[gentle music]
- Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
Call him the man on the spot,
the individual who gathers information
about a place of interest to his government.
During the Cold War, that contest between the superpowers,
the man on the spot could exert considerable influence,
had considerable autonomy
and considerable power, for better or worse.
We're going to look at several examples of a man on the spot
and find out what the result of his work was,
for better or worse.
With me is Alfred McCoy, author of many books,
a UW historian who most recently is the author
of Cold War on Five Continents, published in 2026.
And welcome to University Place Presents.
- Alfred McCoy: Thank you, Norm, thanks for having me.
- The Cold War went on for many years.
Very large historical series of events.
Must be many books written about it.
What's different about yours?
- I set out at the very beginning
to try and humanize the history of the Cold War.
It's a conflict that's been discussed
in terms of diplomatic maneuvers,
NATO versus Warsaw Pact divisions,
nuclear throw weights, all monumental forces--
maybe even global economies--
that reduced human beings to almost inconsequence.
So I set out to look at the human side of the Cold War.
And when I started writing,
it was one of these things where it was an involuntary process.
I started writing,
and then these characters from my past began intruding.
Fifty years ago, when I was a graduate student,
I set out to go around the world
and write a book called The Politics of Heroin
about the relationships between covert operations
and global drug trafficking.
And in the course of that, I met some of the most powerful
and influential covert operatives of the day.
For example, during the French-Indochina War,
from 1946 to 1954, the French state was underfunded.
And so, the way the French funded
their covert operations in Indochina
was they took control of the illicit opium trade
and used it to fund all of their covert operations.
And so, the man who ran the paratroopers,
who worked in the mountains with the opium-growing tribes,
was a man named Colonel Roger Trinquier.
He lived in Paris.
He was probably
one of the most famous counterinsurgents of his era.
If you've seen the film The Battle of Algiers,
there's a character in there modeled on Trinquier.
He wrote a strategic doctrine
that was enormously influential in framing
U.S. counterinsurgency policy in Vietnam.
And so, I called him up and arranged an interview.
And I sat down in his apartment, and he served me a cup of tea,
and we sat for about three hours,
just chatting amiably back and forth.
And he was also a man that was involved
in systematic torture in Algiers during the war.
And he somehow took over my consciousness,
and he began to dominate me,
and I began to feel utterly exhausted.
It was like his fingers had gone up my nose
and were squeezing the lobe in my brain.
And I stumbled out of his apartment utterly exhausted.
And, you know, I wrote up my notes from the interview
and published the facts of person, time, and place
in that book, The Politics of Heroin.
So when I started writing this book on the Cold War,
people like Trinquier, people like General Lansdale,
the most famous of the American Cold War espionage leaders,
they began intruding back into my narrative.
It's like they popped up from the documents lying on my desk,
insisting that I somehow address them.
It was truly a bizarre process
in which my subconsciousness took over my consciousness
and all those memories came cascading back
like a kaleidoscope of sounds, sights, and places,
and they took over my narrative, okay?
And so, then the question was, okay,
I had this flash of insight
that these people were more important
than sort of incidental figures and anecdotes
and incidents in the Cold War,
that they could be potentially central to the Cold War.
And so, I looked.
And when I was a graduate student at Yale,
I had the good fortune to study
with a very distinguished British imperial historian,
David K. Fieldhouse, who was visiting from Oxford.
He later became the holder of a very distinguished chair
and is regarded as the greatest economic historian
of the British Empire.
And Fieldhouse introduced me to the empire,
and he introduced me to the idea
of these larger-than-life figures,
the man on the spot.
And there's a central kind of historical conundrum
in the British Empire.
London's firm policy in the latter half of the 19th century
was non-expansion,
yet somehow, the British Empire expanded
to cover a quarter of the globe
and about a quarter of humanity as well.
So how did this happen?
Foreign policy-- don't expand.
Yet it expanded, and the way it happened
was in these far-flung frontiers of empire,
there were these individual British adventurers
that would move into an unexplored terrain.
For example, like James Brooke, a British adventurer.
He sailed his yacht into Kuching harbor
on the north coast of Borneo in 1837, and he set up a colony.
He became known as the White Rajah of Borneo,
and that colony lasted 100 years, three generations.
And, for example,
when the British empire was expanding in southern Africa,
Cecil Rhodes-- as in the Rhodes Scholarship--
Rhodes put together a mercenary force with Maxim machine guns,
about 700 fighters, and he conquered Matabeleland,
which is now Zambia and Zimbabwe.
It's an enormous territory.
In Sudan, it was the same thing.
Charles Gordon,
you know, as an adventurer came down into Sudan.
He became Gordon of Khartoum.
- Norman: Movies about him, too.
- Alfred: Indeed.
And led to the establishment of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
These characters expanded the British Empire.
They were individuals who,
we all know as historians that individuals,
even the greatest, are of inconsequence.
But yet, there were these moments
when these individuals sort of left their fingerprints
on the crime scenes of world history.
- Crime scenes, it's interesting you should say that.
Because obviously a very powerful, adventuresome,
even well-organized individual will have his Achilles' heel.
