In connection with the jet deal the Nationalists agreed not to use their American weapons, particularly aircraft, on offensive missions without first consulting with the United States. But Jiang sought no approval several months later, in July 1953, when he committed the planes to support a Nationalist raiding force. Jiang’s chief of staff apologized, claiming dire emergency: the raiders were being driven into the sea and needed to buy time for an orderly withdrawal. The Nationalists promised it would not happen again, but in June 1954 Jiang’s navy used its American-supplied destroyers to seize a Soviet tanker on the high seas between Luzon and Formosa. The Eisenhower administration assumed a posture of studied neutrality.

  Overall, apart from its creation of a support network, the CIA’s paramilitary campaign against China produced paltry results. There had been some military impact in Korea, though this was limited because the large partisan units materialized only after the most active, mobile phase of the war. Agency operations in Manchuria and Yunnan were almost totally ineffective. Moreover they prompted stringent Communist security measures, so may even have impeded the CIA’s developing intelligence sources in China. As in the Burma project, some CIA efforts proved positively detrimental to larger U.S. foreign policy interests, and those along the China coast contributed to the inception of the series of crises in the Taiwan Straits that repeatedly brought America near war with China during the 1950s. Covert action irritated the Chinese without producing any American advantage in the Cold War.

  Among the important covert operations of the period in Asia is one that combined political action with psychological warfare and limited military involvement to defeat an armed resistance and put a pro–United States leader in power. This took place in the Philippines. Again the initiative would be antithetical to stated U.S. principles in support of democracy.

  The Philippines became independent at the end of 1946. At the time there were a number of partisan groups that had actively fought Japanese occupiers with U.S. help during World War II. One, the Hukbalahap (called Huks), an amalgam of peasant-based groups and Filipino Communists, formed a National Peasants Union and then a coalition group, the Democratic Alliance, to contest the 1946 elections. There the Alliance won all the congressional seats for key parts of the island of Luzon, but President Manuel Roxas alleged fraud and refused to seat the delegates. The Huks resumed fighting under wartime leader Luis Taruc. In 1947 the United States signed a military base agreement with the new Republic of the Philippines, providing for naval and air bases in exchange for U.S. foreign aid and military assistance. Military advisers naturally were concerned about the Huk uprising and spent much time and effort to bring the Philippine army a victory over the guerrillas. The government called its strategy the “mailed fist.” This approach did little to defuse the resistance. Newly elevated president Elpidio Quirino (formerly the vice president) enticed the Huks into negotiations in 1948, but these proved abortive.

  Enter the CIA. The agency had a station in Manila, of course, and a base at Subic Bay, which had become a major U.S. Navy installation. The OPC station chief, a detailee from the air force, Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, had a natural affinity for political psychological warfare. He became the darling of psywar experts. The major’s background had been in advertising—product lines like soft drinks and blue jeans—and he had lived in Hollywood, attending UCLA. Lansdale had served with the OSS, returned to the army, and transferred to the air force. In the Philippines the forty-three-year-old psywar whiz found a perfect vehicle in Ramon Magsaysay, the Filipino defense minister appointed by Quirino in the summer of 1950.

  Magsaysay, a Filipino congressman and wartime guerrilla fighter who came from a poor part of Luzon, had a more evolved view of the resistance. He began a land redistribution program financed through a government corporation to wean the peasants away from the Huks. Magsaysay also benefited from internal fissures in the rebellion—a split between Taruc and the Philippine Communists, many of whose top leaders had been captured in Manila police raids. Lansdale began promoting Magsaysay using all the resources of the Wisner Wurlitzer, eventually making the Filipino a larger-than-life figure.

