He Inspired Novels, Shaped Policy : Retired AF Gen. Edward Lansdale Dies

Edward Geary Lansdale, a retired Air Force major general whose exploits as a counter-insurgency and covert action specialist became the inspiration for two novels and whose experiences in Southeast Asia helped formulate American policy there, died in his sleep Monday at his home in McLean, Va., a Washington suburb.

The psychological warfare specialist, who spent two decades in the Philippines and South Vietnam, where he developed the doctrine that communism could best be defeated by “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” was 79 and had been suffering from a heart ailment.

Lansdale was an influential and often controversial figure who helped shape U.S. policy in Southeast Asia at critical junctures during the 1950s and 1960s. He was an assistant for special operations to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara during the early years of the Kennedy Administration when vital decisions were being made to commit U.S. support to the Saigon government in fighting the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.

As special adviser to the Philippines defense minister, Ramon Magsaysay, he directed the successful campaign against the Communist-led Hukbalahap guerrillas during the early 1950s.

Directed Covert Operations

As a U.S. adviser in South Vietnam in the years immediately after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Lansdale directed operations, many of them covert, that installed and maintained President Ngo Dinh Diem in office.

He was the prototype for Col. Edwin Barnum Hillendale in “The Ugly American,” the novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick about a harmonica-playing American officer who went into the rural areas of the Philippines and persuaded the peasants to oppose communism.

He also was the prototype for “The Quiet American,” the idealistic but misguided U.S. official in the novel by Graham Greene who believed the United States could defeat communism in South Vietnam by instilling a sense of Town Hall democracy in the rural population.

He also was an early proponent of psychological warfare, a concept he first put to use against the Hukbalahap in the Philippines. In one such operation there, government squads, playing on a superstitious dread of vampires in the countryside, spread rumors that a vampire lived on a hill where the Hukbalahap were based.

Two nights later, a loyalist squad seized a rebel soldier, punctured his neck with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and then put the corpse back on the trail. The Huks fled the region.

As an adviser to Diem in the 1955 referendum to choose between Diem and Emperor Bao Dai as head of state in South Vietnam, Lansdale had Diem’s ballots printed in red, the color many Vietnamese considered to be good luck, while those for Bao Dai were a shade of green that to many Vietnamese signified a cuckold. Diem received 98% of the vote.

Graduated From UCLA

Born in Detroit, Lansdale was a graduate of UCLA. He was an advertising executive on the West Coast before World War II.

During the war, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. He transferred to the Air Force in 1947. In most of his assignments in Southeast Asia, however, he reported to the CIA.

From 1950 to 1954, he was assigned in the Philippines. After the election of Magsaysay as president, he went to South Vietnam as head of the Saigon Military Mission and as an adviser to Diem.

From 1957 until the end of the Eisenhower Administration, Lansdale was assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense, returning to Vietnam on a temporary mission shortly before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President in January, 1961.

His report calling for a U.S. team in Vietnam staffed by a “hard core of experienced Americans who know and really like Asians” and for increased use of CIA-backed covert operations caught the attention of the President.

But by this time, Lansdale had opponents in the State Department and was not invited to participate in any of the operations. In 1962, he worked briefly on an abortive White House plan, “Operation Mongoose,” aimed at getting rid of Cuban President Fidel Castro. He retired from the military in 1963.

He returned to South Vietnam in 1965 as an assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and later to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. He left Saigon for the last time in 1968.