University Place

Norman Gilliland:
[gentle music] Welcome toUniversity 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 ofCold War on Five Continents,published in 2026. And welcome toUniversity Place Presents.

Alfred McCoy:
Thank you, Norm, thanks for having me.

Norman Gilliland:
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?

Alfred McCoy:
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 calledThe Politics of Heroinabout 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 filmThe 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 Gilliland:
Movies about him, too.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
Crime scenes, it’s interesting you should say that. Because obviously a very powerful, adventuresome, even well-organized individual will have his Achilles’ heel.

Alfred McCoy:
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 so-called crises of the Cold War.

Norman Gilliland:
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?

Alfred McCoy:
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 AmericanandThe 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 Gilliland:
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.

Alfred McCoy:
That was another of Roosevelt’s sons.

Norman Gilliland:
Another of the sons.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
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.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
And, I suppose, Kermit must have been very well aware of publicity, too, being part of a famous family.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
To bring in the Shah?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
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?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
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.

Alfred McCoy:
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, Arvalo.

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.

Norman Gilliland:
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?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
During the Reagan administration.

Alfred McCoy:
Right.

Norman Gilliland:
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?”

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
What was actually the goal of the whole Iran-Contra scandal in the first place? Why was this so important to the Reagan administration?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
Assuming, in general, that these people in power are, as we say, leftists or Marxists or communists.

Alfred McCoy:
Communism, always equated as communism.

Norman Gilliland:
Was it always that simple?

Alfred McCoy:
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 Bin 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, Ng Dnh 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.

Norman Gilliland:
That’s a phenomenal amount of power for one man on the spot.

Alfred McCoy:
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 Bnh Xuyn bandits, with 9,000 militia that ran the brothels, the gambling dens, the opium traffic.

Norman Gilliland:
Sources of income.

Alfred McCoy:
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 shotThe Quiet Americanin Saigon.

Norman Gilliland:
Oh, did he?

Alfred McCoy:
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?

Norman Gilliland:
No self-interest there.

Alfred McCoy:
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 Viet Cong had taken over some units of the Phoenix Program. In other words…

Norman Gilliland:
They were that entrenched.

Alfred McCoy:
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 Gilliland:
That’s true.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
The wrong people.

Alfred McCoy:
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 forTimemagazine in Saigon, Pham Xun Anh, okay?

Norman Gilliland:
Double agent?

Alfred McCoy:
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 Xun 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 Xun Anh became a journalist and worked his way up to being the last bureau chief ofTimemagazine. 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 Xun Anh’s skillful intelligence. When the war was over and he retired fromTimemagazine, he was given a commission as a general and given 16 medals, one for each of his contributions to a major victory.

Norman Gilliland:
By the army of Vietnam.

Alfred McCoy:
By General V Nguyn Gip, the defense minister, the famous General Gip of North Vietnam, or then Vietnam.

Norman Gilliland:
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.

Alfred McCoy:
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 Hammarskjld, 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 Mose 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.

Norman Gilliland:
Yes.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
The rich get richer. [both chuckle]

Alfred McCoy:
It was a tragedy.

Norman Gilliland:
And the other place that we cannot forget about, of course, in the Cold War is Cuba.

Alfred McCoy:
Indeed.

Norman Gilliland:
And what was going on there?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
This is under Eisenhower yet?

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
Away from the mountains.

Alfred McCoy:
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…

Norman Gilliland:
Well, the Soviets then get involved. And we start to get this kind of headline in the news.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
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.

Alfred McCoy:
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.

Norman Gilliland:
In the long run, would you say it was popular movements that really ended the Cold War finally?

Alfred McCoy:
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, dtente, the start of dtente 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.

Norman Gilliland:
Alfred McCoy, thank you for giving us a lot of insights into that phenomenon, the Cold War.

Alfred McCoy:
Thank you, Norman.

Norman Gilliland:
I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around forUniversity Place Presents.[gentle music]