| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jonathan Nashel. Edward Lansdale's Cold War. (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 278. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.95.
Covert action invariably contains an element of farce. This is underlined by Jonathan Nashel's intriguing analysis of Edward Lansdale, perhaps the most famous of the Central Intelligence Agency's cold warriors. Quite simply, most warfare is noisy, and so the idea of the CIA presiding over "secret armies" and "silent battles" was always a contradiction in terms. This is why so few of the major Cold War actions stayed covert for very long and why only a minority were successful. This held true for Lansdale; after his initial success against the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, his record was distinctly patchy, with modest achievements in Vietnam in the 1950s followed by botched operations designed to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. Such ill-considered escapades pointed the way toward the Congressional investigations of intelligence in the 1970s. We are not surprised to learn that Oliver North regarded himself as a Lansdale protégé.	1
Lansdale served under Wild Bill Donovan in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, an agency that bequeathed the CIA a strong activist and paramilitary tradition. In the late 1940s, Lansdale was despatched to the Philippines to develop counterinsurgency against a growing rebellion by the Huks. Lansdale was mostly a psywar operator, who used a mixture of development programs, bribes, catchy songs, and gimmicks to shore up the government and accelerate the success of his close friend, Ramon Magsaysay, the Filipino defense secretary. The Philippines was Lansdale's heyday, but this success was never repeated, and thereafter he always had a bright future behind him.	. . .

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