government of South Vietnam would face later. The choice to limit themselves to one distinct area, Hukbalahap, was a fatal error for the Marxists.

The Huks were entrenched in the countryside north of Manila. They made surprisingly few efforts to make their rebellion in the cities. Their efforts at supply from outside, foreign international Communism, was hampered both by the Korean War and the geographic location of the Philippine islands. The classic military strategy of fortifications, in any scale applicable to a definable target, has become absolutely obsolete in the guerrilla world of the post World War II era. The Rommel strategy of a cell network, independent and feeding off the countryside and, ideally, the enemy was the best strategy. Modeling a force after a medical virus would have had the greatest for success.

Instead, the Huks relied on a peasantry that would be just as responsive to the government as they were to the rallying cries of the Marxists. One story, often repeated about Lansdale, details his attention to breaking the people away from the rebels. Separating, as Benedict Kerkvliet outlined, the most radical element of the insurgency from those who were generally supportive among the population. One story involves an area of the Philippines that had an active Huk presence, and Lansdale learned also had a superstition about vampires. The locals called them "asuangs," and the government would use this fear to turn the locals away from the rebels. One rebel was taken in a column, his neck punctured, and blood drained. He would be placed back on the trail, and rumors would quickly spread that the asuangs were killing those with impure hearts. This would scare and intimidate the local population into withdrawing their Huk support. No one wanted to risk being the next asuang victim. This was the smaller scale of psychological warfare that Lansdale helped form.

Later, in Vietnam, the Phoenix program would aggressively penetrate Viet Cong areas of control and paint an "eye of God" over certain huts containing VC leaders. The benevolence of this action was coupled with the horror of body mutilation and violent specific assassinations against those who had received the 'eye of God' staring over them. Printed eyes were left on the mangled bodies of those killed by Phoenix. This was extreme psywar, and it was meant to terrorize the troops and locals. The war against the Viet Cong would experience few moral or ethical restraints. McClintock even quotes an Army Pamphlet that details the intended affect of such operations,

The generalized threats do not delineate behavior or specify demands and consequences; these are left to the imagination of the threatened individual. Uncertain threats are used to create terror among the populace.... The threatener captures attention at a point when persons under stress are desperately searching to eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity. He may suggest escape routes and alternatives, and make compliance demands which are readily accepted in order to eliminate the uncertainty of the threat and reduce terror. Occasionally, terrorists do not even seek compliance to specific demands, but rather hope to cause 'flight" or psychological and morale breakdown of a population.

Terror was authorized against the civilian population, the extent to which this was executed against the Philippine people is certainly less than that of the Vietnamese, but certainly the lessons were picked up, first, in the Philippines. It is interesting that of the 'eye of God' tactic, Cecil Currey ignores this clear predecessor to the infamous Operation Phoenix. Phoenix was the 1967 plan to take out the leadership of the Communist movement by targeting the leaders in a series of assassination. This wet work, when revealed by William Colby in 1971 to the tune of 20,000 individuals, caused great controversy. In that the original larger effort at this was started by Lansdale, is ignored by Currey.

Assassinations against the Huk leadership were never as necessary, however, as the Huks were never able to move much past the countryside. Tall tales of vampires were enough to split away support for the Huks in the Philippines, whereas even a violent extreme would prove to ultimately be futile in Vietnam. The real propaganda victory in the Philippines, though, was not the 'eye of God,' but rather a government program that alleviated the land reform concerns of many potential rebels. As the Huks melted into the countryside, they started to lose their most salient political issue after the Magsaysay government began their own land reform program called "EDCOR."

The 'Economic Development Corps' was "originally a proposal to provide homesteads for discharged soldiers, [and] developed into a means to undercut Huk demands for land reform." Lansdale details this program as a brilliant stroke of Magsaysay in answering one of the strongest Huk rallying cries, that of land reform, among the peasantry. Kerkvliet cites a figure of 950 peasants resettled in the EDCOR program, of which about 250 were former Huks. This program, by the numbers, did little to actually solve the problem of tenant farming, but was a huge psychological victory. It was a psychological battle of Filipino counterinsurgency, and even though few were served, the effects were huge. People regained their faith in the government, and that translated into support for Magsaysay, and swept away a large appeal of the Huks.

The Magsaysay administration realized that the Huks were being supplied by poor tenant farmers in the north, and that the greatest recruitment into the ranks of the Huks were the system of tenant farming that many equated with something akin to sharecropping. The answer, then, was to take land in the south and allocate it to farmers and set up colonies that would be productive and owned by the farmers. Lansdale relates several anecdotes of former Huks changing their ways upon seeing the gem that was EDCOR. This was another way in which Lansdale the advertising executive found to co-opt thy enemy, and was a military action without military force. In In the Midst of Wars, Lansdale recalls watching a tearful Huk repenting his ways to a skeptical Magsaysay, saying that he never thought the government would do such a thing, but now in seeing it in practice, said he would go back and try to recruit his fellow Huks to put down their arms and embrace the government. Magsaysay found a way in which to convert Huks, remove their resources and build productive colonies in the south. This is the type of lesson that the military application of counterinsurgency has lost. No system upon which to convert those in Cuba was ever implemented. The counterinsurgent lessons in the basics of EDCOR are worth more than a hundred fields of Cuban sugar crops destroyed.

Part of this lesson, then, is also the relationship that Lansdale had in regards to the actor involved. The American general was not creating an insurgent movement, or concerned with how to recruit more volunteers into the Huk ranks, he was involved with how to undermine their issues and create ways in which the legitimate government could take steps to mitigate the threat from the insurgents. In that Lansdale helped Magsaysay to start and reap the benefits from EDCOR, it was a lesson that would be hard to extrapolate later when creating an insurgency in Cuba. A specific term in the intelligence community is that of a "denied area" where a police state has so taken over a country that intelligence and covert action is nearly impossible. Cuba was denied and the Philippines were open for programs like EDCOR. The Philippines, by nature of its close relationship with the United States, had never gotten to the point of being a denied area. North Vietnam and later Cuba would both be considered, by the intelligence community, as a 'denied area.' The distinction is important in that it allowed Lansdale the freedom to be unconcerned with both the implementation of EDCOR and the chances of success for such an operation. He could build an operation in stages, putting together the various pieces, without having to worry whether one piece would be taken out by the government. He had free reign to act, versus the incapacitation he would later suffer against these two other governments in Saigon and Havana, neither of which would be friendly to what he was trying to accomplish.

The threat from the Huks, and the American role in putting down that insurgency, was not simply answered by the presence of Lansdale. Again, that analysis carries a certain arrogant and simple answer that neglects the importance of many other factors, not the least of which was Magsaysay himself. The Philippines was not Vietnam in the sixties, and was certainly not Cuba either. The 'magic' that others saw in Lansdale was the combination of many other things he had little control over. Blaufarb puts it bluntly when he says "[Magsaysay's] presence on the scene and his remarkable skills made the victory seem far easier than it actually was and perhaps obscured as much as it revealed." Lansdale had unparalleled access and influence over Magsaysay, but also lacked specific obstacles that he would face later in his career. He was also one advisor, in that he was giving good advice while also being at the right place at the right time is of equal note. The counterinsurgency issue in the Philippines, against primitive people espousing Marxist views, but not backing those views up with material support from a foreign Communist government, made things from Manila seem much simpler than they would later be from Saigon.

The simple geography of the area was much different than the other two major points in Lansdale's career, Vietnam and Cuba. The Philippines are a series of islands. Lansdale, there, worked with a legitimate leader who could easily reform the military from the corruption that plagued it before Magsaysay. Using the reformed military to fight the insurgency, then, the Philippine islands make for a suitable way in which to fight dispersed insurgent movements by simply segregating the conflict by island, whereas in Vietnam there were few discernable borders. In Cuba there would only be one main island from which to base operations and no place to build a social movement. Lansdale could encourage movement of the Filipinos from their villages and place them on a southern island away from the Huks, as a part of the EDCOR program. This prevented their helping the Huks, and also was a way to prevent civilian casualties in case of military action. This same action could not be taken in Vietnam, and was rather inapplicable in the case of Cuba. The British had fought a successful counter-insurgent campaign in Malaysia by making a military grid of areas clear of rebel control, and systemically clearing out the grid. Without the ability to define the battlefield, Lansdale would be constrained in both Vietnam and Cuba with borders he could not control. He would be unable to define the battlefield for Vietnam and could not gain a foothold in Cuba.

Vietnam

Edward Lansdale understood Vietnam as a psychological war. In fact, Lansdale understood every conflict as essentially a conflict not of troops and munitions, but rather of ideas. His answer to insurgents was to try and coopt their messages, deflate their cause, and fight the remaining guerrillas with force. Battles were tests of the endurance of ideas among the greater population, and those who believed in them. The real test of an insurgency was whether the population bought into the rebel demands, and whether the government could assimilate their cause. He distinguished himself from other military tacticians, such as Kennedy Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in that he saw the use of force not as the first, but rather last option. If the people and guerrillas could be absorbed, it was a better situation. Lansdale was a true believer in American ideals, and tried to get others to believe as he did. He tried to use those values to answer the various situations he faced. By contrast, Lansdale comrade, John Paul Vann, stressed material well-being over values. Vann stressed the stomach and Lansdale stressed the heart, both trying to appeal to the people of Vietnam. In their view, the war depended less on kills and ground secured, but rather on how supportive the population was to its efforts. Both Vann and Lansdale understood the conflict as psychological as well as the traditional military doctrine.

