The CIA’s “Vampires” In The Philippines
Wikimedia CommonsAn artist’s depiction of an aswang, a vampire-like creature from Filipino folklore.
There seems to be something of a recurring theme with U.S. intelligence operations and taking advantage of Asian folklore to frighten Eastern and Southeastern nations. Not long after OSS personnel were tossing around the ideas behind Operation Fantasia in Japan, another group of officials from the CIA developed a similar scheme in the Philippines.
In 1950, years after World War II had ended, American Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale arrived in the Philippines. By then, Lansdale was working for the CIA, but before that, he had been in the Air Force and previously worked in the advertising business. This background made him uniquely suited for psychological warfare — and he put this skill to use.
At the time, the Filipino government was embroiled in a civil war against the communist Huk rebellion, but Lansdale was tapped specifically to help diminish enemy forces through more discreet methods. He believed that local folklore held the solution to his problem. As author William Blum explains in Killing Hope, there was a locally held belief in the aswang, a legendary creature that has often been compared to vampires.
Public DomainCIA operative Edward Lansdale.
Lansdale used the aswang to stoke the fires of fear across the Philippines. He and his team would fly over villages, projecting Tagalog curses from a loudspeaker, claiming that those who continued to aid the Huk forces would become cursed. Some superstitious villagers seemed to believe this, as they began turning in Huk fighters who had been hiding out.
But Lansdale took it a step further. His team kidnapped a Huk fighter, killed him, poked two vampire bite-like holes in his neck, and then hung him upside down so that his blood would be drained out. Before long, fellow Huks uncovered the body, saw the bite marks, and presumably believed that the soldier had been brutally murdered by an aswang.
Whether or not they really believed in the aswang, the fighters did flee from the region — so the CIA’s “vampires” did accomplish that goal. But it was certainly a brutal (and bizarre) way to go about things.