  In the conflict Lansdale added psywar to the standard military protection measures. He used massive sound amplifiers on airplanes to saturate Huk areas with prerecorded messages or simply noise that capitalized on peasant superstitions to instill fear. The land program was adapted to encourage defections from the Huks. The CIA also installed a New York political operator, Gabe Kaplan, to create a movement to influence voting, beginning with the Philippine congressional elections of 1951. Lansdale engineered a supposedly grassroots movement to draft Magsaysay for the presidential election. George Aurell worried about the CIA’s growing involvement in nation-building, but Des FitzGerald forged ahead with gusto. Ramon Magsaysay won the 1953 elections, but that proved only the beginning. The CIA remained a player in Filipino elections through the rest of the decade. Magsaysay died in a plane crash four years later, and by the time of the 1957 election George Aurell had become station chief in Manila. The CIA could not decide who to support in that contest. John Richardson replaced Aurell in time for the next congressional elections, and this time there were CIA favorites.

  Manila became an important agency base for Far East operations, particularly its China Mission, which transferred there from Japan in 1955. Led by Desmond FitzGerald, who had desperately wanted a field assignment, the mission purported to be a theater command for actions aimed at Beijing. It never succeeded. The barons at headquarters disliked having anyone come between them and their station chiefs, while the latter wanted to operate, not deal with some supernumerary, and they wanted to go to the highest level at headquarters, which meant the Far East Division chief. The China mission became moribund, much as had the Psychological Strategy Board. FitzGerald finally returned to Washington, succeeding Tracy Barnes as head of the DO’s Political/Paramilitary Staff, slightly reorganized after Guatemala.

  Meanwhile the Huk rebellion sputtered on but came close to disappearing. By 1954 almost ten thousand persons had died, half that number were prisoners, and a couple of thousand more were wounded. An almost equal number had been induced to give up by land offers and other measures. Luis Taruc himself surrendered in May 1954, about the same time Edward Lansdale was promoted for his work in the Philippines. But no grass grew under Lansdale’s feet. He had already moved on to a new secret war.

  Vietnam became another theater for the CIA. Known as French Indochina, after World War II the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were caught up in revolution. France had ruled them as a colony from the late nineteenth century, but independence movements steadily evolved, and with the end of the war they openly opposed the restoration of French colonial rule. In Vietnam the Communist party’s Viet Minh front formed a government in August 1945 and issued a declaration of independence remarkably similar to that of the Americans in 1776. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh sent letters to President Truman soliciting aid for his fledgling reach toward nationhood. Americans of the OSS and other military intelligence units briefly worked in Indochina then, and these Americans had high expectations for Vietnamese self-government. The Viet Minh ran the country for seventeen months before French armies and the Vietnamese began warring over the new Vietnam. France proved quite successful at painting the Viet Minh as little more than satraps of monolithic Russian communism while the United States also worried about the weakness of France in the post-1945 world. The result was that when U.S. involvement in the Far East burgeoned, French Indochina became one scene of the action. What seemed to some as new American initiatives in the Cold War inevitably appeared to others as U.S. support of French colonialism—the opposite of slogans about democracy and self-determination.

  The Central Intelligence Agency first sent people to Vietnam as part of the U.S. legation that opened in Saigon in the summer of 1950. Two years later the agency’s presence expanded to northern Vietnam, with an officer heading a base in Hanoi. Jurisdiction fell to the same branch of the Far East Division that handled Li Mi in Burma. In mid-1951 Truman approved a policy for cooperating with friendly governments in operations against guerrillas, the kind of warfare central to the Indochina conflict. About that time the agency suggested to the French commander-in-chief that he form partisan units behind Viet Minh lines, following much the same formula the CIA had applied in Korea. The French were not enthusiastic. The issue came up again in mid-1952 when the French applied for more aid to create Vietnamese light infantry battalions. French generals continued to resist the CIA proposals; more precisely, the French created a mixed airborne commando force unilaterally, with no U.S. participation.

