On June 5th, 2024, IWP hosted a one-day colloquium titled Liaison & Legacy: Edward Geary Lansdale, focusing on the late U.S. military intelligence officer, advisor, and expert on irregular warfare who practiced his craft in the Philippines and Vietnam. This paper was created as a part of the colloquium.
Donald Bishop speaks at IWP Colloquium on Edward LansdaleBy Donald M. Bishop
In 1978, the Air Force Academy Department of History hosted one of its biannual military history symposia. The topic was “Air Power and Warfare,” and papers, presentations, and commentaries were given by leading military historians and such figures as retired Air Force general officers Curtis LeMay, O.P. Weyland, Ira Eaker, T.R. Milton, John B. McPherson, and Edward Lansdale.[1] Lansdale was a discussant in the session on “Air Power Limits in Limited War, 1947-1978.”
I was his escort officer during the symposium. Let me recall why I was eager to meet Lansdale, what he said at the symposium, and how – even though he did not use today’s terminology, and he could not have imagined today’s turbocharged and infected communications environment – themes in his analysis endure. In particular, he sensed what we now call “sharp power.”
Lansdale Crossing My Scope
Let me set the stage. The symposium convened just three years after the dramatic evacuation of Saigon in 1975, demonstrating the failure of the U.S. effort to sustain South Vietnam despite an immense expenditure of blood and treasure. Between the defeat and that 1978 symposium, those of us teaching in the Air Force Academy’s Department of History endlessly argued the war. Every U.S. officer in the Department had served in Vietnam, so the bitter end came as a personal shock. Was it because the Air Force, shaped for nuclear and conventional warfare, was unable to adapt to a counterinsurgency? Was it because “one hand was tied behind our back”? Were our successes in Vietnam by 1972 undone by politicians in Washington?
During those debates, I recalled my serving in Vietnam in an Air Force base defense squadron in Binh Dinh province during 1969 and 1970. I had made occasional civic action runs delivering plywood and supplies to nearby villages. At one, Hung My 4, we were there a few days after an attack by the North Vietnamese had reduced much of the village to ashes, and villagers were still showing the shock of having lost their homes.
That day, I wondered how it could be possible to “mobilize” these countryside Vietnamese who just wanted their familiar lives to continue. I realized it would be difficult for any American, grown up in an electrified and prosperous society, to really understand the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and to have the basic historical and cultural understanding necessary to pursue a counterinsurgency.
I later reflected that no university in the United States had taught Vietnamese at the outset of the war, which also meant that not many insights derived from area studies would come to bear in the critical early years of the war. Although the US Army Handbook for Vietnam was published in 1964,[2] the Area Handbook for South Vietnam[3] and the Area Handbook for North Vietnam,[4] both prepared by Foreign Area Studies at American University, were only published in the spring of 1967. At 513, 510, and 494 pages, respectively, it would take some time for the Handbooks’ insights to work their way to leaders, staffs, and units.
At Phu Cat, I had read William Corson’s The Betrayal,[5] describing the Marine Corps’ Combined Action Platoons, and the Marine Corps Personal Response Handbook, which laudably helped Marines in their daily encounters with the Vietnamese.[6] This was quite different from the air operations of my 37th Tactical Fighter Wing flying the F-100 Super Sabre and the F-4D Phantom II. I thought both Marine initiatives were promising, pointing the way to a different approach to the war by sending a few Marines to fight with Popular Force units, and developing firsthand relationships with the Vietnamese by living among them. This was a “presence” or “population-centric” approach to the war, a concept that Marines adapted successfully in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province decades later.[7]
After Vietnam, I had also served at an air base in a remote province of South Korea – so remote there was no paved road linking the city and the base to the new national highway network. It would take a few hours to describe in full, but in 1972 and 1973, I was struck by the ignorance and ethnocentrism of so many Americans at the bases and garrisons, even though American forces had been in Korea since 1945.
