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Edward Lansdale
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward Geary Landsdale (February 6, 1908–February 23, 1987) was a U.S. Air Force officer who served in the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency. He rose to the rank of Major General, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1963, and retired in 1968. Lansdale was born in Detroit, Michigan, died in McLean, Virginia, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
After working to suppress Communist insurgency in the Philippines during the early 1950s, where he worked closely and even lived with future Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay, Landsdale took on his best-known role as a shaper of US strategy in Vietnam during the buildup to the Vietnam War. He was sent to Vietnam in 1953 as an advisor to French forces against the Viet Minh, and from 1954 to 1957 was stationed in Saigon as an advisor to the US-backed government of South Vietnam. During this period he was active in training the ARVN, organizing Caodaist militias under Trinh Minh The in an attempt to bolster the ARVN, and spreading claims that North Vietnamese agents were making attacks in South Vietnam. After the widely discredited re-election of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955, Landsdale is said to have advised Diem to revise the 98.2 percent victory he claimed down to 70 percent to make it more plausible, advice which Diem did not take.
He also mentored and trained Pham Xuan An, a reporter for Time magazine who was actually a highly-placed North Vietnamese spy. In 1961, he helped to publicize the story of Father Nguyen Lac Hoa, the "fighting priest" who had organized a crack militia called the Sea Swallows from his village of anticommunist Chinese Catholic exiles.
From 1957 to 1963 Lansdale worked for the Department of Defense in Washington, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations, Staff Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. During the early 1960s he was chiefly involved in clandestine efforts to topple the government of Cuba, including proposals to assassinate Fidel Castro. Much of this work was under the aegis of "Operation Mongoose" which was the operational name for the CIA. plan to topple Castro's government. According to Daniel Ellsberg, who was at one time a subordinate to Lansdale, Lansdale claimed that he was fired by President Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he declined Kennedy's offer to play a role in overthrow of the Diem regime. Three weeks later, on November 22, 1963, Lansdale was allegedly photographed in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas,[1] [2]shortly after Kennedy was assassinated nearby.
From 1965 to 1968 he returned to Vietnam to work in the US Embassy.
Lansdale's memoir, published in 1972, was In the Midst of Wars. His biography, The Unquiet American, was written by Cecil Currey and published in 1988; the title refers to the common, but incorrect belief, that the eponymous character in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American was based on Lansdale. According to Norman Sherry's authorized biography of Greene The Life of Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004), Lansdale did not officially enter the Vietnam arena until 1954, while Greene wrote his book in 1952 after departing Viet Nam.
Recent interest in Lansdale was sparked, in part, by Oliver Stone alleging in his 1991 film JFK that Lansdale was the operational head of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This theory was inspired by questions raised about Lansdale's presence in Dealey Plaza by a former colleague, L. Fletcher Prouty, who first recognized Lansdale in a photograph taken that day by a Dallas Morning News photographer immediately after the assassination, which allegedly shows Lansdale as one of "the three tramps" who were arrested by Dallas police. Although many speculative identities for the other "tramps" have been offered, among them the future Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, Prouty's identification of Lansdale has been corroborated by several of their former colleagues in the Pentagon, including Lt. General Victor H. "Brute" Krulak. Daniel Ellsberg, who was a consultant to Oliver Stone on JFK, worked under Lansdale in Vietnam and is also of Pentagon Papers fame, claims to have told Stone not to include this part of the script, believing Lansdale to be innocent of Stone's allegations.
Lansdale was twice married. He had two sons from his first marriage.