The experience of the Quiet American in Vietnam was initiated due to tension in the Philippines over undue Lansdale influence in the 1953 election, Allen Dulles was specifically concerned that President Quirino would declare Lansdale persona non grata due to his fear of losing to Magsaysay. Thus, as a way in which to cool tensions in the Philippines, Lansdale went to Indochina in order to observe the French efforts at pacification and their efforts at dealing with the Vietnam insurgency. French General Navarre gave him free access to travel to the surrounding areas in order to get a better understanding of the state of affairs in Vietnam. Currey cites the two main problems noticed by Lansdale as being the static defenses of the French in that they holed themselves up in forts such as Dien Bien Phu, one of the forts he toured, as well as the deteriorating political climate from which the French were alienating the average Vietnamese. At this point, in 1953, Lansdale was experiencing exactly how not to fight a counterinsurgency. The French were giving an excellent lesson to the American in how to lose the support of the country.

It was at this point, in January of 1954, that President Eisenhower met with his National Security Council to decide what America should do about Indochina. Eisenhower did not want America to simply take the place of the French, but did not want the free world to lose another country to Communism. Allen Dulles, according to Currey, offered Lansdale as a model in order to pursue American interests without overt U.S. military forces. The 'kingmaker' myth was ensconced within the minds of these cold warriors. They saw Lansdale as a way to spread American values, without the cost of American lives and much material. This was a reflection of how lucky Lansdale and Magsaysay had gotten, and how easy it seemed for the Philippines to succeed. This was an assumption made more on hope than on experience. In fact, Lansdale had only succeeded in the Philippines, and was largely distrusted by officials in the State Department who felt as though he had simply gotten lucky with Magsaysay. Regardless of how the bureaucrats felt about him, Lansdale played on the unreal expectations of those in power that they could win without effort, by sending Lansdale to work, what Currey calls, his "magic."

This magic would not work in Vietnam. The Communist movement was so well entrenched, and the government of South Vietnam so thoroughly disabled by internal corruption and French influence that the movement was hampered from making much positive progress. U.S. support derived from an early understanding of what would later be expanded by Jeanne Kirkpatrick in her 1979 article "Dictatorships and Double Standards." U.S. support was based on the Cold War understanding of the world in which an ally against Communism was palatable as long as "friendly autocrats" did not turn into "unfriendly autocrats." The support for Diem thus ignored ways in which he was undermining his own regime by ignoring the demands of the insurgents.

The Communists were able to make their movement native, and regard the South Vietnamese government as a puppet of America after 1954. This lie was reinforced by the mere attitudes of U.S. policymakers, seen clearly in the May 11, 1961 Kennedy National Security Action Memo that outlines as the President's fifth and sixth decisions, a United States role for actions that are wholly and totally the obligation of the legitimate Saigon government. Increasing Diem's confidence in the United States, popularity in Vietnam and improving the relationship with other countries was not consistent with working towards a sovereign and independent country fighting on its own. The Kennedy National Security Action memo was nation-building, but it was the micro-management of that affair involving too great an emphasis on the actual day to day affairs of the state and too little on developing actual institutions within Vietnam. Lansdale himself said that "I had been told that I was to help the Vietnamese help themselves. As far as I knew [in 1954], this still was almost impossible for an American to do." Even though this was the start of American involvement, it was an assumed role as protectorate, a position carrying the responsibility of the French without the authority. This tension, the overt support of a foreign country was something that the South Vietnamese would never be able to effectively answer for when the Communists made it an issue. The issue was never one of actual foreign support, for the NVA and Vietminh had plenty from their own foreign sources, but the role of foreign occupier was transferred from the French to the United States, and the Communists were able to make the issue more credibly one of the United States versus Vietnam rather than framing it on freedom versus totalitarianism. The southern government of Vietnam was not a bastion of democracy and certainly not perfect, but it was the alternative to Communism which the American government had aligned itself with. In order to prevent the spread of absolute societal control by Communism, America had not to fight for international recognition as much as it had to win the "hearts and minds" of the people, both friendly and enemies.

Lansdale did his best to try and change the terms of the argument. He referred to Communism as "neo-colonialism" in that it meant to spread International Communism. Neil Sheehan caustically dismissed this characterization in his notes as "Lansdale the ad-man", but Lansdale makes the perfect counterpoint to the Communist rhetoric. The problem with his approach, as Michael McClintock noted in Statecraft, was that he saw every conflict as one where a reform of the military could acquiesce the populace. "He still saw a Philippine-style solution for Vietnam-that is, winning over the people merely by ensuring troops behaved decently…." Even though the Communists had spent decades building their movement and had an estimated 15,000 insurgents within South Vietnam, Lansdale still believed that the Philippine experience would still be applicable. The drastic difference in preparation between the Huks and Viet Minh, as well as the support they were able to get from outside governments, blurred the similarities between the Philippines and South Vietnam. Yet Lansdale would continue trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

He was an advisor to the military command, and also to Diem personally. His advice was not always as ambivalent as broadcasting rumors of vampires. In one of the most stunning acts for an American 'advisor' Lansdale orchestrated a mass exodus from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. Initially, as Currey writes, no one would believe the seven figure numbers he wanted to help migrate. The French thought 30,000 would leave, the Red Cross calculated a few thousand. The 1954 Geneva Accords that brought peace between the Communists and the French sought a popular election to decide the fate of South Vietnam in 1956. This election would be pivotal to the future of the nation, and Lansdale realized that Ho Chi Minh had a huge advantage in numbers. He intended to change that discrepancy.

Currey writes that no one gave Lansdale authorization to motivate so many people to flee into the arms of South Vietnam. By the end of the operation Lansdale, in his memoirs, would estimate 900,000 leaving the North during the Geneva timeframe and another 100,000 "trickling in" afterwards. This was a massive operation and a huge success for the goals of changing the electoral dynamics. It was unconventional thinking, but it would not, in the end, win the war. Causing the largely business class and Roman Catholics of the North to come to the South would not answer fundamental problems within the government of the South. These were tactics for winning an election, not actions tied to a larger, strategic effort to win the people's support. If Lansdale was to use a lesson from the Philippines, he needed to add more here than merely getting the people across the border. That may have been an immediate goal, but it was ultimately futile if he could not reform the government and co-opt his Communist enemies.

Lansdale offers a resounding summation of what being anti-Communist means, "When the right cause is identified and used correctly, the anti-Communist fight becomes a pro-people fight, with the overwhelming majority of the people then starting to help... When the pro-people fight is continued sincerely be its leaders, the Communist insurgency is destroyed." His ability, from a rhetorical point of view, to counter the selling points of Communism, Lansdale the advertising executive, was powerful. He was able to frame the Communist insistence of their movement as a decolonial exercise as, rather, Soviet "neo-colonialism" in the guise of Communism. His ability to counter his opponents, and attempt to coopt them through argument is Lansdale's best talent. But, as he was able to independently operate in the Philippines, he was very much constrained in Vietnam. His initial mission was another one as an advisor, and he could not build the same rapport with Diem as he had with Magsaysay. At least some of the reason for that inability was the presence of so many other American officials in the area. He was unable to preach his message of reform and effectively fight as a counterinsurgency. He would come back to the country, after having spent time in Washington under Mongoose, and his team would still be unable to make much positive change in dealing with Vietnam. He would finally leave exasperated and ignored.

Cuba

After Castro's rise in 1959, the American policy toward the island had to change with it. Not entirely sure of itself as it dealt with the new leader of Cuba, it was not immediately clear how Castro would identify himself in the greater Cold War struggle. The composition of his initial advisors were a positive sign for the Americans. When Castro began to declare his Communist intentions, and went to the United Nations and made his allegiances so well known, his threat level rose. Having a Communist neighbor to the south was unacceptable to the Washington policymakers, and preyed on the mind of the Kennedy brothers, who had seen their party be torn apart after the loss of China to Communism. The perception of being soft on Communism was unacceptable to a President committed to "bearing any burden" against insurgents like Castro. That an insurgency in the greater Cold War struggle was not the same as an insurgent force fighting against a legitimate government was of little concern. The answer to Castro's global insurgency in the U.S.'s backyard was to try and form an insurgent force against the reds in Havana.

The geography of Cuba makes it of interest to the United States primarily because of its proximity. Its status as an island nation also made for the ability of Castro to shut out the Americans. The geography had been in Lansdale's favor for the Philippines, and greatly undefined in Vietnam, but he was unable to gain much traction on successfully building the movement that he needed in order to begin knocking away at Castro. Another part of that dynamic was that the island of Cuba was not in a state of revolution after having toppled Batista. One change was much easier than having to immediately depose Castro having been in power for less than three years. Having tossed aside the Batista regime in 1959, the people were not in a revolutionary stage looking for the proper catalyst in order to vent their passions and translate into a new government. Instead, the revolutionary groups had been largely liquidated around the time of the Bay of Pigs. Having lost much of their intelligence apparatus as well as the ability to form a revolutionary counter to the entrenched Communists, the American perspective was limited and lacking.

Mongoose

Mongoose was not a typical operation of the federal government. It was intended to pool the resources of many agencies into one sustained and coordinated effort to topple Castro. It was, as Roswell Gilpatric, the Kennedy Deputy Secretary of Defense said, outside the purview of the Defense Department because it was "considered entirely as a clandestine, covert operation, and the Defense Department mission was not to engage in those, simply to support them, if necessary." The Operation to topple Castro would not be run by the Central Intelligence Agency, as was typical of covert paramilitary operations, the Kennedys had been so distrustful of the CIA that it had created its own committee to coordinate and task the effort to get rid of Castro.