During my subsequent faculty tour at the Academy, my knowledge of Lansdale was limited, but I knew he had identified these issues. For instance, the readings for the Academy’s history course in Unconventional Warfare included a Lansdale memorandum of October 7, 1963, “Through Foreign Eyes.”[8] Members of Lansdale’s staff, meeting more than 200 foreign counterparts, asked for their views of American advisors. The foreign partners valued professional competence, language skills, accessibility, empathy, personal and social ties, country knowledge, directness, enthusiasm, adaptability, humor, the negative effect of a bad temper, non-involvement in local politics, tours no longer than two years, family members joining the advisor, and being a courteous driver. “A PX-oriented US military population does not favorably impress the local community.” All this rang true to me after my 18-month Korea tour.
Reading the Lansdale memo, I asked myself how did American advisors of that time measure up to these standards? The Americans were competent in their specialties, I am confident.
But unless the local languages were Spanish, French, or perhaps German, too many advisors, even those with language training, were mostly not up to communicating with local counterparts, relying on interpreters and translators of varying quality, sometimes with their own agendas.[9] Lansdale, in a 1971 oral history interview, remarked, “At times I have had Americans or others with me as interpreters who were almost bilingual, or at least were rated excellent from a language school, and yet their empathy was flat. Some of them had picked up the manners of instructors or others, an outward show of superiority towards ‘natives.’ They were able to use the language far more readily than I ever was, and yet their manner caused people to freeze up. They lacked friendliness or something.”[10]
I doubted, moreover, that the Army personnel system really evaluated candidates for accessibility, empathy, adaptability, and humor, which meant, for instance, that among advisors were men of short temper and those who, because they were always on “transmit,” were not listening to their foreign counterparts. Other advisors believed the American way was the only way. And if the assignment was accompanied, inevitably families were drawn in by base and PX culture, so the advisor spent more time on base with family members rather than spending evenings and weekends with host country counterparts.
The 1978 Symposium
So when I saw the invitation to Lansdale to participate in the symposium, I immediately volunteered to be his escort officer during the three-day event. I had read The Ugly American and his book, In the Midst of Wars. He came with his wife Pat. I spent the better part of three days with the two of them, including a long conversation in their room at the VOQ.
Forty-six years later, I wish I could remember more of my conversations with the two Lansdales. I recall that when I learned he had been in advertising in San Francisco before World War II – he had the Savarin coffee account – I thought this would be a good start to a “hearts and minds” career. Because advertising effects will always be measured against sales, it would make former ad executives always mindful of the elusive “metrics” or “evidence of effectiveness.”
Of course, I shared my impressions of Vietnam and Korea. He encouraged me to continue to work on increasing cultural understanding among American military people, and my writing[11] and talks[12] would in time lead to an offer to teach these subjects at the COIN school at Hurlburt Field. Even then, though, I knew that the armed services were casting aside the study of counterinsurgency. I had grasped many of the “lessons,” but the Professional Military Education (PME) institutions no longer wanted to teach them.[13] Rather, I joined the Foreign Service in the U.S. Information Agency in 1979.
Before going overseas to Hong Kong, my wife and I invited the Lansdales and two other couples for dinner at our home. That he would accept an invitation from a junior officer showed his generosity. In the conversation, he was engaging, but he listened more than he spoke. (I add that Pat was not shy in expressing her takes on things.) I did sense how much our defeat in Vietnam – and the marginalization of his role at the American Embassy in Saigon – had discouraged him.
My USIA classmate Louis Segesvary, himself a Hungarian refugee in 1956, and Captain John Borum spoke, however, of the rightness of the American role in the world – and that USIA must advocate it. Lansdale complimented us for our belief at a time when the defeat in Vietnam was too fresh, and the desire for noninvolvement was too strong.
With that as background, let me first review General Lansdale’s “commentary” at the 1978 Military History Symposium.[14] He gave me the typewritten copy of his remarks for the conference volume. Second, let me address how he had, long ago, anticipated the character of conflicts in our time.