  A widening U.S. paramilitary effort began with secret discussions in 1953. Strapped for money and facing the escalating cost of their war, the French asked for additional military aid, including for “special warfare,” and the new Eisenhower administration agreed. Ike’s condition was that the French agree to U.S. help on secret warfare. Ed Lansdale participated in the military group that surveyed Vietnam in the course of these deliberations. The French ran the partisan units behind enemy lines in the north. In the south there were two religious movements or “sects,” the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, and also a band of river pirates, the Binh Xuyen, private armies financed by French intelligence. There is evidence that the French, in briefing a senior CIA officer about their activities in Saigon in December 1953, offered the CIA a role in control over these forces in return for additional aid money. The briefing was repeated for another CIA official in March 1954, but the offer was rejected. Nevertheless there were Saigon rumors of American contacts with the private armies, especially after late 1953, when two women connected with the U.S. embassy were found dead in a jeep on a rubber plantation close to Cao Dai headquarters. In another incident, also hushed up for diplomatic reasons, a consul at the embassy, stopped for an identity check at a bridge, was found to have plastic explosives in his car trunk. But Joe Smith, a young Far East Division officer, believes that Saigon station agents refused to contact the religious minorities because they were Catholics and considered the groups blasphemous.

  American special warfare experts were also active in northern Vietnam. In the north the French had about ten thousand partisans in nineteen separate bands. This increase over previous levels was encouraged by the Americans. Beginning in December 1953 two U.S. Army officers were permanently assigned to the French special warfare command to handle requests for equipment. Obscurely titled Detachment P of the 8533rd Army Attaché Unit (Special Foreign Assignment), another U.S. covert office appeared in Hanoi to furnish combat intelligence for the partisan operations. Maj. Roger Trinquier, the French commander, visited Korea to observe American-organized partisan activities there. By February 15, 1954, the American ambassador to Vietnam was reporting that “we are already making [a] contribution to increased French practice of ‘unconventional warfare.’ ”

  President Eisenhower was not satisfied with the progress. In a June 1954 letter to friend and fellow general Alfred M. Gruenther, then serving in France with NATO, Ike complained that the French had rebuffed most American offers of the kind “that would tend to keep our participation in the background, but could nevertheless be very effective. I refer to our efforts to get a good guerrilla organization going in the region.”

  Early agency involvement included Civil Air Transport as well. The CAT action flowed from the military aid program, which loaned the French some C-119 “Flying Boxcar” transports. Twenty-one CAT pilots familiarized themselves with the C-119 at the air force base at Ashiya, Japan. The whole class went to Indochina, where they actually outnumbered the French crews given C-119 orientation at Clark Air Force Base. The CAT people brought everything they needed, down to their own refrigerator and supply of bottled beer. The first CAT flight in Indochina was a supply lift to an entrenched camp in Laos on May 6, 1953. Within the year a gaggle of two dozen CAT pilots would be caught up in the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu. The CAT crews performed combat missions while a full squadron of U.S. Air Force C-119s—its pilots often moonlighting with CAT—flew ostensibly less dangerous flights to support the French. The air force people, housed at a hotel in Haiphong, got help from the CIA base chief in Hanoi. For a time their messages moved on CIA radio circuits. At least one of the air force pilots, Allen Pope, resigned to join CAT, which paid a lot more for essentially the same work.

  Beginning in late 1953 the French tried to break the Viet Minh by tempting them to attack a strong mountain camp at Dien Bien Phu. Squaw II became CAT’s name for its Dien Bien Phu airlift (Squaw I having been the Laotian mission in the spring). In all the CIA proprietary flew 684 times to the mountain camp. Chief pilot Paul R. Holden was wounded by anti-aircraft fire on his fifth mission. The top flier was A. L. Judkins with 64 flights, next was Steve A. Kusak with 59. Pilots recall the flak over Dien Bien Phu as being as heavy as anything they encountered in World War II. Kusak himself was flying a mission alongside James B. McGovern on May 6, 1954, when McGovern was shot down in his C-119. Nicknamed “Earthquake Mc-Goon” after a popular comic strip character, McGovern died just hours before the final collapse of the French at Dien Bien Phu, one year to the day after CAT had first flown in Indochina. McGovern’s body and other artifacts were discovered in 2002 at a crash site in Laos, almost five decades after his plane went down, by Americans searching for those still missing in action from the U.S. war in Vietnam.

