Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War?

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0:39Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is Short Stuff. Giddy up. That's right. And this week we are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA during the Cold War in this case. But first, we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right? Yeah. There's 7 ,000 islands in the Philippines, more than. I did not know that, but that's a lot of islands. That's a lot. Yeah. There's 175 different languages. Tagalog is one of the larger language families or groups or just languages. And because there's 7 ,000 islands, there's a bunch of different languages.

1:20There's a lot of different cultural beliefs. But some of the ones are spread pretty far and wide across the Philippines, which would suggest they're very, very old folk beliefs. And one of them that we're going to talk about today is the Aswang. That's right. We don't have an exact correlation here in the United States, but you might call it like a vampire potentially because it does suck blood. But it also feeds on organs and it feeds on phlegm, which is completely disgusting to think about. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard. Yeah, feeds on phlegm. Unborn children, pregnant women. It can be a giant pig.

2:02It can be a giant vulture. It can be like a dog-shaped thing. And sort of like, I can't remember, what was the one we did this past October about the Mexican folklore? The owl. Yeah, similar to that. I can't remember the name of that one, but it's one of those deals where like any mysterious death or unexplained illness or any kind of misfortune that might happen, you might blame on the Aswang. Right. And you mentioned a dog. I saw somewhere that the name comes from Aswang, which means dog, I think in Tagalog. Oh, all right. So people are like, OK, great. What's up with the name, though, the CIA vampires thing?

2:42What are you talking about, you guys? Well, this is what we're talking about. In the Cold War in the 50s, there was a guy whose name was Edward Geary Lansdale, and he worked for the CIA. And he used the tail of the Aswang to try to manipulate people into turning against a guerrilla army there. That's right. And, you know, if you're afraid of something like this, it's probably because it's truly horrific. Aside from feeding on phlegm, this thing in humanoid form would lurk on rooftops at night and had a long tongue, sort of like a proboscis, that it could lower through what's called a lick hole in the ceiling of your home.

3:28Do you have a lick hole? Horrible, horrible words put together. They're feeding on phlegm and lick hole. And like we said, pregnant women, children, it would suck out their insides with this tongue and essentially leave something, you know, devoid of organs and, you know, disemboweled and devoid of blood. It would suck them from the outside in or inside out. Right. Yeah. And again, like we don't have a good analogy to this in the West. the best we can do is like Dracula, essentially. But that's really eating blood or consuming blood. That's where the similarities end. That's right. So Ed Lansdale comes along.

4:11He was pre-war, World War II. He was an ad guy. And so once he got in the war, they said, all right, you're pretty sharp tack. We're going to move you over to the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which predated the CIA. and they said, since you're an ad guy, you know what you'd be great at is psyops, you know, using media and marketing and propaganda to help win the war, like demonize the enemy because that's basically what you do as an advertiser. Exactly. And he was a whiz at it, so he excelled at psyops himself. And he took a different view of things. He said normally that when people think about psyops conventionally, They're talking about dropping leaflets that try to demoralize the enemy, maybe using like a Tokyo Rose type to talk about how G.I.'s girlfriends are hooking up with other guys back home.

5:06Those are psyops, and they're really kind of low-hanging fruit. What Lansdale was doing was really trying to dig into the local culture to figure out how to turn that culture's beliefs and superstitions against it to win the war. That's right. That feels like a pretty good time for a break. Yeah? Yeah. All right. We're going to come right back and talk about what happened in 1950 right after this.

5:57All right. So I promised talk of 1950. That is when Lansdale came to the Philippines. He was undercover as the CIA guy. He was officially there as an Air Force officer and advisor to the president of the Philippines, who was Ramon Magsaysa. Magsaysay? I'm going with Magsaysay. Magsaysay. I don't know why I said Saysa. So he was assigned there in the Philippines because the U.S. was backing that regime and they were fighting a war against communist rebels there known as the Hooks. It was H-U-K-S. And they were, you know, they fought, the Hooks fought, you know, pretty heroically in the Philippine army against the Japanese in World War II.

6:41But after the war, they, along with their leader, whose name was, I guess, Louis Taroq, said nuts to this government, to borrow a Josh Clark term, because the Philippine Trade Act of 1946 basically said the American government gets equal rights to the natural resources. And the Hawks weren't down with that. Yeah, and I'm not sure if the Hooks were actually like communist or if they were just labeled as communist insurgents to help drum up public support against them. Right. Because they really were this revered like infantry that really helped get the Japanese out of the Philippines. And the U.S.