At the symposium, he spoke mostly about strategy, contrasting World Wars I and II – the “big wars” – with the “limited wars” in Korea and Vietnam. The big wars ended when we toppled “the enemy’s despotic leadership” and “We made peace with the people, not with their former leaders.”
In Vietnam, he said, “Skilled use of misinformation and psychological campaigns that entered our own news communications helped cover up the true nature of the members of the enemy’s Politburo and the heartless savagery of their decisions. Ignoring the people, eventually we made our truces with this very leadership.”
When he spoke of “skilled use of misinformation and psychological campaigns that entered our own news communications,” he was describing what we now label “sharp power,” defined by the National Endowment of Democracy as “authoritarian influence efforts” that “pierce, penetrate, or perforate the information and political environments . . . seeking to influence their target audiences by manipulating or distorting the information that reaches them.”[15]
Lansdale went on: “[W]e were subjected during Vietnam to a political, psychological campaign by the enemy that was filled with disinformation to make us believe something that wasn’t true; and we actually came to believe it. Ho Chi Minh, for example – who had been a classmate of Stalin’s at the Lenin Academy in Moscow, who had helped to form the Communist Party in France, and who was certainly one of the most skilled and effective Communist leaders in the world – was a very tough propagandist. He was very successfully portrayed to Americans as a kindly old gentleman with a wispy goatee who often played with little children. Now, who is going to make war against a kindly image as that?”[16]
At the symposium, Lansdale further argued that the U.S. failed to target the Politburo and its crimes. In his commentary, he retrospectively introduced the idea of trying North Vietnamese leaders for war crimes. He reasoned that trials, held in Saigon by “jurists from the U.S. and our allies in the war,” would have shifted the focus of international news reporting to the brutality of North Vietnamese leaders.
As I heard him on the platform, I thought to myself that this could never have happened. In short, the idea would never fly in President Johnson’s or President Nixon’s Washington. I did not myself hear General Lemay’s reaction, but a colleague who was sitting with him in the front row told me that he had audibly scoffed at Lansdale’s idea.
General Lansdale continued on the “psychological aspects of the struggle in Vietnam. We based our policy in that war on the idea that we could punish the enemy leaders until they gave in to our demands. Yet most of the Politburo members were almost completely unknown in the United States. We knew little about their past and even less about their personalities or how they would react to our actions. The result was sheer folly.”
“I regret that we did not do more during the Vietnam conflict in terms of psychological operations,” he said. “We had agencies to do that.” (That included USIA.) “We had military groups to do that. Unfortunately, we had commanders who felt that psychological operations consisted entirely of dropping leaflets when the enemy was penned in to give them the option to surrender.”
He concluded, “I feel very strongly about the subject of psychological aspects of war, as you can tell. I think the opponents we are likely to face in the future are far more skilled at such things than we are and are subjecting us to things that we had jolly well better become aware of and take into consideration in the planning and execution of our national policy and strategic planning.”[17]
Lansdale used the word “psychological.” The adjective “psycho-social” was favored by some scholars and practitioners in the Lansdale era.[18] President Eisenhower, who signed the executive order that created USIA, recognized the need for an organization that would undertake peacetime “psychological” initiatives.[19]
In Saigon in 1965, moreover, the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) under Barry Zorthian (the USIS Country Public Affairs Officer for Vietnam) was an umbrella organization that aimed to unify the public affairs work of USIS, MACV, and USAID. Journalists called Zorthian the U.S. “czar of media relations.” Often neglected, though, is that Zorthian wore another hat. He was the United States Mission Coordinator for Psychological Operations.[20] My take is that two jobs were too much for one man, but these arrangements reflected the 1950s and 1960s view that “psychological operations” and USIA’s Public Diplomacy were to be partners in a common effort. Lansdale in Saigon in 1955-56 had a fruitful partnership with the head of the U.S. Information Service, George Hellyer, and in 1965, he had a USIA officer on his staff.