  At one point in the Dien Bien Phu crisis the French asked Washington for the loan of some B-29 bombers. The United States discussed encouraging the French to add an air component to their Foreign Legion, which could be given B-29s, and which American crews could then be encouraged to join. But the option was impractical given the immediacy of the crisis.

  The Eisenhower administration was nevertheless so impressed with CAT performance that it considered creating an entity to fly combat aircraft and help the French. At the request of the NSC Operations Coordinating Board, the staff of Gen. Graves B. Erskine, assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations, prepared a plan. The concept provided for an International Volunteer Air Group (IVAG) that could be “sponsored” by France or some Asian government. The unit would have several squadrons of F-86 jet fighters, and there was talk of giving it B-29s as well. Only eight months would be necessary to set up IVAG, officials were told, at an initial cost of $130 million and an annual operating cost of $200 million.

  Although first discussed in the context of Indochina, IVAG could possibly have had much wider covert applications, and this potential was clearly perceived by the Pentagon special warfare planners: “such a unit will always be useful as a ready striking force in the event of renewed aggression in any part of the Far East. Without it no air striking force exists which can be employed on short notice in circumstances where it is undesirable to employ official U.S. air power.” In the event of a declared war the IVAG could be “officially inducted into the U.S. Air Force as an additional wing,” a clear allusion to Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers.

  Pentagon planners believed that “creation of an IVAG is consonant with and within the framework of U.S. national policy” but felt the project required “NSC affirmation” and an opinion from the attorney general that confirmed the legality of enlistment by U.S. civilian and military volunteers.

  The original plan called for creation of the unit before the end of the 1954 rainy season in Indochina, but the National Security Council made no decision. The United States considered a private firm, Aviation International Limited, to recruit American aircraft mechanics to assist the French air force in Indochina, but used military personnel over the short term. The first Indochina war ended soon after.

  The OCB recommendation to form an International Volunteer Air Group was nevertheless taken up that summer. The NSC approved it on August 18, 1954. Although the end of the Indochina war briefly shelved the IVAG plan, it became the responsibility of the CIA with the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations. Proponents of a “foreign legion” air force were never able to work out the problems of cover or basing, however, and these finally scuttled the plan. Nevertheless this exercise established an NSC-approved role for the kind of covert air force the CIA had just utilized in Guatemala and would again resort to in the Far East.

  French defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to a negotiated settlement at Geneva which provided for a temporary division of Vietnam into two “regroupment zones” which became known, respectively, as North and South Vietnam. The partisans in the North ended up being taken over by the CIA after all. In June 1954 an agency special unit, ten men under Col. Edward G. Lansdale, arrived under cover as the “Saigon Military Mission.” They worked independently of John Anderton’s Saigon station. Geneva provided for a two-year hiatus after which elections were to be held to reunify the nation. Lansdale’s mission, specifically for operations, had that much time to prepare the ground.

  Lucien Conein, the mission’s deputy for the North, took on the partisans. He managed to smuggle a few shipments of weapons and explosives into North Vietnam under cover of the French withdrawal, and carried out some psywar actions, but he had no capability for long-term support. By 1956 the last of Conein’s projects had failed.

  The secret warriors were more successful in South Vietnam. There Lansdale established a close friendship with the politician Ngo Dinh Diem. When President Eisenhower sent a new U.S. envoy to Saigon in late 1954, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, he received a briefing from Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, and Pearre Cabell advising him to make full use of Lansdale in the struggle for power in the South. Later Allen Dulles secretly visited Saigon and was squired about town by Lansdale, reminding him of the excitement of wartime Switzerland. Beginning in January 1955 the CIA stopped giving the French cash to pay for the political-religious sect armies. Instead Lansdale funneled the money to Diem, who took over the sects and made them his first power base. The tab amounted to tens of thousands of dollars a month and increased steadily. Several additional CIA subsidies went directly to Diem’s palace contingency fund, used to pay off politicians and for similar purposes. A visiting agency officer saw so much cash passing through the station he told a colleague in Singapore that this kind of money in Malaya could have ended the entire Communist movement simply by handing every ethnic Chinese radical a first-class airline ticket to China.