- My observation was
if these individuals could play such a profound
and paramount role in the expansion
and creation of empires, right,
that the Cold War also coincided--
and this is not generally recognized
by most of the literature--
with the era of decolonization, okay?
There were about 140 colonies.
They covered 40% of the Earth's land area.
And after World War II,
they all were turned into 100 new nations.
Most historians think-- and it's correct, I suppose--
that it's pretty much over by the 1970s.
But it's not; it continues on.
The decolonization continues
right to the end of the Cold War.
So what I argue is that just as imperial expansion
created opportunities for the men on the spot--
as the empires are expanding, clash of empires,
voids in the world system-- there are suddenly these spaces
where individuals have the autonomy to act.
And in this recession,
this imperial recession called decolonization,
which coincides exactly with the Cold War,
that also created the opportunity
for these men on the spot to emerge.
And so, in my account, I found 30 of them.
Over half are Americans.
British, French, and then Dutch.
Vietnamese, Cuban.
They pop up around the world,
and they play a surprisingly central role in the crises--
beyond the Moscow-Washington standoff
that are the the so-called crises of the Cold War.
- If we talk about American colonization and decolonization,
the Philippines looms large.
And did we have one of these opportunists there?
And if so,
what was his relationship with the officialdom in America?
- The United States colonized the Philippines
from 1898 to 1946.
And at the end of this period, a major in the U.S. Army
named Edward Lansdale turned up in Manila
as an intelligence adviser to the Philippine government.
He was there for two years.
He later became the most famous covert operative
of the Cold War, the subject of two movies,
The Quiet American and The Ugly American,
and one famous but rather mediocre work of fiction,
The Ugly American.
Lansdale was by far the most famous covert operative
of his day.
What he did was he inserted himself
between the Philippine government
and the American government,
and he befriended the Philippine defense minister,
and he put together a team of counterinsurgency specialists.
And they actually defeated a major communist revolution,
the Huk revolt, in the Philippines.
And this happened at a time when the CIA was just established.
It'd been initially established as an intelligence agency.
And the doctrine of covert action,
of not just reporting on events,
but using espionage and covert operatives
to actually not just report developments
but to make developments, not report history,
but, if you will, to make history, okay?
And this was a brand-new doctrine,
and Lansdale was one of the very first
that showed the capacity of covert operatives
to turn what had been considered a desperate situation.
The Philippines was considered likely to collapse to communism.
And he turned it around,
defeated a major communist revolt,
and did it without the commitment of any U.S. forces.
And for the Eisenhower administration,
I think this was extraordinary.
You gotta remember, Dwight Eisenhower
was the Allied commander in Europe, okay?
The whole point of the invasion of Europe
was basically to change two governments--
Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Berlin.
That took 400,000-- well, most of 400,000 American dead,
you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths to do that.
So Eisenhower, having been the commander of that,
was acutely aware of the enormous human life
that could be lost in an attempt to change a government.
And now, suddenly,
there was this almost miraculous phenomenon,
this new form of statecraft called covert operations.
Lansdale had, if you will, saved a government from falling.
And in Iran at about the same period,
in the early 1950s,
another CIA covert operative, Kermit Roosevelt Jr.,
conducted a coup that overthrew a nationalist,
Mohammad Mosaddegh,
and installed the Shah from being the constitutional monarch
to the actual direct ruler of Iran.
- Norman: This is the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt.
And his father, Kermit Sr., I believe, was actually involved
in the D-Day invasion, was in combat in World War II,
if I remember correctly, at least behind the scenes.
- That was another of Roosevelt's sons.
- Another of the sons. - Yes.
Kermit Sr. was... Oh, how could I put it?
He was the family tragedy.
He drank heavily.
He had tawdry affairs that were tabloid fodder in the 1930s.
And he shot himself in the head
while serving in the Army in Alaska during World War II.
So Kermit Sr. was a very charming, engaging man
from a good family,
but his path to power and wealth was through covert operations.
- And Kermit Jr., then, was part of that.
You use that phrase-- it was almost like a paradox.
"Most famous covert operator."
It seems the very nature of a covert,
espionage agent, let's say,
would be to be as obscure as possible.
- Lansdale was different.
He started his career as an advertising man, okay?
So he was well aware of the power of publicity, all right?
And so, he was very skillful in manipulating reporters.
When he did his operations,
he was always a very important source for reporters.
- And, I suppose, Kermit must have been very well aware
of publicity, too, being part of a famous family.
- Yeah, but Kermit was good at currying power
at the highest levels.
After he conducted his operation, for example,
he was flying back to Washington and he stopped off in London.
He held a luncheon for the top leadership of the British MI6.
Told them all about his operation.
Dropped in at 10 Downing Street.
Perched himself on the edge of the bed
of Prime Minister Winston Churchill
and told him the story.
Flew on to the White House and regaled President Eisenhower
and the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles,
with these tales of covert action derring-do.
And again, the simultaneity of Lansdale's success in Manila
and Kermit Roosevelt's success in Iran,
Lansdale stopping a government from falling
and Kermit Roosevelt changing a government
and doing it without much in the way of loss of life,
particularly for Kermit Roosevelt.
He changed the government in about 300 dead in Tehran
during the rioting that accompanied.