Lansdale was prescient. Our current adversaries – Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran the most prominent – rely heavily on informational and “psychological” initiatives. Indeed, they are, as Lansdale judged, “more skilled at such things than we are.” And they spend much more. It’s not just that they propagate falsehoods via their controlled media, broadcasters, information networks, and social media. It’s more than the old disinformation, maskirovka, and “active measures.” It’s that their information warfare is fully integrated into national strategy, as China does with its United Front work.[21]
At the 1978 symposium, one attendee, John C. Currey – no relation to Lansdale’s biographer Cecil Currey, I presume – opined that President Eisenhower’s “attempts to establish an organization to focus on this problem were unsuccessful” because of two obstacles. “First, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought such a group would impinge on the State Department’s prerogatives.” And, “it floundered on a semantics problem. President Eisenhower himself referred to it as the psychological office of warfare, but he said ‘I don’t want the word “warfare,” and I don’t like the word “psychological”.’ And, we never did come up with what to call this type of thing.”[22]
This highlights a problem that continues into our century – a lack of agreed terminology. “Countering violent extremism” had its day. A clutter of concepts – soft power, sharp power, informational power, strategic communication, stratcom, commstrat, public affairs, public diplomacy, operations in the information environment (OIE), civic actions, civil affairs, psywar, information warfare, and political warfare – has kept doctrines and roles in flux. The State Department, its Public Diplomacy officers, and the Global Engagement Center[23] aren’t always of one mind. The U.S. Agency for Global Media and its five broadcasting networks, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House all see the landscape differently, and all defend their turf.
A recent biography of Lansdale was titled The Road Not Taken. I’ve said that Lansdale anticipated the need for robust informational (or “psychological”) power as an equal and integrated element in the array of U.S. power, and foreign policy, national security, and military journals are awakening to this need.[24]
Lansdale discovered that the road he conceived was blocked by ditches, felled trees, washed-out bridges, and ambushes – by which I mean intellectual disarray, overreliance on military power, bureaucratic rivalries, legislative impediments, what Robert Komer called institutional repertoires,[25] and turf protection among different parts of the U.S. government. They blocked the roads then, and I fear they still impede the influence of American ideas now.
Before joining the Foreign Service in 1979, Donald M. Bishop was an Air Force Officer – in Vietnam, Korea, and the faculty of the USAF Academy, teaching history. As Public Diplomacy officer in USIA and then State for 31 years, he served in Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan, and he led U.S. public diplomacy in Bangladesh, Nigeria, China, and Afghanistan. In retirement, he is a Krulak Center Distinguished Fellow at Marine Corps University in Quantico.
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[1] Air Power and Warfare: The Proceedings of the 8th Military History Symposium, United States Air Force Academy, 18-20 October 1978, Alfred F. Hurley and Robert C. Ehrhart, eds. (Washington: Office of Air Force History, Headquarters USAF, and United States Air Force Academy, 1979), online at: https://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/22/2001330054/-1/-1/0/air_power_&_warfare.pdf, accessed 30 April 2024.
[2] Department of the Army, U.S. Army Area Handbook for Vietnam, DA Pamphlet 550-40, George L. Harris et. al. (Washington: Department of the Army, 1964).
[3] Department of the Army, Area Handbook for South Vietnam, DA Pamphlet 550-55, Harvey H. Smith et. al. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967).
[4] Department of the Army, Area Handbook for North Vietnam, DA Pamphlet 550-57, Harvey H. Smith et. al. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967).
[5] William R. Corson, The Betrayal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).