Mongoose was largely made in reaction to the Bay of Pigs debacle. It was decided that overt military action was specifically the last course of action, and that covert action to overthrow Castro was to be utilized, as well as creating the justification for military intervention. The Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba in October of 1962 was a response to the actions of Mongoose. The Soviets were concerned as to the level of hostility shown by the American government, and their suspicions were largely correct. From the beginning, Mongoose was prepared to do what it took to get rid of Castro.

The initial group was composed of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, CIA, with Lansdale representing the Secretary of Defense and serving as the Director of Operations for the Operation. The policy, as outlined by Lansdale, was "to use all available assets in a project to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime." This group would be known as the Special Group, or simply "SG." It would later be called the Special Group Augmented, (SGA) after the addition of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor. The Special Group was chaired by General Taylor, and focused on overthrowing Castro and Communist Cuba.

It seems peculiar that Edward Lansdale, a counter-insurgency expert, would operationally lead this group even though its goal was not to counter any insurgency. Its goal, rather, was to destabilize Castro and facilitate his removal, by creating an insurgency. The expertise of each member of the group was based on bureaucratic seniority, not experience with the topic. These were Washington men, and all lacked ways to create a rebellion. General Maxwell Taylor had been a career military officer with strong opinions about flexibility in military doctrine, but with little to none in counter-insurgency or insurgency itself. The group's Director of Operations, General Lansdale, was primarily experienced in supporting legitimate governments and in countering rebellions and insurgencies. His experience in the Philippines with Magsaysay and in Vietnam with Diem both corroborate this experience. His working knowledge of creating an insurgency, and undermining existing governments was simply a logical corollary to his experience, not based upon any of his previous assignments. These were the two non-bureaucrats, the ones who would be focusing on overthrowing Castro. They were military men, not revolutionaries and certainly not Cubans.

Edward Lansdale himself was more of a celebrity than a proven leader. His reputation was what made him attractive to the Kennedy brothers, having the "kingmaker" of the Philippines replace Castro through dirty tricks and sabotage. Lansdale had been promoted from Colonel to General not out of merit or service but out of bureaucratic necessity. In relating his problems of giving orders to Generals, Roswell Gilpatric found a solution for Lansdale in simply upgrading his shoulders rather than replacing and retasking him. His inexperience was clear when he sent a memo to William Harvey about possibilities for liquidating Castro and other Cuban leaders. It was understood not to put such matters in writing, and Harvey complained to John McCone, the CIA Director, and then-CIA Operations Chief Richard Helms. Lansdale the assassination novice had talked about things too sensitive to put in a memo. He also lacked experience in "over the beach operations" as Thomas Powers writes. Powers recalls two especially laughable Lansdale ideas, one to seize the Isle of Pines and use it as a base of operations, failing to note that it was the location of the Modello prison. Another idea was to use rumors to spread the idea that Castro was the anti-Christ, and if the Roman Catholic population of Cuba would kill Castro, Christ would return to Earth. Powers describes Lansdale's use of these schemes as part of his innovative thinking, and also his inexperience. He was better suited to political operations, consulting Magsaysay and Diem, rather than planning operations. His credibility was based more on his celebrity than his actual experience. The Kennedy brothers wanted a 'kingmaker' and they thought Lansdale could make one out of scratch, they were wrong.

The preliminary date for revolution, as contemplated by Lansdale, was the early fall of 1962. This was to be achieved by, first, setting up a movement within Cuba. This obvious first step, was never realized. Though Lansdale would meet with Robert Kennedy, separately, "At least once a week" , progress was made on specific tactics rather than on a realistic strategy to counter Castro and sow the seeds of a credible counter movement. The immediacy of action demanded by the Kennedy brothers was inconsistent with the realities of covertly building, forming and growing such a movement. Thomas Powers corroborates this, "the Kennedys, like all other Presidents and high officials dealing with the CIA, did not really understand the operational side of clandestine activity, or the importance of time in establishing solid covert organizations in a world all too untidy and unstable." Building a movement to bring a revolution, even one that would take over after a large military operation, would take more time than the Kennedys were willing to give Mongoose and the CIA.

Any Cuban movement to overthrow Castro would have to be based on some ideal. There had to be a value to sell to the people. When Lansdale worked on the Cuba project, there was a noticeable lack of any American ideals. The concepts of freedom, capitalism and republican government were not what the California advertising executive tried to sell to the Cuban people. Any revolution against Castro, he well knew, would have to be based on some idea or value contrasting against the dictator in Havana. Lansdale keenly recognized not only the power of liberty and freedom, seen as distinctly American concepts, but the incredible selling power of those ideas. Lansdale the advertising man saw that America's values were the key to winning support among native people, exporting his own Americanism and patriotism. This buttressed nationalist movements, they were not the export of control from Washington. Rather, a devotion to the ideas of Washington the man, and those others who believed in a republican form of government. These were the ideas that he sold to Magsaysay, and tried to sell to Diem. Being that Lansdale was meant now not as the advisor but rather the instigator, he now failed to sell these American ideas to the Cuban people. As "Director of Operations" for Mongoose, this was his task, and his past should have been his motivation. How he saw the Philippines and Vietnam, thousands of miles away, as a better market for the sale of his American ideas, and not the island of Cuba, seems odd. It seems as though the Kennedy insistence on overthrowing Castro at any cost short of military invasion caused Edward Lansdale to obviate that which had worked for him so well in the Philippines, crafting a movement that could be native, and consistent with American values and interests. The tangible steps towards making this movement, such as identifying its main theme or topic to stir and foment revolution, was never set forth. Kennedy wanted Castro gone immediately, and Mongoose was going to do what it could to comply.

In remarks to the Air University on October 2, 1963, Lansdale said the "Communists [are] well aware [of the] effect U.S. beliefs have on people. Thus propaganda - along with strong pitch of going to win in long run or 'wave of future' - also says 'Hate America'." The Quiet American understood the focal point for what America should be selling ideas, and he sold it before. In pointing out the Communist recognition of the power of American ideals, he was tipping his hand as to what he saw as the strongest weapon in the American arsenal. The beliefs and values that cause an enemy to believe in the mission of America was powerful not just to the Communist, but also to Lansdale. He understood the rhetorical relationship of the Communists and their responses to American statements, and yet he failed to extend this logic and relationship to Cuba. Had Mongoose taken one group, and helped them craft an appeal to the Cuban people, as Lansdale points out in In the Midst of Wars that the Politburo is so able to do, a simple message that could be carried by American supporters would have a stronger effect on undermining Castro than covert operations. Mongoose should not have myopically seen only covert operations as part of their responsibility, they needed to form a social movement to remove the dictator in Havana. Lansdale the Americanist lost his edge in Mongoose, relying on crackpot schemes and ridiculous tactics to achieve a revolution that would have to be rooted in the ideals he was overlooking.

These Mongoose plots and schemes offered no counter-movement to the existing regime in Havana. As with Magsaysay, successfully and unsuccessfully with Diem, Lansdale was selling American ideas to the people. These were leaders intent on offering a capitalist system, with significant political rights, in an essentially democratic system. This is the basis for George Kennan's argument for containing international Communism. The style of American approach to the world generally falls along these definitions in the Cold War, with various exceptions for consideration of realpolitik. The regimes preferred by the United States were generally consistent along these lines. Anything, then, would be preferable to Castro. Free systems of government were the best choice in the world, and trying to keep an immediate ring of free states around the U.S. was of great interest to the American government. America offered a counter-movement for the people, a contrast to the global Communist insurgents. The battle, as it had been in the Philippines and Vietnam, was focused on how the country's people should live, under a capitalist system with democratic institutions, or under a Communist system with totalitarian institutions and a command economy. This analysis, though, is not applicable in the Cuban operation, because the American alternative was never offered. Even if the Americans were to offer another dictator to replace Castro, as a transitional state, in the scheme of what Jeanne Kirkpatrick would later outline in her

The counter-movement was never so simple as to kill Castro. Though that would, in some way, undermine the regime, it would not present a counter-movement. Thomas Powers, in his biography of Richard Helms, makes the assertion that it was not CIA policy to kill individuals. Though Powers offers no analysis as to why that has been the case, the answer seems clear that it affects little in terms of the strategic goals the Agency is pursuing. A regime and movement is never simply ended by the death of one man, and in the case of Cuba, would not have transferred to a capitalist, free society on the death of Castro. It required, rather, a counter-movement to affect change and bring about the revolution required. Assassination is not revolution. It creates turmoil that revolutionaries can exploit, but is not a policy in itself. As such, when asked by the Senate Intelligence committee about plots to kill Castro, Lansdale said "I don't ever recall that at all. … And I am very certain, Senator, that such a discussion never came up, that, neither with the Attorney General nor with the President." Powers quotes General Charles Cabell on the assassination question well, in that such operations are "uncertain of results and highly dangerous in conception and execution…" And though going after these leaders could be rationalized in specific circumstances, it still did not build the requisite movement to achieve the needed result. Therefore, the plots and schemes to overthrow Castro, were never serious enough or planned through the Special Group. The simple idea to kill Castro was an operation for the CIA, and the effort to undermine and overthrow the Castro regime was left to the Special Group.