- To bring in the Shah? - Yeah, to bring in the Shah.
All right, to do that, you know, with a few hundred dead
rather than hundreds of thousands,
I think had an enormous psychological impact
on Eisenhower.
And so, when you think about the 1950s,
the height of the Cold War, to the best of my knowledge,
Eisenhower only ran one conventional military operation
during his eight years of presidency.
But he ordered over 140 covert operations
during his eight years in power
so that the CIA became the primary vehicle
for the projection of U.S. power on a global scale
during the Cold War.
- What was the objective, ultimate objective, in Iran?
And was it served, and how did the Iranian people fare
in that exchange or change of governments?
- It was twofold.
On the surface, the biggest oil refinery in the world
was the Abadan refinery.
That was, it's actually BP, British Petroleum.
It was then the Anglo-Persian, or Anglo-Iranian, Oil Company.
They had a massive concession.
And the prime minister, Mosaddegh, had nationalized it.
So on the surface, it was an attempt
to topple a nationalist government, install a Shah
who was willing to deal with the oil majors, okay?
But there was actually a subtext going on.
It was a major geopolitical transition.
The Middle East was the epicenter
of the post-World War II British Empire,
and the United States was doing two things:
one, collaborating with the British in Western Europe,
but also subverting them in the Middle East
to push them out and take over.
And so, there were two things going on.
One was installing the Shah in power,
and the other was pushing the British out.
Because when the whole operation was over,
40% of Iran's oil exports went to U.S. oil major corporations.
- And that does touch on a major theme of the Cold War
and even history somewhat before and after.
And that is the role of corporations
in effecting this change.
- That was probably most--
First of all, it's not the only factor.
There are a whole complex of factors, mainly geopolitical.
The U.S. is constantly maneuvering
against the Soviet Union.
But what's happening is that six powerful European empires
are unraveling.
New nations are emerging.
The political alignment of those nations is unclear.
And so, there's this contest
to try and bring those nations within the fold
of these two rival blocs:
the socialist/communist bloc, based in Moscow,
and the capitalist/democratic bloc, based in Washington, D.C.
But there are times when U.S. corporate interests
are paramount.
And that was another one of these early covert operations,
the Guatemala intervention in the early 1950s.
And that is almost...
To even talk about it reads like a page
out of the little Marxist comic book.
I mean, you know,
Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles
had been employees of Sullivan and Cromwell,
the most powerful law firm in the United States at that point.
Big corporate law firm.
They represented the United Fruit Company
as corporate clients.
Henry Cabot Lodge was from a family that had had longtime--
He was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
in the Eisenhower administration.
The Lodge family had major investments
in the United Fruit Corporation.
It went on and on.
The number of links between the United Fruit Corporation
and the Eisenhower administration
makes it almost a...
as I said, a little Marxist comic book.
Almost a caricature, okay?
But anyway, that was one in which...
Guatemala was a deeply divided society
between a Mayan Indigenous minority
and a Hispanic landed and upper class.
The United Fruit controlled most of the land.
They didn't work the majority of the land.
They just kept it empty to avoid competition.
That denied access to the land to the Indigenous population.
So from 1944 to 1954,
there was a decade of attempted reform in Guatemala
by the father of the current president of Guatemala,
Arévalo.
And what they proposed to do was to buy the land
from the major corporations, particularly United Fruit,
and distribute it to the peasants.
And they were going to pay
the declared taxable value of the land.
United Fruit had hundreds of thousands of acres,
which they declared to be worth $1.4 million.
So that's what they got. [laughs]
And they were outraged, and they manipulated it like crazy.
They hired a top publicist.
They brought in correspondents from the major newspapers.
They described what was going on as "communism in the Americas."
They lobbied the Eisenhower administration very heavily.
And again, they were open to a coup.
And in this case, it was Howard Hunt of Watergate fame.
He was the first CIA station chief in Mexico City,
and there wasn't much of an active CIA presence
in Guatemala.
And so he sort of took it over
as a subsidiary of his Mexican operation.
Began sending people down, investigating it,
and advocating intervention.
And so, he became sort of an architect of it.
And actually, when the CIA coup took place,
the CIA formed an exile army.
They sponsored an invasion
that was portrayed as a nationalist operation.
And E. Howard Hunt,
from Opa-locka air base or airfield in Florida,
ran the propaganda campaign for the operation.
And it was a very interesting operation,
because essentially, it was 400 poorly armed,
badly trained, exiled soldiers
overthrowing Central America's largest army
of about 5,000 to 6,000 men.
And it was all done through psychological warfare:
radio broadcasts, leaflets.
They created the aura of a massive invading army.
And so, Hunt's role in psychological warfare
was very important.
And that's another part of the Cold War
that was very important-- the use of psychological warfare
in certain of these key operations.
- When we talk about overthrowing a government
that's trying to...
...provide more resources for its populace
and we're talking about the United States,
a democratically-elected government,
overthrowing that kind of government,
isn't there an erosion of American democracy
in that kind of operation?
- Over the full period of the Cold War--
First of all, more generally, whenever there's a war,
the president, from Abraham Lincoln
through Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
gains extraordinary powers in a wartime situation.
