Photographs of Lansdale standing in a hip-shot slouch near, but not too close, to an Asian leader recall “Major Flip Corkin” of the Second World War’s United States Army Air Corps (later to be the USAF). In a similar way, Lansdale deliberately created a story of himself in the American narrative. Herodotus, in his History, delineated a nation by the story that its people tell themselves about themselves. Colonel Lansdale inscrutably kept a low profile while at the same time embodying the phrase “a legend in his own time.” Sir Robert was the epitome of the British empire’s soldier-scholar. And there was Colonel Edward Geary Lansdale of the US Air Force, seconded to the CIA, who helped elect and then closely advised Filipino president Ramon Magsaysay to put down the Communist Hukbalahap guerilla war in Luzon. There was Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson of Great Britain who had devised anti-Communist counterinsurgency measures for Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first Prime Minister of the new Federation of Malaya. This challenge appeared to have been successfully met in two nations of the region, by two unique individuals. It was evident that the end of colonial rule in Southeast Asia was being followed not by a decline in Communist attacks, but by the redirection of the guerilla insurgencies toward destroying the new national governments taking over from the departed European powers. In the larger context of that time, we knew only two things: Something bad was getting worse in South Vietnam, and we, the U.S., didn’t know what to do about it. Kennedy, president a little over a year, had clearly conveyed to us that an unprecedented threat to the nation had risen as Communist forces, inspired, supported, and directed by Moscow and Beijing, were carrying out a new form of warfare in “the Third World”: guerilla insurgencies breaking every tenet of the established laws of war.Īlso in the FSI garage were some of President Kennedy’s favored Green Berets, hunched around a sand table blocking the way to the language labs, exchanging tactical schemes. Down in the dark, dank, windowless caverns of The Foreign Service Institute-a subterranean parking garage near the Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia-where we were supposed to be learning an Asian language, the name “Lansdale” was votive, although we weren’t sure why.
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