Roswell Gilpatric said "the idea of a concentrated effort to undermine or overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba [had originated with RFK] through weakening it, psychologically, economically, politically and physically." This did not include killing Castro, "that, as I have testified before, was something that I never recall being discussed…" and "have no recollection [of it ever being discussed]." The goal of Mongoose was to affect a change in government, not simply a shuffling of leaders. Gilpatric continued, RG, page 24, "I think my first reaction then, and it would be today, that it is not an activity that the United States government should engage in, and secondly, on a more pragmatic basis, it would not be productive. We knew perfectly well that Castro was one of a number of people comprising his system… there were a number of others. It was a well-installed, ingrained system. …you don't accomplish anything by knocking off one man." The actions of Mongoose were specifically targeted against the regime, not a man, "I have no recollection of this particular point being discussed, and we talked about all kinds of sabotage, psychologically warfare, contingency planning for invasions, the whole range of actions involving preventative effort in regard to the Castro regime to keep it from doing more damage to what we felt was the interests of the United States. But the subject of killing him, eliminating him or liquidating him is something that I do not recall was discussed at a meeting in which I was present. Maybe my recollection is faulty, but that is it." The easiest 'dirty trick' for Mongoose could have been assassination, but its effectiveness was so low that other avenues were pursued. The well-known stories of exploding conch shells and exploding cigars are a product of the group that followed Mongoose, headed by the CIA's Desmond Fitzgerald. Whether Mongoose tried the same approach seems obscured, for now, by the opacity of the intelligence community.

Though Mongoose may not have tried to kill Castro, it took concrete steps to try and overthrow him. Part of what stymied that progression, though, were the qualities of Castro that Mongoose could hardly change. Mongoose was frustrated in its conception due to Castro's own personal charisma and following. He never slipped down the slope of negative popularity similar to Ngo Dinh Diem. Lansdale said as much himself, in 1975 testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, when he recalled his initial comments to President Kennedy upon being asked his appraisal of the situation in Cuba. Lansdale told JFK that Castro "had aroused considerable affection for himself personally with the Cuban population…" They could not find a way in which to insert an idea or person to replace that charisma. Even if Castro was not the best option for the Cuban people and American interests, they still had to offer an alternative. They could call him a problem, but they themselves had to offer a solution. One is never offered.

The lack of a solution speaks largely about Mongoose suffering from a lack of concrete goals. It was given the mandate to topple Castro, but the inexperience of those on the Special Group gave no means from which to achieve this end. Powers cites Lansdale as being more interested in the "boom-and-bang" rather than substantive covert action achievements. The two logical first steps to undermine Castro, to collect intelligence and start planting an intelligence network of agents, was not pursued. Cuba's distinction as a "denied area" where a strong, effective police state can effectively counter any attempted penetration was never changed by Mongoose. Operations and sabotage could be successful, but linking them with the intelligence and movement needed to affect a real change in Cuba left Mongoose impotent.

Roswell Gilpatric confirms this status, as he spoke in 1975 about this lack of goals. He described it as being faced with unsolvable problems. "We felt a sense of frustration because the basic difficult we faced was we were trying to do a big job without involving directly the United States government, trying to do it through covert means, and that is just a biological impossibility under the circumstances. The kind of a job we were trying to do through these various actions and plans and schemes of the Agency were just not on a scale to accomplish the result and yet we didn't want to go further and implicate and involve the United States openly. We were just faced with that problem." The Kennedy brothers wanted to achieve bloodless policy through covert means, and wanted it immediately. Their expectations were too high, their dedication was too low, and their people were tasked with too much with too few options to achieve what the Kennedy administration wanted: Castro gone without the use of force.

The greatest advocate for this position was Robert Kennedy. He was the President's brother, Attorney General and chief cheerleader on Mongoose. He also stymied any real function of the group due to his special relationship with the President. RFK served as a special conduit to the President, but also functioned to exert undue influence. The command structure no longer flowed from top to bottom, it had an unnatural sidebar that was a disruption in the normal flow of bureaucracy. Thomas Powers asserts that Richard Bissell, namely, was fired not only for the Bay of Pigs debacle, but also because the Kennedy brothers felt as though he was not strong enough on their mission to rid Cuba of Castro. Roswell Gilpatric, in his 1975 testimony also stated that Robert Kennedy was the driving force in Mongoose. His function was not to administrate, but rather motivate and prod the Special Group into action. RFK had the affect of asserting unnatural motivation, as he carried the role and authority of the President with him by virtue of being his younger brother. RFK was known to call CIA officers directly involved with the Cuban operation, call the CIA's Operations Chief Richard Helms as well as his subordinates and even their subordinates, Bobby Kennedy was a distinct aberration to the normal bureaucratic hierarchy. The Kennedy impatience with action against Castro resulted in confusing signals and competing jurisdictions. Bobby Kennedy even assumed the role as chairman of the Special Group Augmented, over General Taylor, in October of 1962 after feeling that the operation was progressing too slowly. This position also cancelled possible bureaucratic objections to proposals, because the Attorney General/brother to the President wanted constant action. Roswell Gilpatric noted that "So I think we swallowed our reservations - or, we expressed them, but we went ahead and did the best we could, which wasn't very good. It wasn't a very effective operation." The ability to challenge Robert Kennedy's peculiar place and authority within the Special Group was not the same as a normal bureaucrat. Mustering the ability to challenge the President's brother was not the same as others. RFK got faster results, that were of much less quality because the normal screening was scrapped.

The Special Group was to be the coordinating agency, yet its authority and role was never clear beyond an advisory role to the 5412 committee of the National Security Council, as well as the diffusion of power resulting from approval and review by each of the participatory agencies within the Special Group. To overthrow Castro, one group needed the authority, power and responsibility to do it alone. Especially Lansdale the independent operator, to have to coordinate with such a vast bureaucratic institution, would be taxing even for a seasoned bureaucrat much less someone with much more field experience than desk time in Washington.

Mongoose was complicated by its strange place within the government. More an advisory committee than any body with authority, it was meant to task agencies and departments, but had little power to enforce that tasking. General Lansdale, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence committee in 1975, related that very item in terms of 'control.' "I had the responsibility of tasking them [elements of the CIA, the Defense Department, the Department of State and the USIA]. Control is a different matter, one that incidentally, bothered me a great deal at the time. I was given the position of coordinator." This coordination was with the representatives of the departments represented in the Special Group. These representatives still had to clear the actions and functions approved by the Special Group through their superiors and actors in their respective departments. Lansdale put it bluntly in his Senate testimony by saying that he "had no control over their activities and no compliance. … I was never in a position of real control."

Mongoose operated outside the traditional definitions for a government committee. Though the operation itself was not unlike many other within the government, its status of tasking myriad intelligence and military agencies in the effort to topple Castro, without overt military action being on the table was unique. Also different was the position of Robert Kennedy as the titular head of the committee. Functioning as the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy sat in on the meetings. The Attorney General served, however, not only as the department head but also as the President's brother. And, by such a close association, functioned as the President on the committee. This strange arrangement within the normal bureaucratic processes made it difficult to function. In the notes from the 4 October 1962 meeting of Mongoose, chaired by Robert Kennedy, the first subject brought up was the President's dissatisfaction with Mongoose's progress on sabotage operations. The Attorney General was relaying what his brother and President wanted done, as he sat chairing the meeting. The "concern" expressed at the lack of action put those on Mongoose in a precarious position of taking action without consideration to effectiveness and consequence. Roswell Gilpatric corroborates this version of events in his 1975 characterization of Robert Kennedy on Mongoose: "The complaint the Attorney General had, if we assume he was reflecting the President's views on it, the steps taken by the CIA up to that point, their plans were too petty, were too minor, they weren't massive enough, they weren't going to be effective enough. We should get in there and do more. … He wanted results. He was not telling us how to do it." These were bureaucrats with the President chairing the meeting, by proxy. Efforts to seriously undermine Castro, build an effective intelligence network, and begin a political and social movement to replace Castro never really began due to the Kennedy insistence that action be taken to achieve results first, before the foundation could be laid for any successful movement against Castro.

Any such foundation was too slow for the Kennedy brothers. Even during the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy was urging stronger action against Castro. Notes from Richard Helms, then Deputy Director for Plans at CIA, show that on 16 October 1962, Robert Kennedy urged the Mongoose team into action. Helms notes Bobby Kennedy chastising the committee for "discouraging" results as well as "small accomplishments." Helms also noted Bobby's resolve "to give Mongoose more personal attention" by having daily meetings with the principals on the committee at 9:30am. He rebuffed a sabotage plan as not having enough "push" and wanted more action immediate and "aggressively." The point was action, tactical success rather than strategic victories.

The absence of a plan is plainly evident in the Helms notes. Helms writes in his notes that he explained to the Attorney General that the Cubans that CIA had been working with were getting hesitant to cooperate. In fact, Helms told RFK, "they were willing to commit their people only on operations which they regarded as sensible. I defined 'sensible' in Cuban terminology these days as meaning an action which would contribute to the liberation of their country." The light sarcasm evident in Helms' notes shows a certain dissatisfaction at the quality of operations being undertaken. Surely, Helms was not alone in this view. Mongoose was more about satiating the Kennedy desire to strike at Castro rather than achieving any tangible goal, namely the liberation of Cuba from Castro. After telling this to Robert Kennedy, Helms notes that "The Attorney General's rejoinder was a plea for new ideas of things that could be done against Cuba." Mongoose was saddled with the Kennedy impatience.

The entire operation was hurt by the presence of the immature Attorney General. Mongoose lacked a proper and clear role to operate within. It was a bureaucratic anomaly that was made unique by both the role of Robert Kennedy as its major operations had to be cleared by the President, yet the President's brother was sitting in on every discussion. Robert Kennedy was most known, later in testimony by Roswell Gilpatric, as being one of the driving forces behind the Kennedy quest to get Castro. Bobby Kennedy was serving for the President, with the de facto role of President and who also served to press them into action for seemingly failing to topple Castro. John Kennedy was perpetually over the shoulder of Mongoose, prompting them into action. The quality of some recommendations, thus, must be at least partially attributed to the urgency at which the Kennedys sought the removal of Castro. The normal bureaucratic vetting of more outlandish Lansdale proposals sacrificed in favor of doing something.