There's pressure on the Congress to comply.
There are all kinds of de facto emergency powers
the president gets.
The Cold War was 40 years of continuous warfare, right?
And since the war was being waged
primarily through covert means, it was the creation
and expansion of the CIA as an executive agency, okay?
It's not, this is purely within the purview of the White House
or the presidency.
And the president issues direct orders to the CIA.
That's the way it was created right from the outset.
And so, it is an adjunct of executive power,
without a cabinet secretary
who's approved by the Congress, right?
And so, it gives the president extraordinary power.
And throughout the long 40 years--
44 years of the Cold War,
the growth of this covert operation
gave the executive enormous power
over the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Originally, Congress was happy to go along.
But from the Vietnam War all the way
through the Iran-Contra controversy of the 1980s,
Congress became increasingly concerned
about the loss of its legislative authority,
its oversight over foreign policy,
and began to challenge the executive.
And so, there were a whole series of congressional actions,
starting with the War Powers Act of 1973-'74,
that required that the president get a congressional mandate
after troops going overseas for a certain period of time,
all the way to the Iran-Contra controversy,
which was the longest and largest political scandal
in U.S. history.
And that was part of a legislative battle
to take back this enormous executive authority
that had developed covertly,
in the shadows, through covert operations.
- During the Reagan administration.
- Right.
- In one of the hearings related to the Iran-Contra scandal,
didn't one of the congressmen ask Oliver North,
"Is it appropriate for you, as a single officer in the military,
"to create the size of an issue that is the Iran-Contra?
Or should that have been something left to Congress?"
- Indeed.
Oliver North had taken on enormous authority.
What happened was, okay, is that from 1984 to '86,
Congress passed something called the Boland Amendment
that absolutely, effectively, barred any form of military aid
going to the Contras.
And so, there was no funding for the Contras.
And so, what happened was,
is the National Security Council inside the White House
was transformed from an advisory intelligence body
into an ad hoc covert action agency.
And they actually had a fleet of aircraft,
an oceangoing ship, offshore bank accounts.
They had a kind of White House mini CIA
just beneath the Oval Office, right,
operating this globe-girding covert operation,
delivering arms to Iran, getting payments,
depositing them in Swiss bank accounts,
buying arms on the market,
loading the arms on aircraft in San Salvador,
flying 'em into the Contras in the jungles, okay?
And this was, if you will, the acme,
the apogee of executive authority.
Congress had barred the executive from doing something
by exercising the power of the purse.
And so, the Reagan presidency,
after four decades of the Cold War,
had enough assets, covert-action assets,
to create his own covert-action enterprise--
it was called "the Enterprise"
amongst the principals involved--
and to run this off-the-shelf covert operation.
And Congress investigated.
There were 500 witnesses called.
Lawrence Walsh ran criminal investigations.
Three cabinet-level officers,
three top CIA officers were indicted.
President Bush-- George H.W. Bush, the elder--
pardoned them all.
But nonetheless, they were dragged before Congress,
dragged before the courts.
And it was a clear signal from the Congress,
from the legislature, to the executive
that its untrammeled authority over covert operations was over.
And so, by the early 1990s, the Cold War,
which had been the golden age of espionage,
that golden age was over, okay?
And that, I think most people don't understand
what the real implication of the Iran-Contra scandal is.
As I said earlier, the longest and largest scandal
in U.S. political history, bar none.
And, you know, it was headlines all along,
but the consequence was to end the executive's capacity
to use covert operations
apart from the authority of Congress.
- What was actually the goal of the whole Iran-Contra scandal
in the first place?
Why was this so important to the Reagan administration?
- Well, the Reagan administration was determined
to effect a regime change in Nicaragua.
There was a leftist government that came to power in 1979,
the Sandinistas.
They started off as a quite idealistic,
sort of Christian-Marxist reform group.
They devolved over time into President Daniel Ortega
as a virtual cacique, an autocrat,
a dictator of Nicaragua today.
But at the time, it was a left-wing, idealistic movement.
Reagan equated it with communism.
And after they took power in 1979,
the Reagan administration was determined to overthrow them.
In other words, the same thing in all of these operations--
the use of covert action to change
who's in the presidential palace in countries around the globe.
That's always the aim of these operations.
- Assuming, in general, that these people in power are,
as we say, leftists or Marxists or communists.
- Communism, always equated as communism.
- Was it always that simple? - It was at the time.
And of course, you know, the complexities of movements
are reduced to that one term,
and unfortunately, sometimes the United States
didn't see the full range of complexities.
They simply equated it with communism,
and they went in, sort of like a red cape for a bull,
and were determined to make a change,
and effected a real damage to the United States
and to U.S. foreign policy.
The classic case, of course, in that is Vietnam, okay?
And in Vietnam, in two critical areas--
in fact, throughout the whole conduct of the conflict,
which is a massive conflict with over 500,000 U.S. troops,
half the U.S. military fighting--
there are key points in which the men on the spot
play a determinative role in this conflict.
First of all, in the mid-1950s, 1954, '55,
the French lost the First-Indochina war.
Their colonial era was over.
