Edward Lansdale

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Maj. General Edward Lansdale in 1963

Edward Geary Lansdale (born February 6, 1908 in Detroit , † February 23, 1987 in McLean (Virginia) ) was an officer in the United States Air Force who worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) worked. He rose to the rank of major general and received the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal in 1963 . Early on, he advocated a more aggressive approach by the United States in the Cold War . Lansdale was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was married twice and had two sons from his first marriage.

Childhood and youth

Edward Geary Lansdale was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1908, the second of four sons to Sarah Frances Philips and Henry Lansdale. He attended schools in Michigan, New York, and California and then studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), initially largely through writing articles for newspapers and magazines, and later through higher-paying advertising jobs in Los Angeles and San Francisco funded.

Second World War

Lansdale served in the OSS during World War II. In 1943 he was made a lieutenant in the United States Army , where he took on numerous intelligence duties during the war . After several war promotions, he was transferred as a major to the US Air Force Headquarters for the Western Pacific in 1945 , where he headed the intelligence department.

Philippines

He stayed in the Philippines until 1948 , where he supported the Philippine Army in rebuilding their intelligence services and was responsible for the repatriation of the numerous Filipino prisoners of war . In 1947 he was named captain in the US Air Force, with the provisional rank of major. After leaving the Philippines, he served as a lecturer at the Strategic Intelligence School at Lowry Air Force Base , Colorado , where he received a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1949 .

In 1950, the then President of the Philippines, Elpidio Quirino, personally requested his transfer to the Joint United States Military Assistance Group in the Philippines to support the armed forces intelligence services in the fight against the communist Hukbalahap rebels. The future President of the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay , had recently been appointed Secretary of Defense and Lansdale was appointed as a liaison officer . The two men soon became close friends and they often visited battle zones together. Lansdale helped the Philippine Armed Forces develop psychological warfare and rehabilitate Hukbalahap prisoners.

Vietnam

Lansdale was a member of the US armed forces delegation under General John W. O'Daniel in Indochina in 1953 , where he advised the French armed forces on special operations (“SpecOPs”) against the Việt Minh . From 1954 to 1957 he was stationed in what was then Saigon as head of the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) . During this time he ran the training of the Vietnamese National Army (VNA), organized the Cao Đài militias under Trình Minh Thế to support them , started a propaganda campaign as part of the " Operation Passage to Freedom ", which the Vietnamese Catholics to move to to encourage the south of the country and spread allegations of attacks by North Vietnamese agents in South Vietnam. Before the widely condemned referendum in 1955, through which Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm removed the head of state Bảo Đại from office and proclaimed himself president of the new Republic of Vietnam, Lansdale Diệm, with whom he was a close friend, had not advised the vote to manipulate and to be satisfied with a realistic result of 60 to 70 percent, but Diệm did not take this advice. He officially received 98.2% of the vote across the country and 133% in Saigon.

Anti-Castro campaign

From 1957 to 1963 Lansdale worked in the Department of Defense in Washington as "Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations" , a member of the staff of the "Committee on Military Assistance" of the US President and "Assistant Secretary" for special operations. During the early 1960s, he was mainly concerned with secret plans to overthrow Cuba - particularly in connection with Operation Mongoose - and proposed, among other things, an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro . According to military historian Daniel Ellsberg , who worked intermittently as Lansdale's subordinate, Lansdale claimed his 1963 discharge from the Air Force was induced by John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara after he rejected Kennedy's offer to play a leading role in the overthrow of Diệms To adopt regime.

Later career

From 1965 to 1968 Lansdale returned to Vietnam to work at the US Embassy as an advisor to the Ambassador, the South Vietnamese government and director of the CIA's covert operations in Indochina. He represented the United States on a committee of the South Vietnamese government, which wanted to get the rural population on their side. On Lansdale's advice, the South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ promoted a reconstruction program to pacify the rural regions and remove the Viet Cong .

In 1972 his memoir "In the Midst of Wars" was published. His biography "The Unquiet American" , written by Cecil Currey, was published in 1988. Its title refers to the widespread, but controversial assumption that the title character of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" (German: " The Quiet American ") based on the real person Edward Lansdale. In the Hollywood first filming of Greene's novel in 1958 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz , Lansdale influenced the director so that the CIA agent portrayed in the film - in a complete twist of the portrayal in the novel - was portrayed as a hero and the British journalist as a shady character. Greene was outraged and described the film as a " propaganda film for America".

Lansdale was probably also the model for the character Colonel Hillandale in the 1958 novel "The Ugly American" (German: " The Ugly American " ) by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer .

literature

  • Edward Geary Lansdale: In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia . Fordham University Press 1972.
  • Cecil B. Curry: Edward Lansdale: the Unquiet American . Houghton Mifflin 1988.
  • Jonathan Nashel: Edward Lansdale's Cold War . University of Massachusetts Press 2005.
  • Edward G. Lansdale , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 10/1966 of February 28, 1966, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eric Pace: Edward Lansdale dies at 79; adviser on guerrilla warfare. In: The New York Times. February 24, 1987, archived from the original on January 9, 2018 ; accessed on May 16, 2020 (English).
  2. ^ Clayton D. Laurie, Andres Vaart: CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia, 1947-75 . In: CIA (Ed.): Studies in Intelligence . Center for the Study of Intelligence, September 2016, ISSN  1527-0874 , The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954-65, pp. 5 ( archive.org [PDF]).
  3. ^ Matthew Alford, Robbie Graham: An offer they couldn't refuse The Guardian , Nov. 14, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Lansdale, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lansdale, Ed; Lansdale, Edward G .; Lansdale, Edward Geary (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American officer in the United States Air Force
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Detroit
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1987
Place of death McLean (Virginia)