The most obvious proposal, the use of military force, was specifically off the table. That caused those on Mongoose to lack the needed authority and options to achieve the ends they were asked to accomplish. Without the military option, they were neutered in terms of using a covert operation to justify military force that could dislodge Castro. Roswell Gilpatric outlines this frustration.

We felt a sense of frustration because the basic difficult we faced was we were trying to do a big job without involving directly the United States government, trying to do it through covert means, and that is just a biological impossibility under the circumstances. The kind of a job we were trying to do through these carious actions and plans and schemes of the Agency were just not on a scale to accomplish the result and yet we didn't want to go further and implicate and involve the United States openly. We were just faced with that problem.

The problems that Lansdale and Mongoose faced often had solutions that no one was authorized to give. The pragmatism of General Lansdale often bore itself out even if the static answers of the traditional establishment thought otherwise. Lansdale was appointed to head a commission to sort out sectarian differences in Vietnam, and one of the problems for the commission to solve was disarming the sects. Lansdale's answer was to offer some payoffs, and also give a highway contract to a sect leader. This bribe would be made knowing it would take many men to work on the highway and would be in exchange for ten thousand arms, to meet the self interest of the sect leader and the commission's goals. Lansdale even told the sect leader they would name the highway after him. This proposal was refused, and was perhaps too obvious to be implemented by a bureaucracy. The Lansdale advertising skill, knowing how to sell not only products but ideas, was the continuing tension he faced in a military dominated by force. His marketing and communication talent lost on those who were more willing to eschew their military principles rather than the needed persuasion. Such is the tension not only with commissions, but also with governments.

Governments faced with insurgent threats, that can accomplish their goals through simple reform measures, often disregard such easy antidotes in favor of current policies. The military reaction to insurgent threats is often dictated by their understanding of large-scale traditional conflicts. Insurgencies are often fought with weapons, but won with words and ideas. The military is often too blunt an instrument to fight such wars alone, and governments too willing to cede such crises to the military and avoid taking the measures needed to combat insurgent threats.

Even the reaction of the United States was dulled in response to what Douglas Blaufarb calls the "Counterinsurgency Era." The main public response was to dedicate the military to 'understanding' this threat by devoting 20% of their attention to the concept. Blaufarb notes ridiculous examples of Finance classes learning how to make explodable typewriters and cooking classes learning to hide grenades in cakes. The other response was for Kennedy to create the infamous "Green Berets" and for the Navy to make the Sea, Air, Land teams (SEALs), these still ignore the social element that Lansdale has already understood. Kennedy responds to the concept of counterinsurgency by making National Security Action Memo 114 in November of 1961 which directed the Secretary of State to make a "continuing review" of U.S. forces in the concepts of "riot control, counter-subversion, counter-insurgency, and related operations." There was no explanation or illumination that such concepts were not solely to devise new tactics for a military campaign. In that war was Clausewitz's politics by other means, guerrilla war was the same at its essence, a political struggle. Combating ideas and movements with tactics would only prolong a struggle, not overcome one.

Lansdale saw the key to overcoming this struggle, translated into a Communist struggle during the Cold War, as a war of ideas being sold. He was an Americanist, he understood the freedom and liberty that he saw as distictly American. Citing Jefferson, he sought not an empire, but freedom for a people he tried to move towards that vision. It was not a vision permeated by war, but rather one of an armed peace. In a very revealing Foreign Affairs article from October of 1964 entitled "Viet Nam: Do We Really Understand Revolution?", Lansdale offers his own opinion to 'oppose the Communist idea with a better idea and to do so on the battleground itself, in a way that would permit the people, who are the main feature of that battleground, to make their own choice." In this simple sentence, Lansdale not only identified the people as the main component within an insurgency, but identified the idea as the war to be fought. The key, then, to a revolution and insurgent element, is the battle of ideas. Lansdale offers American values as the way in which to fight insurgencies. Not avoiding the military component, but rather relegating it to the proper place as an accompaniment to sound policy based on ideas rather than the replacement for a lack of ideas being sold.

The lack of ideas did not cause of lack of results. The most tangible result of Mongoose, and the most well-known, was the Cuban missile crisis. Fearing an invasion prompted by the escalation of the low-intensity war against Castro, the Soviet Union sent missiles to prevent any invasion. As Samuel Halpern later said of Lansdale's plan and Mongoose that it ignored the possibility of outside intervention. It operated as though there was no one for Castro to turn to, no missiles to be placed on the island to defend it from invasion. Robert Kennedy, at a Mongoose meeting earlier in 1962, had even broached the topic of missiles in Cuba, but the committee had dismissed it as an unrealistic notion. Mongoose was operating at high-intensity with sabotage and covert action, but with little mind to what such action could cause. Though the main sabotage accomplished was against a refinery, plans were in place to attack mines and the workers harvesting Cuban sugar. The plans, therefore, were more important than what was actually accomplished. The missile crisis was not a punitive measure, it was preventative. Seeing what was planned, the Soviets took action before Mongoose could cause the crisis needed to invade.

Popular history has held that the Russians placed their missiles in Cuba over the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961. Daniel Ellsberg simplistically and mistakenly offered his opinion on the missile crisis as deriving from Republicans calling for an invasion of Cuba, while completely ignoring the role of Mongoose and the Kennedy low-intensity war against Castro. Cecil Currey, in his Lansdale biography, even goes a step further in saying that the "secret war against Cuba was secret only from Americans; it was certainly well known by both Cubans and their Soviet allies. In reaction to the Special Group Augmented activities, the Russians began rapidly increasing their support of Castro." The action to covertly topple Castro had instead caused the crisis most regard as the closest the world has come to nuclear war.

Part of what caused Mongoose to be such a failure, and what made the Soviet missiles a surprise to U.S. intelligence, was the lack of intelligence in Cuba. Days before the Kennedy brothers knew missiles were in Cuba, Senator Keating made a bold declaration of their existence on the Senate floor. Ellsberg offers a partisan conspiracy theory that CIA Director John McCone, who was a Republican appointed to the position after Allen Dulles's resignation, offered the material to Keating, a Republican. As has been described by Max Holland, the link between Claire Booth Luce and Senator Keating shows the extent to which Mongoose's intelligence on the ground in Cuba had been failing. The intelligence community knew less than Luce, a private individual working with one of the Cuban counter-revolutionary groups, the DRE, whose supporters had told Luce about the Soviet buildup. Holland even quotes Luce as telling William Colby, in 1975, that it was she "who fed the missile stuff to Keating." Edward Lansdale, in his 31 August 1962 memo to the Special Group (Augmented) even understood this route for information, "The continuation of the refugee flow and the selective debriefing of refugees provide the most significant source of intelligence." This source of information, channeled through Luce, was the information that set off the crisis. This information should have been culled by Mongoose, and is the most telling example of its failure, in that JFK was able to be blindsided by Senator Keating even through Mongoose had been working for nearly a year on Cuba.

There should have been no chance for such a bombshell. Keating should not have been able to find out more than the U.S. intelligence community, who was working so diligently on the topic. That there was no movement in place in Cuba, working to persuade the citizens and also collecting intelligence, is a damning indictment of the operation. On its face, the question of a movement seems an issue related to the post-revolution governance, but it poses a more important question for the policymakers in Mongoose. What to do with those in power? In the Philippines, a peaceful withdrawal by the United States was followed by a democratic election of a widely popular Magsaysay, and a counterinsurgency against ostracized Marxist rebels who were confined to a section of an island. They were targetable and persuadable. Their grievances could be met, and the battle could be won. In Vietnam, Lansdale faced supporting a less legitimate ruler, highly alienated from his countrymen, who was never quite independent from the previous colonial power. Whereas the Americans were content to leave Manila, the French were not so willing to leave Hanoi. As Mongoose plotted, they seemed oblivious to the consideration that they were attempting to uproot not only Castro, but the entire regime. Their answer to this dilemma, though not recognized in words, was to begin operations to slowly erode support and political favor in the regime. The ridiculous ends to which this was attempted was even to consider leafleting Cuba with submarine-based hot air balloons. The seriousness of this proposal is seen only in its paper, not its practical application. Though Lansdale was known for unconventional thinking, he was not trained in building a revolutionary movement overnight, assuming it were possible in the first place.

Which is, at its essence, what Robert and John Kennedy were asking for: a historical movement to be immediately fabricated. Assuming that most colonial countries were going through "decolonization" in the post World War two time, Cuba had already sloughed off its dictatorship in favor of a new one. Since Castro had so effectively liquidated his opposition, there was little base from which to build a movement. Trying to blanket the island nation with leaflets was an exercise in futility. A more productive action would have been to try and split the Cuban government from their Soviet patrons. Working to undermine this relationship would have been more effective than trying to establish a natural movement from within. Cuba had already developed a remarkable totalitarian police state network in the short time it had existed.