After the great battle of Dien Biên Phu,
in which French military forces were defeated and captured,
there was a peace agreement in Geneva
in which all the major powers sat down
and decided that there would be a two-year sort of ceasefire
in which the parties would withdraw,
the communists would move north,
and the anti-communists would go south.
Then there would be a plebiscite after two years
to determine the shape of the government.
At that moment, the U.S. government
sent Edward Lansdale, the hero of Manila,
the man who'd defeated the Huk communist revolt,
to Saigon.
And his orders were, from the U.S. Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, very simple.
Dulles told Lansdale, "Do what you did in Manila."
In other words, he had a broad brief
that gave him absolute autonomy to do whatever he could.
Lansdale, through his experience in the Philippines,
had been transformed
from kind of a publicist with little covert capacity
into a fairly skillful covert operator.
And he manipulated the situation
in order to push the French out of Indochina
and then make sure that his man, Ngô Dình Diem, Premier Diem,
won this underground battle against the French for Saigon.
There was a five-day shooting war
in which Lansdale manipulated the forces
and assured that not only did Diem win,
but that Washington recognized him as its surrogate,
its man in Saigon.
- That's a phenomenal amount of power for one man on the spot.
- It was an extraordinary achievement.
I mean, he was up against the French,
who were determined to turn over power
to one of their surrogates, okay?
He was up against Washington, D.C.,
which had decided that Diem was inept.
He was up against the--
There was, the French had a Sino-Vietnamese mafia
called the Bình Xuyên bandits,
with 9,000 militia that ran the brothels,
the gambling dens, the opium traffic.
- Sources of income. - The vice trade in the city,
and then controlled all the movement
in and out of the capital.
You know, he overturned all of that.
It was an extraordinary achievement, all right?
And that also contributed to his fame as the man on the spot.
Because, actually, Joseph Mankiewicz
came and shot The Quiet American in Saigon.
- Oh, did he? - Yeah, during that period,
with Lansdale's assistance, all right? [chuckles]
And changed the plot of the novel
and portrayed the Quiet American as the great hero, right?
- No self-interest there. - Right.
Lansdale manipulated the script.
So 10 years later, the people that met Diem--
C. Douglas Dillon, later secretary of treasury,
who was a U.S. ambassador to France, met Diem.
He had spent the French-Indochina War
in a monastery in Belgium, in Bruges.
And when he came out of the monastery to get an appointment
from the emperor of Vietnam as prime minister,
he passed through Paris.
Dillon met him and was absolutely convinced
that he was inept, that Diem had no capacity
to perform this political miracle he needed to perform.
And in Saigon, there was a U.S. lieutenant general,
J. Lawton Collins, who was President Eisenhower's emissary.
Now, a lieutenant general in the U.S. military,
in the U.S. Army,
is an enormously powerful individual.
Much of his career is assessing his junior officers
for promotion and assignment of command.
So these are, Lawton Collins was a skilled officer
and a good judge of men,
and he felt that Diem was completely inept.
Well, indeed, it turned out that Lansdale's pick,
although he was very skillful at manipulating the situation,
his judgment was less than perfect.
And his elders and betters, C. Douglas Dillon
and Lieutenant General J. Lawton Collins--
At that point, Lansdale was just a lieutenant colonel
in the Air Force.
So, you know, a four-star general outranked Lansdale
and had a lot more experience, you know?
So Lansdale had manipulated the situation,
but he'd put into office a man
who, as Dillon and General Collins predicted, was inept.
And so, there was a great crisis in 1963.
The U.S. ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge,
decided that Diem should be overthrown.
And so, he turned to one of Lansdale's friends in the CIA,
Lucien Conein, a very skilled covert operative,
a binational-- French-born, American citizen--
who was very well-connected with the Corsicans
in the Saigon underworld,
was good friends with all the South Vietnamese generals.
Most of them had formerly been senior officers
in the French army.
And so, Conein participated in a coup that overthrew Diem.
And he was the one that basically persuaded
the coup generals that Diem should be killed.
And so, after Diem's assassination,
problematic he might have been,
but he had built a state apparatus under his control.
And when he died, that apparatus collapsed.
And two years later,
U.S. combat forces were intervening in Vietnam.
Now, when that intervention happened, okay?
Simple question.
You know, why did the United States lose the Vietnam War?
Okay?
Now, a complex issue.
But let me present a working hypothesis.
We won every battle.
We won the conventional war, all right?
But we lost the covert war.
The CIA constructed, during the Vietnam War,
a massive program called the Phoenix Program
that had 40-plus torture and interrogation centers
across Vietnam.
According to official records, the Phoenix Program conducted
41,000 extrajudicial executions, all right?
Countless thousands of tortures.
And as one senior CIA operative said,
"In the entire history of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam,
we failed to get a single senior Viet Cong operative."
How can you torture tens of thousands of people,
kill 41,000 people, and miss all your targets, okay?
So what happened was, is that the Viet Cong,
the Vietnamese, ran the largest counterintelligence operation,
arguably, in the history of espionage.
That was the CIA's judgment.
They had 30,000 spies inside the South Vietnamese government.
Military intelligence.
The CIA operative
who ran the Viet Cong order of battle section
issued a report in which he said that the Vietcong had taken over
some units of the Phoenix Program.
