Within weeks of his arrival, Lansdale had assembled a crack team of American and Filipino covert operatives, the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), to carry out paramilitary and psychological operations intended to undermine the Vietminh and buttress the South Vietnamese government. These included contaminating oil in the tanks of Hanoi buses, winning Diem the support of powerful Vietnamese sect leaders by providing their mistresses with English classes, and artificially stimulating the migration of Catholics from the North whom Dooley was treating in Operation Passage to Freedom.13 Lansdale was interested in the Catholic exodus for several reasons. It aroused domestic American support for the anticommunist cause in Vietnam and at the same time created an electoral constitu-ency for Diem in the South. Refugee movements also functioned as cover for paramilitary activities—SMM had a branch in Haiphong under the command of Lansdale’s right-hand man, Lucien Conein. The Lansdalian imagination ran riot generating psy-war materials for secret circulation in the North: an almanac in which notable Vietnamese astrologers predicted disaster for the Vietminh and prosperity for the South, handbills showing an aerial view of Hanoi on which was superimposed target sites purport-edly representing American plans for a nuclear attack on the North, and posters of a Catholic cathedral being ransacked by the Vietminh while the congregation was forced to pray to a portrait of Ho Chi Minh.14 Eventually, roughly 60 percent of the nation’s 1.5 million Catholics journeyed south, many from the dioceses of Phat Diem and Bui Chu, both close to Haiphong. So convinced was Lansdale about the moral virtue of his anticommunist ends that the methods he used never gave him a moment’s pause. “You can . . . get away with almost anything,” he later told an interviewer, “so long . . . as you do it for the right reasons.”15
Not that Lansdale’s techniques for influencing Vietnamese public opinion were confined to dirty tricks: in line with the Eisenhower administration’s new emphasis on containing communism by integrating the free world, he also believed that Americans needed to capture popular support from the communists by demonstrating empathy for local values and objectives. This involved U.S. officials distancing themselves from European-style colonialism and engaging in “nation-building”—helping to create democratic political structures, if necessary by economic means
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such as land reform, that would be capable of withstanding communist pressure. “Let’s cut out the American self-delusion,” Lansdale insisted, in the face of CIA colleagues concerned only with espionage (“the shoe clerk and librarian types,” he called them) and cosseted State Department career diplomats who talked down to the Vietnamese.16 One early application of this strategy was “Operation Brotherhood,” a program ostensibly sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce but in fact run by the Saigon Military Mission, which brought 100 Filipino doctors and nurses to South Vietnam, a country almost deserted by medics in the wake of the French withdrawal. “The presence of medical personnel,” explained Lansdale in a secret report, “furnishes the ideal answer to meeting the initial suspicion that foreigners evoke.”17
Dooley’s role in Passage to Freedom might have been scripted by Lansdale. On the one hand, the young doctor perfectly embodied America’s humanitarian, modernizing mission in Asia, bringing the benefits of western medical science to the victims of communist aggression with a smiling face. On the other, echoes in his performance of earlier Catholic missionary work in Asia stirred the emotions of American Catholics and fostered the impression, which the planners of Passage to Freedom were all too glad to see perpetuated, that the conflict in Vietnam was a war between atheists and Christians. (Although Dooley explicitly denied any evangelical intent, it was hard not to read some religious significance into his actions, such as the way he administered U.S.-manufactured drugs to Catholic refugees “almost as a surrogate Eucharist.”)18 The fact that other American officials thought Dooley an immature attention-seeker or
“blowhard” did not bother Lansdale. “I said no,” the maverick spy recalled in 1984. “I had seen him look at the Vietnamese that he’s treating and there’s a real affection in his emotions and the guy cares.”19 Documentary evidence linking the two men at this stage in Dooley’s career is scant, but the fact that SMM had a base in Haiphong is suggestive, as is Lansdale’s later claim that the decoration of the young doctor by Diem was his idea.