The other, more well-known, aspects of Mongoose and the attempt to undermine Castro are well-known and ridiculed with the hindsight of 40 years. Another Lansdale plan to undermine Castro was to get the largely Catholic nation to lose their confidence in Castro's divine Providence. This is often considered one of the most wild, ridiculous schemes of Mongoose. The plan was dubbed 'elimination by illumination'. The connotation on those play on words was not meant to be favorable. The rush to undercut Castro's support led to proposals that serve as 40-year-old punchlines, joking as to the unbelievable ways in which the Kennedy administration tried to undermine Castro. Jonathan Nashel calls "the sheer number of bizarre schemes considered and sanctioned by Washington to defeat communism emphasizes Lansdale's influence on governmental policy." The creativity sometimes left one with schemes that were barely practical, and a little outlandish. Samuel Halpern, who was a part of Mongoose, has called Lansdale's schemes ridiculous in recalling his time on the committee.

The central problem within Mongoose was how to create a political movement. Indigenous movements often have thousands involved over a span of many years, the Kennedy brothers were demanding results of Mongoose in a year or less. Lansdale's 33 point plan was an effort to begin the process, but was certainly not the entire way in which to achieve a revolution. The bureaucrats assembled were more experienced with the Washington social scene than they were about guerrilla tactics. The lesson Lansdale had to offer them, from his experience with Magsaysay and Diem, was to appropriate American ideals and values as a way to approach a broad-based movement. The myriad of ridiculous ways in which to 'undermine Castro' were silly forays rather than constructive actions to building a movement.

One plan, dubbed "Elimination by Illumination" involved building a fable that Christ's return was being blocked by Castro's presence. Another scheme was to make Cubans believe Castro was not worth much. This operation was called it "Operation Bounty" and was undertaken to achieve, what Currey cites as "distrust and apprehension in the Cuban Communist Hierarchy." This would be achieved by dropping leaflets from the air offering a reward for the murder of government officials. The caveat, is that though $5,000 would be offered for informants, $10,000 for government officials, Castro was only to be worth a paltry two cents. Another Mongoose plan was called "Operation Free Ride", which consisted of dropping one-way airline tickets on the Cuban population. These were

"Operation True Blue" was a scheme devised to override Cuban broadcasting signals. It would, during a speech by Castro, interject American propaganda and messages to the people of Cuba. The Mongoose planners even came up with such schemes as to place blame, in case the manned Mercury mission failed, on Cuban electronic interference. They would, in keeping with this operation, "manufacture various pieces of evidence that would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." This was called Operation "Dirty Trick." Some of these plans were part of pretexts to be used for another invasion of Cuba, while others, like Operation Dirty Trick, were meant to isolate and undermine Castro internationally. Mongoose had not one goal in keeping with these plans, rather they sought to hurt Castro in any way possible.

Castro was not alone, though, as Mongoose also sought to hurt the Cuban people in order to further their motivation to rebel against Havana. Through "Operation Invisible Bomb", Mongoose sought to use American aircraft to create sonic booms which would make the population both feel under attack, and would have the tangential benefit of breaking their windows. To say that Mongoose was amoral in terms of the Cuban people would be to simplify the case to the immediacy of the moment. Lansdale and others honestly believed that what they were doing was weakening Castro so that a free and liberated Cuba could assert itself. Certainly, Castro, in his own brutality of dissidents was as bad to the people. On the individual question of Mongoose, however, their record is frustratingly complicated in its use of tactics with large tactical markers and creativity, but with little regard to concrete measures to actually free the Cuban people. Hurting the people to achieve an end of undermining Castro may be justifiable, but in knowing that 40 years later, Castro still rules the island, invalidates much of the justification one can give to Mongoose. Even though these actions tried to justify their means by taking out Castro, the fact they never did points to Mongoose's largest, and clearest, failure. These plans, then, are made nearly impossible to defend except on points of abstract military and political theory, laden with the lofty hopes that America could win a revolution free of American blood.

In trying to avoid that blood, and being implicated in these plots, Mongoose sought ways to strike at what little they knew could have an effect. An especially troubling operation, involving American use of biological agents to sicken sugar workers, stands out among many others. It was Lansdale's own idea to sicken sugar workers with a temporary agent that would keep them out of the fields for 24-48 hours during harvest season. Using non-lethal chemicals, this was a plan to strike at the Cuban economy relatively easily with tangible results. Though the effects were indirectly related to the overall goal of toppling Castro, it still made progress towards that goal. Perhaps because it was not large or grandiose enough for Mongoose, or because it was slightly too practical, Currey states that it was "quietly cancelled" by the Special Group. David Martin, in Wilderness of Mirrors, offers that CIA told Lansdale that it did not have a single agent in place that could accomplish the job required by Task 33. Not only that, but to spray the workers from the air would be directly traced to the United States, and to follow through with such an act would, as Martin quotes the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "probably result in demonstrations and riots… throughout the world." Martin quotes the Chiefs again as saying, compared to Task 33, another invasion of Cuba "could conceivably cause less furor in the international forum and perhaps be less detrimental to the long-term interests of the United States."

In a very telling document of Operation Mongoose, the Memorandum from Chief of Operations Lansdale to the Special Group (Augmented) on 31 August 1962, the "second phase" of Mongoose is outlined. This phase would be short-lived with the discovery of Soviet missiles later in October, but the plans and assignments listed on the sheet are an important roadmap of what direction Mongoose was heading. Looking over these plans, it has no common theme or selling point from an advertising perspective, and has no indication of any significant intelligence having been used to formulate the plan other than the observation of where Cuba was on the map and to what international organizations it belonged. The plan for phase two of Mongoose shows a remarkable dearth of knowledge, the intelligence collected seemingly obviated in favor of pursuing psychological operations and covert means that were just as applicable elsewhere. The specifics of Cuba's history, geography and politics ignored.

This ignorance, and disavowal of igniting a movement, may have resulted from the lack of intelligence or the perceived failure of the attempts to build a movement. National Security Historian James Bamford states that Lansdale and General Lemnitzer had given up on building a movement in favor of outright invasion. The bay of pigs was meant to be done right in terms of tactics, not strategy. Bamford says, "As prospects of an internal revolt in Cuba dimmed, Lansdale and Lemnitzer began to quietly explore the possibility of doing what they had wanted to do all along: conduct a full-scale invasion." This contrasts with the dissent Peter Grose mentions in his book on Allen Dulles, where he quotes Lansdale as specifically challenging his mentor Dulles on the wisdom of the Bay of Pigs operation. Grose relates the quotes given by Currey, of Lansdale questioning Dulles at the 5412 committee, asking "What's the political base for what you're going to do?" and "How popular is it going to be?" So, the focus of Lansdale as seller of invasion seems to have either been mischaracterized by Bamford or significantly changed. Lansdale's emphasis on the reception and attitude of the Cuban people is not shown in documents of the most notorious part of Mongoose, called Operation Northwoods.

Bamford calls Northwoods one of the most corrupt programs ever conceived by the government. It was a plot to justify a military invasion. The Northwoods memo dates to the early summer of 1962, before the missile crisis. It was going to sink a boatload of "real or simulated" refugees in order to create international outrage. It thought about recreating an attack that they phrased a "remember the Maine" event again in order to justify military action. The only way in which the Mongoose planners could topple Castro was through outright military action. Yet Cecil Currey says that these schemes were not Lansdale. Currey asserts, rather they were pieces of the three elements of intelligence collection, propaganda and sabotage efforts that Lansdale was trying to undertake. These were, in Currey's words, "consistent with his underlying principles and the expressed purpose of Mongoose - to build gradually toward an internal revolt by Cubans." This argument is greatly undercut by Lansdale's involvement with Northwoods and the other schemes in Mongoose. Currey does pose the question, though, whether this was what Lansdale had meant to export to Cuba, or rather if these events and documents are taken out of context.

Lansdale had operated as Allen Dulles' independent operator in the Philippines, and had enjoyed a great degree of independence in Vietnam as well. His ability to work in a team, or more aptly within the bureaucracy of the American government, is much less established. Within counter-insurgency, most military actions have three primary abstract goals about them, as seen in a 1962 book called Counter Guerilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, where the first appendix lists the goals as "1. To capture, kill, or harass the enemy, 2. To obtain and report information. 3. To win the support of the people to the government and the armed forces, by demonstrating their concern for the people." The book was interestingly co-written with a good friend of Lansdale's, Charles T. R. Bohannan. So, essentially, these goals can be summed as the military, intelligence and political nature of the overarching strategy behind counter-insurgency efforts. Each function of the plan achieves one of these three main goals. Thus, its important that one head of this group can coordinate these functions, and ensure that actions taken are consistent with the overarching goals and work towards that end.

This was the role that Lansdale played for Magsaysay. Helping him shore up his own domestic support, while bouncing ideas and plans off of Lansdale. The Quiet American was the advisor to the Asian king at court. These were answers to specific circumstances, absent of a large, coordinated and outside supplied movement. For Mongoose, as David Martin says in Wilderness of Mirrors, "The timetable was preposterous, especially coming from a man who lectured others on how long it had taken the Communists to build an insurgency in Vietnam." The timetable "preposterous" and the planning was equally so. Martin continues that "Members of Harvey's Task Force W decided that Lansdale's October deadline [for overthrowing Castro] had more to do with the November elections than with the realities of insurgency." The Special Group agreed with CIA's appraisal of the hasty timetable and scrapped the deadlines in favor of intensive intelligence gathering. Lansdale the advisor became Lansdale the administrator, coming up with deadlines and plans that he could otherwise assist, but never had to deal with the entire strategy as a whole. The operations chief for Mongoose had no previous experience of this scale to fall back upon.