In other words... - They were that entrenched.
- Yeah, they were there.
In the history of the Cold War, whenever the U.S. intelligence
came up against Soviet counterintelligence,
the Soviets were better at counterintelligence
than we were at intelligence.
I mean, the one thing
that police states are very good at: policing.
- Norman: That's true. - Okay.
So is it possible that this massive program
designed to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure
and underground government was flipped by the enemy
and effectively turned against the United States
and undercut our support, okay?
I gained personal insight that opened me to the possibility
that this might be true,
through kind of the accident of personal connections.
When I went to a small New England boarding school,
there was a guy a couple years ahead of me.
He dropped out of college.
Wound up in Vietnam as a Marine Corps lance corporal.
Really smart guy who later went to Harvard Business School
and became an innovator at IBM.
A smart guy, okay?
And he was a lance corporal,
and he had a squad operating in northern Vietnam.
And they got intelligence that at a certain time and place,
a Viet Cong unit would be coming down the river in sampans.
So they set an ambush at the time and place,
and they opened fire.
And Mercein said it was a killing zone.
They killed everybody. - The wrong people.
- They were all women and children and old men.
And so, Mercein and his squad
basically hid out in friendly villages, refused to fight,
and then, when their time was up, they went home, right?
And he wrote this in a memoir.
And because he knew I was teaching a course
here at UW-Madison on the Vietnam War,
he sent me the manuscript.
And so, at Christmas, I told my stepfather,
Colonel Krueger R. Blyte,
who had been deputy chief of intelligence
under General Westmoreland in Saigon.
And I told him this tragic story
about a Marine Corps lance corporal killing women and--
And my stepfather shot back at me like that.
He said, "Good counterintelligence
by the enemy."
And I said, "What do you mean, Krueger?"
He said, "Very simple.
"You know, Marines demoralized.
"Villagers hate Americans, win-win for the enemy.
Good counterintelligence by the enemy."
And if they could manipulate,
if a Viet Cong militia could manipulate
this American squad so brilliantly,
so perniciously effectively,
you know, what could the real people do?
And one of the, probably the most successful
among these tens of thousands of Viet Cong spies
was the man who wound up being the bureau chief
for Time magazine in Saigon, Pham Xuân Anh, okay?
- Norman: Double agent? - Alfred: Yep.
A superbly skilled double agent.
In the early 1950s, when General Lansdale was in Saigon,
Lansdale was very open to recruiting allies
from Indigenous populations,
something he'd learned in the Philippines.
He did it in Vietnam.
And he recruited Pham Xuân Anh.
He trained him in tradecraft.
He got him a CIA scholarship to come to the United States
and study at Orange Coast Community College,
get an undergraduate degree in journalism, and go back.
And Pham Xuân Anh became a journalist
and worked his way up to being the last bureau chief
of Time magazine.
And he was responsible--
He was Hanoi's man on the spot in Saigon, right?
He operated individually, and he had about 40 couriers.
Half of them were captured, tortured, and killed.
But he was never captured.
He wouldn't hold documents.
He typed up, I think, 490 intelligence reports
that couriers carried to Cambodia,
flown to Hanoi, okay?
And every critical North Vietnamese victory
during the war bears the influence
of Pham Xuân Anh's skillful intelligence.
When the war was over and he retired from Time magazine,
he was given a commission as a general
and given 16 medals, one for each of his contributions
to a major victory.
- By the army of Vietnam.
- By General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the defense minister,
the famous General Giáp of North Vietnam,
or then Vietnam.
- Let's follow the Cold War to a couple of other continents
of interest, of course.
At least, let's touch on CIA
or covert operations in general in Africa.
- When you survey the world during the Cold War,
there were two world regions
in which there were intense anti-colonial struggles
and thus lots of activity by European men on the spot.
One is Southeast Asia, and we've been talking about it.
The other was Africa.
And there were, how can I put it?
In the transition from empire to independence,
there were protracted struggles that created ample opportunity
for individuals to write their writ in history,
to play an extraordinary influence.
In Congo, that was an enormous crisis.
Congo, second-largest country in Africa.
One of the, in terms of mineral wealth,
one of the most wealthy places in the world.
And in the early 1960s,
Congo was given independence by Belgium.
There were less than 20 university graduates.
The country was completely unprepared for independence.
Had been a very poor preparation by the Belgians.
The country plunged into congress.
And the Soviets began intriguing.
Congo was suddenly, if you will,
open for where it was going to fall in the Cold War.
And there was a seven-year struggle
to bring the Congo within the U.S. ambit of the Cold War.
And the key figure in this was the CIA chief of station,
a man named Larry Devlin.
And he played a dominant role in U.S. policy towards Congo
from 1960 to 1974.
He had two tours as station chief in Congo.
He became head of the CIA's Africa section and ran Congo.
And very quickly, okay, he befriended Joseph Mobutu,
a former sergeant in the Belgian colonial army
who became the head of the Congo army.
And through their close collaboration,
Devlin promoted Mobutu as the U.S. man in Kinshasa,
the U.S. ally in Kinshasa, and helped install him in power.
