17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

Navy, he volunteered for service in “Passage to Freedom,” an emergency effort to transport non-communist Vietnamese to the south of the country as the north fell under communist domination.5 His facility with languages (he already spoke French and soon acquired serviceable Vietnamese) and obvious sympathy for the predominantly Catholic refugees he treated as they boarded American vessels for the journey south so impressed his superiors that in October 1954 Dooley was assigned his own medical task unit in the port of Haiphong, the last neutral enclave in North Vietnam. There he distinguished himself further by managing to prevent any major outbreaks of epidemic disease in the teeming refugee camps and transporters bound for Saigon. In the process he attracted the attention of several Vietnam-based U.S. newsmen, who detected in the spectacle of this youthful Irish-American ministering to Catholic evacu-ees a human interest story that would tug the heartstrings of their audiences back home. Dooley’s motivation was not entirely selfless: letters written from Haiphong to his mother hint at a growing appetite for publicity linked to the wounded pride he still felt about his poor performance at SLU.6 That said, he was undeniably moved by the devotion he appeared to inspire in the refugees, especially the children, who flocked around him, calling “Bac Sy My” (“good American doctor”), as well as by the suffering of Catholic victims of torture at the hands of the Vietminh, whose injuries he described in the letters to his mother with palpable horror.7 Dooley risked his own health caring for his Vietnamese patients, nearly dying of malarial fever, acquiring four different types of intestinal worm, and frequently hallucinating due to sleep deprivation.8 It was in recognition of this self-sacrifice that the new Catholic premier of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, decorated Dooley in May 1955 at a special award ceremony in the Saigon presidential palace. The doctor’s “medicine and knowledge,” so Diem’s citation claimed, had demonstrated to ordinary Vietnamese “the true goodness and spirit of help and cooperation that America is showing in Viet Nam and in all the countries of the world.”9

170

S A V I N G T H E W O R L D

Not all was as it seemed, however. Behind Passage to Freedom and Diem’s honoring of Dooley was the CIA—or, to be more precise, the shadowy figure of archetypal American Cold War secret agent Edward G.

Lansdale. There has been so much myth-making about Lansdale that it is almost impossible to separate the facts of his career from the fictions about it. (In addition to a thinly veiled portrait of Lansdale appearing in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American, a best-selling fictional critique of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, he is also widely, if mistakenly, believed to have inspired the character of American antihero Alden Pyle in the Vietnam of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. ) Nonetheless, certain biographical details do seem to be incontrovertible. Born to a middle-class, Catholic father and Christian Scientist mother in Detroit, and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the soft-spoken Lansdale left a lucrative career in a San Francisco advertising agency to serve in the Pacific with military intelligence and the OSS during World War II. After the war, he returned to the Philippines as a psychological warfare and counterinsurgency expert in Frank Wisner’s OPC, under cover as a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General), despite the fact that he never learned how to fly a plane. During a tour of duty that lasted until 1953, Lansdale waged an ingenious psy-war campaign against the communist Hukbalahap insurgency and developed a Svengali-like relationship with the pro-U.S. Filipino Defense Minister, Ramón Magsaysay. In addition to employing American advertising techniques to promote the cause of his friend, the OPC operative cunningly exploited local superstitions to turn ordinary Filipinos against the Huks, on one occasion arranging for the body of an insurgent to be drained of blood, punctured twice in the neck, and laid out in a Luzon village street to create the impression that a local vampire was preying on communists.10 In 1953, Magsaysay won a presidential election with an overwhelming majority and the following year drove the Huks into the Sierra Madre, earning Lansdale a reputation in Washington as a master practitioner of “unconventional” warfare and authority on all matters Asian.11 It was no surprise, therefore, that in 1954, when the Dulles brothers were looking for ways of stabiliz-ing the fragile regime of the Vietnamese anticommunist Diem, they turned to “Colonel Landslide.” Lansdale left for Saigon in June of that year with instructions from Foster “to help the Vietnamese the way you

C AT H O L I C S

171

helped the Filipinos” and a personal message from Allen: “God bless you.”12