The CIA end of the Operation also had interesting characters, some with personality quirks that brought an unusual experience to the operation. CIA used the term "Task Force W" instead of what the Special Group Augmented called Mongoose. One CIA character, in particular, had a reputation not only as America's James Bond, reportedly even introduced as such by Lansdale to President Kennedy, but also as a hard-drinking womanizer who purportedly carried two pistols on him at all times because of the secrets he knew. William King Harvey was also rumored by Lansdale to have carried a gun with him into the Oval Office, a charge Harvey later denied to Congressional investigators in the 70s. William Harvey was the "buffer between [CIA Director for Plans Richard] Helms and the impatient demands of the White House." This put Harvey in command of over 400 CIA agents, whose purpose was to assault the Castro regime.

This effort was out of proportion. It was related only to the level of animosity the Kennedy brothers held for Castro. David Martin quotes a CIA member of Mongoose as saying "Task Force W was all out of proportion, we had a force working on Cuba that was the equivalent for an entire area of the world. I specifically was told that I could have as many people as I wanted when I got my job." Robert Kennedy sees overthrowing Castro as simply a matter of will rather than in tangible terms. He dismisses any CIA reticence, thinking it due to the same weakness and duplicity that caused the Bay of Pigs failure. The effort was doomed to failure, however. No matter how hard they tried, they were making fundamental mistakes that could not be corrected. David Martin quotes a member of CIA's Cuban task force as saying "The thing Lansdale couldn't realize was that he wasn't operating anymore in friendly territory, he was operating in enemy territory without a goddamn asset in the place." No force could accomplish an objective where such mistakes were already made. There was no intelligence and no way to build a movement. Lansdale was taking needless steps, acting before thinking. The Soviet missiles would be the consequence to that lack of thinking.

Khrushchev tells Kennedy in a 26 October 1962 letter that "We must not succumb to light-headedness and petty passions, regardless of whether elections are forthcoming in one country or another." The lack of thinking and lack of a plan to create a movement allowed the Soviets not only to place missiles, but obviated the possibility that outside action would take place in Cuba. At several points during the days of October, confusion reigned in the approach and response to the crisis. One of the greatest miscalculations was Kennedy's insistence that the Soviet missiles were probably defensive in nature. Even Khrushchev recognizes the confusion in Kennedy's assessment of 'defensive' weapons, "You are a military man, and I hope you will understand me. Let us take a simple cannon for instance. What kind of weapon is it - offensive or defensive? A cannon is a defensive weapon if it is set up to defend boundaries or a fortified area. But when artillery is concentrated and supplemented by an appropriate number of troops, then the same cannon will have become an offensive weapon, since they prepare and clear the way for infantry to advance. The same is true for nuclear missile weapons, for any type of these weapons." Khrushchev later says in the letter that weapons cannot be offensive without the presence of invading troops. The confusion of Kennedy in dealing with foreign interaction and presence speaks to a greater flaw within the plan of Mongoose, where the threat of foreign intervention was not considered.

Previously, the United States had been able to act with relative impunity. The Monroe Doctrine gave it the moral authority over the Western Hemisphere, and the actions in other nations, so far during the Cold War, had faced relatively light foreign support in terms of covert action. The Korean War had been a traditional war without the insurgents found in other conflicts immediately after the second World War. That wars would be fought unconventionally was not the question, rather when it naturally caused an escalation into a potentially greater conflict the plan had no direction. Mongoose did not know what to do when it prompted a Soviet answer to American low-intensity war against Cuba.

The lack of clarity in this plan, contrasted with the Kennedy urgency for action against Castro, plays out strongly in the missile crisis. The delicacy of the situation made for a fragile peace during the tense days of October 1962, a tension exacerbated by Mongoose. Initially in the crisis, the weakness of the American position was the direct blame of John Kennedy in framing the political situation in a way allowing the Soviets a rational reason for shipping the missiles. This blame was obvious to some, but vented itself never more directly than in the end of William Harvey's tenure as director of CIA's Task Force W. During the missile crisis in a meeting with the President and the Attorney General, according to Thomas Powers, "Harvey had the temerity and professional ill-judgment to say clearly, in the midst of witnesses who were genuinely horrified at the idea of saying anything so baldly critical to a President, that the crisis was their own fault: if they'd never made an official distinction between defensive and offensive weapons… then none of this would have happened." Harvey was indirectly attacking the Kennedy vendetta against Cuba without logically rationalizing Soviet involvement. Harvey's was a critique not only of the Kennedys, but also of the rest of the intelligence community which failed to predict that scenario. In pointing out the trait that would end Mongoose's further existence, it also spelled the end of William Harvey as head of anything significant within the CIA.

Mongoose was the bridge between the two greatest Kennedy crises, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy creates and delegates covert action authority to Mongoose in response to the failure of outright military action against Castro, and this secret war against Castro prompts a greater reliance on the Soviets, and, in turn, the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles that began the twelve days of nuclear tension in Cuba. Mongoose had tried to build an intelligence network, blown some things up, but failed to initiate any popular movement against Castro. Its only success was in bringing the Soviets into the playing field of Cuba.

Kennedy sent a letter to Khrushchev on 23 October 1962 where he said Moscow should "recognize that the steps which started the current chain of events was the action of your Government in secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba." This is not wholly accurate, and Khrushchev, in his 26 October 1962 letter to Kennedy makes it clear that the Bay of Pigs, and "the constant threat of armed attack and aggression has hung and continues to hang over Cuba" that has prompted the placement of the missiles. Khrushchev talks about the placement of Marines in Russia during the Russian revolution as part of a continuing American interference in the affairs of the Communist world. The reference of such counter-insurgency measures, as well as the elaboration of the threat against Cuba, undoubtedly placed the blame at the foot of Mongoose. The American effort to justify a large military invasion had to be reputed in order for Khrushchev to remove the missiles. This was the referencing of the actions of Mongoose though the name of the operation was unknown to the Soviets. The ends that the Kennedy brothers were working for, through Mongoose, had to be given up in order for the missiles to be removed. This letter had been the secret one from Khrushchev and stood in contrast to his announcement, a day later, that the removal of American missiles in Turkey would be a requisite for removal of the missiles. The Russian leader not only ups the ante in terms of tit for tat missiles, but also a pledge not only against a military invasion of Cuba, but interference in it altogether. This delineation, and demand from Moscow, is again corroboration that the missile crisis was spurred by Mongoose. The missiles in Cuba become a bargaining chip for Moscow to barter Russian missiles 90 miles from Florida in exchange for Mongoose and American missiles in Turkey. The original deal is scrapped in favor of a greater American detachment from running interference and operations against the Communist world. When JFK accepts this new arrangement, it spells the end for Mongoose.

This end for Mongoose, a bureaucratic reshuffling that tossed the entire question of Cuba away from the designated Special Group Augmented and up the chain of Presidential committees meant that the Cuba question would not be prosecuted as aggressively as had been planned. The plots and schemes of Mongoose would fall out of favor, though the relations with Cuba would not improve. Lansdale would refocus his efforts on Southeast Asia, and take another venture to Vietnam. He would maneuver for a position as ambassador to Vietnam, losing out to General Taylor. Lansdale retired from the Air Force on 1 November 1963, but continued to stay active in the intelligence community as his mission to Vietnam shows.

The role of Lansdale would later be treated by Jonathan Nashel in his 1994 dissertation, his imagery and his role in shaping Southeast Asia. Nashel does a disingenuous waltz around the role of Lansdale as perpetual advertiser. Noting early in his dissertation, citing Cecil Currey's biography on the 'Unquiet American', on Lansdale that he 'hated people who told lies about products, and I refused to do it," and couples that quote, later, with a ditty by George Kennan about the 'monstrous evil of American advertising.' And then, to boot, Nashel uses a party invitation to reiterate his very weak point that Lansdale was peddling shoddy goods in the form of the immediate pleasure. So, to sum, Nashel goes from advertising is bad and reinforces the immediate pleasure required by the consumer and uses, incredibly, Lansdale's party invitations from the Philippines as support for this argument. Nashel seems stretched to place Lansdale's experience as advertiser, and misunderstands his use of Americana as a selling point. Lansdale clearly summed this up in the October 1964 Foreign Affairs article where he explains ideas as the way in which to fight a revolutionary war. In a simple reading of only the headline of that article Nashel could have understood that simple point, and yet its chalked up to the inevitable conclusion of Lansdale as a cynical peddler of Americana, yet Nashel even proffers a cop-out to explain that, in spite of the arguments he just made, Lansdale "deeply believed" the wares he was perpetually selling. This is a function of calling war advertising instead of the other way around. The persuasive goal of attacking international Communism with the American values and beliefs that are the core of any American policy is not a shallow, cynical move as Nashel seems to assert. Instead, its breaking the conflict down to its essence. A war of ideas, fought by Communists well versed in rhetoric trying to motivate and move a civilian population, cannot be countered with artillery and air strikes. The need to bring in the Lansdale element of psychological warfare, and using the lessons of advertising, is turning the shallow aspect of advertising and coupling it with the substantive elements of American policy.

Conclusion

Policymakers and Historians are still trying to understand the essential "hearts and minds" argument that permeates the foreign policy debate. Jimmy Carter tried to establish a moral foreign policy in the late 1970s and even more recent, news articles on the situation in Iraq point to the 'hearts and minds' as essential to any success. The support of the people, their integration into a movement and cause supported by military might and action, is the guiding principle of successful military action. The cause needs action, never an action needing a cause. A more cerebral and lasting change to foreign policy would be to recognize this change.