And we don't have time
to go into the tempestuous period of Congo.
But I mean, just to sketch out the kind of volatility, okay?
This was a war in which there were massive mercenary armies
with the white mercenaries fighting.
The UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld,
was probably shot down by a Belgian mercenary pilot
and killed.
The first prime minister of the independent Congo,
Patrice Lumumba, okay, Devlin's enemy,
Devlin removed.
He was tortured and executed by Belgian officers during this.
And then the Belgians' foil
for trying to hold power after independence
was the head of what had been called the Katanga Free State.
Okay, it was Moïse Tshombe, all right?
The French intelligence actually arranged an aerial hijacking
to kidnap Tshombe, shove him in an Algerian prison,
where he died two years later.
In other words, this was an extraordinary,
tempestuous part of the globe in which these covert operatives,
the men on the spot, had this enormous influence
in ultimately bringing the Congo into the U.S.
and, very tragically for Congo itself,
establishing the Mobutu government.
He held power for 30 years.
The term for his government was coined a kleptocracy.
- Yes. - Massive plunder.
So that by the time that he left power,
the national income was a quarter of what had been.
He left a ruin of a state.
- The rich get richer. [both chuckle]
- It was a tragedy.
- And the other place that we cannot forget about, of course,
in the Cold War is Cuba.
- Indeed.
- And what was going on there?
- When Castro seized power in Havana in 1959,
Washington decided it was a major challenge
to the U.S. position in the Cold War.
And the Eisenhower administration decided
that they would overthrow the Cuban government.
The CIA decided that the Guatemalan intervention
that I discussed, in the early 1950s, had been such a success
that they would basically replicate
the Guatemala operation.
So they put together "the team," as they put it,
which included Howard Hunt.
So Howard Hunt was assigned to Miami,
and it was his job to organize the exile government.
They brought in the paramilitary experts
who'd been involved in the Guatemala operation,
and they brought in the man
who'd run the pirate radio station
that broadcast the propaganda
that had been so important in Guatemala.
So they put together the team.
The other model they used was, of course,
organizing an exile army
and using that army to overthrow the government.
- This is under Eisenhower yet?
- Yeah, still, all right?
And then there's a hand-off.
Eisenhower launches the program using the Guatemala operation,
which was his operation,
and using the same CIA team to do it, all right?
And then it's passed to Kennedy.
And Kennedy has a lot of doubts about it, you know?
He insists that it be far less noisy,
far less spectacular, staged in a way
that it looks genuinely like a Cuban exile operation,
not a U.S. CIA covert operation.
And this leads to all kinds of complications.
Most importantly, the CIA,
in these months of meeting and planning, said that "Look.
"We will land in the town of Trinidad.
And then, if the operation fails--"
The town of Trinidad is right at the foothills
of the very rugged Escambray mountains,
where guerrilla warfare is possible.
So the guerrillas will retreat
into the nearby Escambray mountains,
where they can be sustained for a protracted period.
So the operation can't fail, right?
Kennedy then decides that invading a town is too noisy,
so he orders the CIA to come up with an alternative plan.
So they move it 100 miles west,
down the coast to the Bay of Pigs.
- Away from the mountains. - Away from the mountains, okay?
And throughout the planning, it's almost, okay...
It's almost comical.
It's tragicomical.
Throughout the planning,
the idea that if the operation fails,
there's always the fallback, there's always the mountains.
But when you actually look at the map,
you've got to cross through a mangrove swamp,
and then you hit a bay, and there's no way to cross the bay.
I mean, it was abysmal planning by the CIA.
The result, of course, was this enormous disaster,
this huge embarrassment.
And I think you've got a...
- Well, the Soviets then get involved.
And we start to get this kind of headline in the news.
- Alfred: Because our man on the spot surfaces again.
After the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, right,
Kennedy was infuriated.
He wanted vengeance.
So he turned to the master of manipulation,
the greatest covert operative of the Cold War era,
Edward Lansdale,
who by this time was a major general,
assigned in the Pentagon, head of special operations.
All right, and he comes up.
He gives Lansdale $50 million
to run something called Operation Mongoose.
And Lansdale comes up with all kinds of fabulous schemes,
bizarre schemes.
Operation Illumination, that on All Souls' Day,
he thinks he can manipulate Afro-Cuban religion.
And he's gonna have a submarine surface in Havana harbor,
fire spectacular exploding shells over the harbor
on All Souls' Day to convince the Cubans
that Castro is preordained by divine forces
to fall from power.
You know, they also run a series of--
Well, the CIA has the third-largest navy
in the Caribbean,
operating out of Miami, foraying up and down the Cuban coast,
burning cane fields, blowing up buildings,
shooting up militia bases, all right?
And this ongoing, well, covert attack on Cuba
convinces the Soviets they have to do something.
And so, Khrushchev, as he describes in his memoirs,
realizes that, you know, that Cuba is under threat
from the United States,
that even though the Bay of Pigs invasion was defeated,
that there's still risk and he has to do something.
So he sends 180 shipments of missiles
and builds up a nuclear capacity,
which you showed in that map.
And those missiles were aimed at the United States.