[6] U.S. Marine Corps, Unit Leaders Personal Response Handbook, NAVMC 2626 (US Marine Corps, 1967), online at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Unit_Leader_s_Personal_Response_Handbook/Zf0xoBRbu3YC?gbpv=1, accessed 9 May 2024. In his 1971 oral history interview, Lansdale recalled “a very excellent campaign” by the Marines. See U.S. Air Force Academy Oral History Interview #116, Edward G. Lansdale, 25 April 1971, conducted by Major Kenneth J. Alnwick,” 9, online at: https://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=lansdale_interviews, accessed 20 July 2024. My 2010 review of the publication is “Old Handbook, enduring lessons,” amazon.com, 24 October 2020, online at https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2B5HKVH849AYI, accessed 24 July 2024.
[7] For Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marine Corps set a high standard for understanding culture as a factor in operations, with the Center for Advanced Operational Cultural Learning at Quantico, led by retired USMC Colonel George Dallas, taking the lead. See, for instance, Kerry Fosher, Lauren MacKenzie, Erika Tarzi, Kristin Post, and Eric Gauldin, Culture General Guidebook for Military Professionals (Quantico: CAOCL. December, 2017, at https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/CRSS/Documents/Culture%20General%20Guidebook%20for%20Military%20Professionals%20licensed%20(2021).pdf?ver=y7H1i-HtXsdUB1BhgTPoUg%3D%3D, accessed 13 May 2024.
[8] History 463 Reader, Unconventional Warfare (USAF Academy: Department of History, January 1970). The pages are included in my “Ed Lansdale’s ‘Through Foreign Eyes,” Public Diplomacy Blog, 22 April 2018, online at: https://www.academia.edu/44043188/Ed_Lansdales_Through_Foreign_Eyes_, accessed 20 July 2024.
[9] The use and effectiveness of translators and interpreters has been relatively neglected in military scholarship. In various settings, units have relied on Americans trained at the Defense Language Institute, English-speaking members of partner armed forces, local personnel with bilingual skills, and contracted members of U.S. immigrant communities. In a 2023 presentation at Rutgers University, Professor Youngju Ryu of the University of Michigan argued that “Occupying the southern half of the Korean peninsula from 1945 to 1948 without much knowledge of the country’s language, culture, or history, [the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea] quickly devolved into ‘a government of, for, and by interpreters’” with many unintended consequences. See “Translating (for) the Heavenly Host: Korea Under U.S. Occupation,” Rutgers-New Brunswick Translation Studies Initiative, 1 November 2023, online at: https://translation.rutgers.edu/events/current-events/event-details/667-translating-for-the-heavenly-host-korea-under-us-occupation, accessed 20 July 2024. Writing for the Army War College Press in 2017, M. Chris Mason of the Strategic Studies Institute judged: “In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military relied almost exclusively on interpreters, with disastrous consequences. In a change from the Vietnam War—where the U.S. military trained at least 45,000 deploying service members to speak Vietnamese and probably twice that number—for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, apart from some remotely-based intelligence specialists doing classified work, the U.S. military trained almost no deploying personnel to speak either Arabic or Pashto fluently. Instead, it relied on interpreters or “terps” as the troops called them. This policy was an unmitigated failure and an important cause of the U.S. inability to get traction at the operational level of war in both countries.” See M. Chris Mason, “Strategic Insights: Lost in Translation,” U.S. Army War College Articles and Editorials, 17 August 2017, 3, online at: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1393&context=articles_editorials, accessed 20 July 2024.
[10] U.S. Air Force Academy Oral History Interview #116, Edward G. Lansdale, 25 April 1971, conducted by Major Kenneth J. Alnwick,” 8, online at: At https://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=lansdale_interviews, accessed 20 July 2024.
[11] Donald M. Bishop, “American Forces in Foreign Cultures,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1978, 902ff, online at https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/april/american-forces-foreign-cultures, accessed 30 April 2024.
[12] The Republic of Turkey: Intercultural Education and the Colorado Air National Guard, William A. Mitchell, Carl W. Reddel, and Bryant Shaw, eds., USAFA Technical Report 81-5 (USAF Academy, CO: Dean of the Faculty, 1981), 2, 215, online at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA102636.pdf, accessed 4 May 2024.