7:20troops even fought alongside of them. But after they broke with this American-backed administration, they were persona non grata. They had to be gotten rid of because they weren't just like protesting. They were carrying out a guerrilla war to try to overthrow this U.S.-backed regime, I guess. Yeah, not only U.S.-backed, but sort of U.S.-elected because those supposedly free elections in the Philippines that brought this party into power were totally rigged by the CIA and U.S. operatives. So it was all dirty dealing going on in the CIA back then. Not like these days. No, not like today. By the way, since we're talking about the CIA, I have another show recommendation for you.

8:04It's called The Agency, colon, Central Intelligence. It's a really stupid name, but it is a really well done, suspenseful, but also really dramatic show. It's Michael Fassbender, Richard Deere. Does it like I've never seen him act like he is in this one. Jeffrey Wright. It's just this really great show. It's a great cast. everybody does wonderfully. Even the people I've never heard of before, everybody does great. You know what we should do? We should do a little 15-minute show once a week where we recommend stuff to people. That's a great idea. Where'd you get that idea? I don't know. Let's hear from you.

8:43Do people want that? Let's find out. All right. So some of these side war tactics, they got busy doing their stuff, like kind of doing research on the Filipinos and like what would kind of what would sway them, what would work. They did some studies of the people, especially the peasants living in the Hook areas. One of the sort of, I guess, sort of low-hanging fruit light you were talking about that they used was they would fly over these areas with, you know, kind of low-flying light aircraft to broadcast curses in Tagalog. If anyone was like, if you're a villager and you're going to help the Hook soldiers, this curse will befall you.

9:20That sort of worked a little bit. He would also paint what's called the Eye of God. It was just kind of a scary looking thing on houses of Hook sympathizers, like on their front door. And that would kind of scare people out. But kind of nothing like what he did with Aswang, right? No, this was definitely a different level than those other ones that you mentioned, because there was a CIA trained that Lansdale helped oversee group of government, Filipino government military operatives. That's a really clumsy way to put it. But they were basically set out, they were unleashed on this village where a bunch of Hook rebels, I think 100 to 300 of them, were encamped nearby.

10:07And they were intimidating the villagers into being quiet, giving them supplies, that kind of stuff. So the CIA found out about this and they really wanted to get this Hook detachment out of this area. And this is when they unleashed this Aswang rumor. They basically had these Filipino commandos go into the village and start a rumor that the Aswang was haunting this area where the Hook rebels were camped out. Yeah. And you think, all right, well, that doesn't sound much different than the other thing. Like they're spreading a rumor that might scare them into not helping these local soldiers. there in the nearby hills.

10:47But they took it one step further and they had these agents go in and Aswang them, basically. They would kidnap Hook fighters and disembowel them and clean them out Aswang vampire style and leave their bloodless corpses behind. Well, I saw also one of the things that they did was put puncture holes in their neck and drain them of blood. and that is not really oswang at all that's dracula stuff and that's just shoddy um research of a poor quality if you're really trying to scare off people based on their superstitions yeah i mean there was a guy that wrote a book about this uh in addition to uh lansdale wrote his own memoir but um there's a researcher i think his last name was clark what's jordan clark He talked to, I think he talked to Dave Roos, who wrote this for How Stuff Works.

11:41Oh, okay. Well, he basically backed up what you're saying is like, if they would have done their research, they would have believed that the true local creature they were scared of was not Aswang. It was a self-segmenting kind of Aswang, but it kind of strictly fed on the fetuses of pregnant women and was not a bloodsucker. Right. And he's also not sure that like this thing worked, but he's not sure if it worked because they thought it was an Aswang or whatever the local. I can't even. How do you pronounce that?

12:14Menonangal? Yeah, I think so. Was the local boogeyman? If it worked because they thought it was that or if it was because they were like, holy crap, these they're so twisted. They're sucking the blood out of and draining blood out of people to make it seem like. So, like, either way, don't mess with these guys. It's awful. Yeah. But it worked. It didn't win the war. Jordan Clark points out, like, this worked this one time. I think it was only used one time. And it did dislodge those Hook insurgents. But the war was run by grinding them out. They basically fought over the years. And Luis Turok finally surrendered in 1954.

12:55I think he secured a pardon for himself and his troops. That's right. And he said, did you see what happened with the Oswang years back? Yeah. And they were just like, that's it. Does that mean Sure Stuff is out? All right.

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