And Khrushchev says in his memoirs, you know,
yes, most of the missiles would be shot down,
but if even one or two nuclear-armed missiles
reach New York, that would be a success.
I mean, this was a major threat, right?
So this, of course, produced the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and it shut down Lansdale's operation.
- And the quarantine, however,
that the United States imposed, the blockade on Cuba--
looking at another headline, if we can--
leads to ultimately what was called in the press at the time
a "stunning' success for Kennedy.
But it wasn't, as we found out, what, 30 years later,
not quite that simple.
- No.
There was an agreement,
a sub rosa agreement that the United States would--
Just as the Soviet Union would pull its missiles out of Cuba,
the United States would withdraw
its Jupiter missiles from Turkey,
which were right on, facing the Soviet Union,
close to the Turkey borders on the Soviet Union.
And so, the Soviet withdrawal of its missiles was very public,
highly publicized.
And all the parties, the dozen or so senior officials
who were privy to the discussions, this trade-off,
that the Soviets pull their missiles out of Cuba
and we pull our missiles out of Turkey--
and we also pulled them out of Italy
to kind of cover up the withdrawal--
that this trade-off that we did with the Soviet Union
was concealed for 30 years.
All the principals in it lied
and denied there was such a deal.
But this is a case
in which covert operations run by these men on the spot,
which are operating in the shadows, far away, okay,
penetrate and shape the most profound
and serious crisis of the Cold War.
It's the way that the visible, surface events we all think of
as the major events in the history of the Cold War
spring from this larger, ongoing contestation.
And it's the nuclear issue that highlights
why these covert operations were so important.
Once the United States detonated the bombs at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945, we thought we had a nuclear monopoly.
Within four years, 1949,
the Soviets test a bomb and build a nuclear arsenal.
So once the superpowers, by the early 1950s, are nuclear-armed,
any kind of direct confrontation,
as we saw in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
between those superpowers,
any direct, visible confrontation,
particularly military confrontation,
runs the risk of escalation into thermonuclear war
and the destruction of all life on the planet.
Both superpowers are aware of that.
It's why they could resolve the issue in Cuba.
Both Khrushchev and Kennedy were aware, you know,
that they were literally playing with nuclear fire.
So if you are engaged in a constant war against your enemy
and you can't use your prime weapons, nuclear weapons,
okay, you then have to compete covertly.
And it's that which transfers all the tensions
and the struggle to this covert realm.
- In the long run, would you say it was popular movements
that really ended the Cold War finally?
- Yeah, when you think about it, the Cold War lasted 44 years.
There was no kill switch, okay?
The normal form of diplomacy is when there's a military contest,
there's an outcome.
The powers either fight to a stalemate,
or one wins and the other loses, and that allows diplomacy
to construct an end to the conflict.
But because of the nuclear standoff,
this was a war without end.
There was no way of ending this.
And when you look at all the negotiations--
and there were many of them--
for the control of the nuclear weapons,
the understanding over Berlin,
in my view, these were negotiations for the mechanisms
for continuing the war, not ending it.
So how did the Cold War end?
And that's another thing I try to do in the book.
The first half of the book is really about
this World War II generation, battle-hardened,
that produced about 30 of these men on the spot,
these battle-hardened covert warriors
that wage these sub rosa conflicts, okay?
But then, during the Vietnam War, okay,
there were massive protests.
There was a younger generation
that grew up in the prosperity of the Cold War era,
the baby boomers: 1946 to 1964.
They grew up in the greatest era of prosperity
that humanity has ever had,
and they don't share those kinds of sensibilities.
And there are massive protests internationally during the 1960s
that lead to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam
and in Europe, détente,
the start of détente among the superpowers
to remove the threat to Europe with nuclear warfare.
During the 1980s,
the Cold War had been going on for a very long time,
at that point, in excess of 30 years.
There was this phenomenal eruption of popular protest.
I would think that it was probably the greatest eruption
of popular protest in human history, all right?
It started with, in the early 1980s, massive mobilizations
of 1 million and 2 million people in the streets of Europe
to protest the deployment
of intermediate-range ballistic missiles
targeting the cities of Europe.
It expanded into protests
against apartheid in South Africa.
In the United States, during that period in the '80s,
there were protests over the sanctuary movement--
Or the sanctuary movement protesting the Reagan policy
of intervention in Central America.
And then, at the end of the Cold War,
there was this incredible eruption of popular protest
against the military dictatorships
on our side of the Iron Curtain and the communist dictatorships
on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
And around the rim of Eurasia-- It started in Manila
with the famous People Power Revolution of 1986
that was broadcast transnationally
by the first satellite television broadcast.
And that inspired a massive eruption of protests in Seoul,
Beijing, China, Bangkok, Rangoon, Burma.
It spread to Europe, okay?
The autumn, the European autumn of 1989,
an eruption of mass protests across Europe.
They spread to the Iron Curtain.
Mass protests in Moscow, even.
And in the end of this greatest eruption of popular protests
in the history of humankind,
these dictatorships came tumbling down,
the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War was over.
- Alfred McCoy, thank you for giving us a lot of insights
into that phenomenon, the Cold War.
- Thank you, Norman.
- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me
next time around for University Place Presents.
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