[13] “The Vietnam War, along with counterinsurgency, were barely mentioned in the 1976 version of FM 100-5, which led the Army to an institutional identity of focusing on conventional operations. Throughout the 1970s, with the focus of the Army on conventional war against the Warsaw pact, counterinsurgency doctrine was nearly eliminated from Army doctrine and the curriculum at service schools such as the United States Army Command and General Staff College (USACGSC).” Christopher E. Fowler, “Forgetting Lessons Learned: The United States Army’s Inability to Embrace Irregular Warfare,” research report (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air Command and Staff College, April 2014), 13, at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD1023604.pdf, accessed 12 May 2024.
[14] Air Power and Warfare, op. cit., 330-332.
[15] National Endowment for Democracy, Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence (Washington: National Endowment for Democracy, 2017), online at: https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Sharp-Power-Rising-Authoritarian-Influence-Full-Report.pdf, accessed 1 May 2024. I explored this in a preliminary way in an essay, “Ed Lansdale, Vietnam, ‘Sharp Power,’ and ‘Psychological,” Public Diplomacy Blog, 13 October 2019, online at: https://www.academia.edu/49574017/Ed_Lansdale_Vietnam_Sharp_Power_and_Psychological, accessed 4 May 2024. For a more thorough treatment, see Anne Applebaum, “The New Propaganda War,” The Atlantic, 6 May 2024, online at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/, accessed 9 May 2024.
[16] Ibid., 335. Saying that Ho was a “classmate of Stalin’s at the Lenin Academy” isn’t supported by what is known about Ho’s time in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Lansdale’s comment supports his other conclusion on North Vietnam’s leadership — that “We knew little about their past and even less about their personalities and how they would react to our actions.” And in the 1960s, Le Duan was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam; Le Duan, not Ho Chi Minh, was the top decision-maker by 1965.
[17] Ibid., 335-336.
[18] See, for example, Robert S. Byfield, The Fifth Weapon: A Guide to Understanding What the Communists Mean (New York: the Bookmailer, 1954), 2. Thomas F. Staton, “The Psycho-Social Instrument of National Policy,” The Air Power Historian, October 1961, 207-219, online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/44513131, accessed 30 April 2024.
[19] See Kenneth A Osgood, “Form before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy,” Diplomatic History, Summer 2000, 405-433, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24913835
[20] Interestingly, journalist Don North judged that Barry Zorthian was among the Embassy officers who believed Lansdale came to the Embassy too late and was “irrelevant” in a larger war. Don North, “Holding the Line at the Credibility Gap,” HistoryNet, 14 November 2017, online at https://www.historynet.com/holding-line-credibility-gap/, accessed 20 July 2024. He cited USIA’s legendary Frank Scotton that “My sense is that we never did have a chief of all psychological operations.”
[21] Peter Mattis and Alex Joske, “The Third Magic Weapon: Reforming China’s United Front,” War on the Rocks, 24 June 2019, online at: https://warontherocks.com/2019/06/the-third-magic-weapon-reforming-chinas-united-front/, accessed 20 July 2024.
[22] Air Power and Warfare, op. cit., 335.
[23] See, for instance, Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, “The Global Engagement Center: A Historical Overview 2001-2021,” Adele E. Ruppe and Vivian S. Walker, eds. (Washington, Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, 2024, online at https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024GEC-ACPD_DIGITAL-508_FINAL.pdf, accessed 1 Jun 2024).
[24] See, for instance, Donald M. Bishop, “DIME, not DiME: Time to Align the Instruments of U.S. Informational Power,” The Strategy Bridge, 20 June 2018, at https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/6/20/dime-not-dime-time-to-align-the-instruments-of-us-informational-power, accessed 11 May 2024.
[25] R.W. Komer, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam” (Washington: Rand, 1972), xii, online at https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R967.html, accessed 1 Jun 2024.