The foreign policy of Lansdale's time had an overriding principle: the defeat of international Communism. That cause was one by quiet Americans such as Lansdale, and their ideas and ideals were what caused eastern Europe to reject further domination, and led to popular uprising that defeated Communism. As Reagan said in 1980, the West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. It was the ideas that were proliferated, and supported with military action, that eventually confined Communism to the "ash heap of history." The West was a movement of economic, social and political freedom that the Russian Communists could not counter. The Soviet wars and efforts were broken down and frustrated by the appeal of freedom for the people, the simplest idea of the West was the one with the greatest resonance in its foreign policy appeal to the common man.

Mongoose never got past what Thomas Powers calls the intelligence gathering phase, and being a general annoyance to Castro. The boom-and-bang that Lansdale was interested in, and the pursuit of sabotage objectives rather than building any sort of counter movement in Cuba doomed any sort of American-friendly uprising and revolt. Instead, Mongoose was relegated to plots, schemes and various tactics to prick at Castro, but none to effectively challenge his dictatorship. Which is not to blame Lansdale. In fact, in a 19 November 1963 friendly letter to Lansdale, the second sentence, after a congratulations on retirement, is a poignant articulation of Lansdale's tough position in the intelligence and military communities. The letter reads "regardless of how [your retirement] came about, whether as stated (presumably accurately) as a result of being knifed in the back once too often, or out of a fit of pique on your part, or just as one of those things, I feel that you are to be congratulated." Certainly, this letter speaks much to the status of Lansdale the original thinker and independent operator had felt while within the bureaucracy and political world of the military and intelligence communities.

The most obnoxious part of modern American foreign policy history, then, is the staying power of Fidel Castro. Denying economic, social and political freedom to his people, Castro sits 90 miles off the Florida coast, defiant. Outliving most of his American opponents, the Cuban Communist dictator survived much longer than Robert Kennedy would have ever thought. Whether he could have or would have been overthrown had the Special Group focused more on establishing a movement rather than destroying material is purely a matter of conjecture. Hindsight is too easy to make over generalized statements such as what seems natural in rejecting the entire operation of Mongoose. The historical record, and the much vaunted Kennedy 'vendetta' against Castro is complicated by the disclosure that in the days before his assassination in Dallas, Kennedy had been trying to broker some sort of rapprochement with Castro and Cuba. This engagement was to the point where Castro contacted President Johnson through Lisa Howard of ABC News on 12 February 1964 and explained his intent to continue what he described as a "dialogue toward a settlement of our differences." This settlement never occurred, and the existence of Castro has long outlasted even the memory of Mongoose. The project was quietly scrapped after the Cuban Missile Crisis on 30 October 1962 as the Lansdale plots had gotten more extreme, and the entire "Cuba Project" was remanded back to the Special Group chaired by McGeorge Bundy and tasked out to the State Department. For all intents and purposes, Mongoose was over, and the effort to topple Castro ended in fear by the Kennedys that it would provoke the Soviets even more than they had been already.

An assertion that is neither over generalized or too obvious is that the role and actions of Edward Lansdale changed when pursuing Castro. He was no longer an independent operator, counseling legitimate leaders on quelling insurgencies, and he ignored the American values he otherwise based his efforts upon. The guiding principles that Lansdale used and expounded upon in his October 1964 Foreign Affairs article, where he posits American values as the true revolutionary ideas in the developing world, were abandoned with his efforts against Cuba. Mongoose may have been yet another debacle for the intelligence community, but its actions were atypical for Edward Lansdale.

Lansdale was an idealist who meant to "transfer Jeffersonian democracy" to Southeast Asia according to Allan Millett in a review of Currey's biography of Lansdale. Millett explains that he understands and knew the general to be one defined in the phrase "coopt thy enemy." In the advice he gave to the leaders he consulted, he brought a brand of populist counterinsurgency that others completely failed at. His approach to Cuba, however, stands in sharp contrast. Millett avoids much discussion in his review of Mongoose, and obviates the difficult task of weaving Lansdale's experience into that analysis. There was no approach to Cuba that achieved those similar ends. It is almost as if Lansdale stopped being himself when tasked by Kennedy to topple Castro. The absence of those ideals, the advertising executive forgetting his signature line, is left out of the Millett review. It is not that Mongoose is less interesting than his other adventures, rather that it fits so poorly with those other experiences. All the quiet American seemed to do was make a lot of noise in Cuba.

As the United States faces a generation as a hyperpower, and confronts a generation of insurgencies, the lessons of counterinsurgency and General Lansdale come quickly into focus. Noise will not be sufficient to counter the threats to the 21st century. Efforts to kill Pablo Escobar and Osama Bin Laden as well as other efforts to topple Saddam Hussein and effect regime change are essentially the same problem faced by the Kennedys and Lansdale 40 years ago. The American focus on leaders, rather than movements, a distinction unresolved since the Clinton move in the 1990's from state actors to group actors, is further complicating this dynamic. How to approach and combat movements, be they wrapped in the guise of a nation, people, ideology, group or terror cell matters not when considering the basic way in which to either kill or co-opt their movement. These situations represent movements that must be countered, either with force or with skill. The delicate and tailored application of force that General Lansdale typified is the most preferred action of the United States government, because it allows for a movement to coexist.

Modern threats to legitimate governments would be well advised to study the insurgencies faced by Lansdale, to understand the success of the Philippines, the confusion of Vietnam and the failure of Cuba. In an increasingly decentralized world, with formless threats, the recognition of insurgency as an action of movements, and the ability to absorb these enemies by taking action that is more social and cultural than by using a military, is the first step to this recognition. The advent of the information age will be less and less about military action and more about the war of words and ideas that marked the piece of the struggle in Mongoose that went most lacking. This understanding is still lacking in today's "modern military." When General John Abrams was asked in 2003 how an Iraqi insurgency could be effectively countered or prevented after the success of the United States, his answer was only to find the leaders of any insurgency and "take them out" before they were able to organize a resistance. The four-star general fails to notice insurgency as an inherently political act. The ability to prevent an insurgency lies not within preventing its organization, but in removing the cause for organizing. Lansdale's career and fumbling of Mongoose has never been timelier.

Lansdale won using all the right techniques in the Philippines, and yet lost for using all the wrong ones in Cuba. For his part, he told Cecil Currey that he felt the Cuban thing had tainted his career and was sorry he had gotten mixed up in the whole thing. Operation Mongoose was a failure, corroborated by both Roswell Gilpatric and Lansdale himself. They never tried to build the movement which would be required to topple Castro, and eventually succeed Communism. Lansdale the aide to Magsaysay, the advisor to Diem, could not be the revolutionary against Castro. The kingmaker could not dethrone the dictator. The Quiet American could not make noise in Cuba. After Mongoose was taken apart, that job fell to Desmond Fitzgerald, who would be involved with the various schemes upon which to purely take out the bearded dictator, relieving itself of the need to actually overthrow the government. Getting rid of Castro would become increasingly impractical and impossible as the Kennedy brothers and the intelligence community quit making serious efforts to get topple the Cuban government.

The Kennedy speech at the American University in 1963 is considered a benchmark for his Presidency, where the Massachusetts playboy redefines the American approach to the Cold War in a mature way that could, ostensibly, assure peace through cooperation. Seymour Hersh, in his expose of the Kennedy years, the Dark Side of Camelot, quotes Kennedy's speech while putting it into the context of the missile crisis that the Kennedy vendetta against Castro had started in the first place. While Kennedy told graduating AU seniors that "while defending our own vital interest, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy - or of a collective death wish for the world." The irony, of course, is that Kennedy had only had such an epiphany after having brought the world to that point. Mongoose had been conceived in vengeance after the Bay of Pigs, and had sparked Soviet nuclear missiles into Cuba. Mongoose had failed between those two points to bring a revolution in Cuba due to the lack of goals, the poor intelligence gathered and the fundamental lack of a movement created by those tasked with the impossible: overthrowing Castro from within without the time, resources and ideals required.

As the next decade progresses, more material will undoubtedly be uncovered about Lansdale and Mongoose. The secrets still so carefully clutched against the ever-demanding historians will trickle out slowly. The secrets will be known, and new stories will be told. Daniel Ellsberg noted to Cecil Currey that of all Lansdale's traits, his ability to keep secrets was one of the most impressive. And though Lansdale and his team never got Castro, history may finally get to know the rest of the reasons why Mongoose failed and Castro remained.

Bibliography:

James Bamford, Body of Secrets, New York, 2001

Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance 1950 to the Present, New York, 1977

Cecil Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American, Boston, 1988

Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, 1977

Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston, 1994

Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, Boston, 1997

Max Holland, A Luce Connection: Senator Keating, William Pawley, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Journal of Cold War Studies, 1999, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_cold_war_studies/v001/1.3holland.html

Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, New York, 1991

Edward G. Lansdale Papers, The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, New York, 1980

Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale and the American Attempt to Remake Southeast Asia 1945-1965, Rutgers Dissertation, 1994

Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, New York, 1979

Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi, New York, 1999

Luis Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger, London, 1967

Colonel Napoleon D. Valeriano and Lieutenant Colonel Charles T. R. Bohannan, Counter-Guerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, New York, 1962, Second Edition 1966

Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, New York, 2001

Mark J. White, The Kennedys and Cuba: The Declassified Documentary History, Chicago, 1999

Peter Wyden, The Bay of Pigs, New York, 1979

Citation Information:

Chicago/Turabian Style
Benjamin R. Wetmore, "Lansdale and Cuba" (Undergraduate History Major Thesis, The American University, 2003), http://www.benwetmore.com/papers/Lansdale_And_Cuba.htm

MLA
Benjamin R. Wetmore. "Lansdale and Cuba." History Undergraduate Major Thesis. The American University, 2003.