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

During the Cold War, the CIA used the legend of a vampire named Aswang to scare locals into not helping the communists. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:45Josh Clark?

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• 1:07Josh Clark?

  Hey, 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.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  That's right. And this week we are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA.

• 1:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  During the Cold War in this case, but first we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right?

• 1:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's 7,000 islands in the Philippines, more than. I did not know that, but that's a lot of islands.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35Josh Clark?

  There's 175 different languages. Tagalog is one of the, the larger language families or groups or just languages. And because there's 7,000 islands, there's a bunch of different languages. There's a lot of cultural, 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, like folk beliefs. And one of them that we're going to talk about today is the Aswang.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  That's right. We don't have an exact correlation here in the, 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.

• 2:22Josh Clark?

  It's one of the worst things I've ever heard.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, feeds on phlegm. Unborn children, pregnant women, it can be a giant pig, it can be a giant vulture, it can be like a dog shaped thing.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  And sort of like, I can't, what was the one we did this past October about the, the Mexican folklore?

• 2:41Josh Clark?

  The owl.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Called? 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, blame on the Aswang.

• 2:55Josh Clark?

  Right. And you mentioned a dog. I saw somewhere that the name comes from Aswang, which means dog, I think in Tagalog.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Oh, all right.

• 3:04Josh Clark?

  So people are like, okay, great. What, what's up with the name though? The CIA vampires thing? What 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, the tale of the Aswang to try to manipulate people into turning against a guerrilla army there.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  And had a, 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.

• 3:56Josh Clark?

  Do you have a lick hole?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Horrible, horrible words put together, feeding on phlegm and lick hole.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  And like we said, pregnant women, children, they 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, rather.

• 4:19Josh Clark?

  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, that's really eating, sucking, or eating blood or consuming blood is, that's where the similarities end.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  That's right. So Ed Lansdale comes along. He 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 a 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 psy-ops, 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.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And he was a whiz at it. So he excelled at psy-ops himself. And he took a different view of things. He said normally that when people think about psy-ops conventionally, they're talking about dropping leaflets that try to demoralize the enemy, maybe using like a Tokyo Rose type to talk about how GIs girlfriends are hooking up with other guys back home. Those are psy-ops 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.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  That's right. That feels like a pretty good time for a break. Yeah?

• 5:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  All right. We're going to come right back and talk about what happened in 1950, right after this.

• 6:13Speaker 03

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• 6:32Speaker 04

  I love the 60s. I feel really jealous that I wasn't alive for it. I'd be interested, like, knowing what that was like and seeing the way culture and art has progressed today. How do you find it?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Wait a minute.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Sorry, I have so many questions. Sorry.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  You're not nervous, are you?

• 6:46Speaker 04

  I am nervous.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  You are?

• 6:48Speaker 04

  I am. I feel, like, insecure about my experience. I know I shouldn't, but, you know, I'm 20. I haven't really lived my life yet. And then sitting in front of somebody that has lived an enormous life is intimidating. And sometimes I feel like talking about myself is just not as interesting. So that's why I feel a bit nervous. I'll try and ignore it, love.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Please do. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  All right, so I promised talk of 1950. That is when Lansdale came to the Philippines. He was undercover as a CIA guy. He was officially there as an Air Force officer, an advisor to the president of the Philippines, who was Ramon Magsaysay. Magsaysay? I'm going with Magsaysay. Magsaysay. I don't know why I said saysay. So he was assigned there in the Philippines because the US 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

• 8:11Speaker 02

  in the Philippine Army against the Japanese in World War II. But after the war, they, along with their leader, whose name was, I guess, Louis Taruk. 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 hucks weren't down with that.

• 8:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I'm not sure if the hucks were actually like communist, or if they were just labeled as communist insurgents to help drum up public support against them.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:44Josh Clark?

  Because they really were this revered like infantry that really helped to get the Japanese out of the Philippines and the US troops 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 US backed regime, I guess.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, not only US backed, but sort of US elected because those supposedly free elections in the Philippines that brought this party into power were totally rigged by the CIA and US operatives. So it was all dirty dealing going on in the CIA back then. Not like these days.

• 9:31Josh Clark?

  No, not like today. By the way, since we're talking about the CIA, I have another show recommendation for you. It's called The Agency: 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 Dear, 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.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  You know what we should do? We should do a little 15 minute show once a week where we recommend stuff to people.

• 10:12Josh Clark?

  That's a great idea. Where'd you get that idea?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. Let's hear from you. Do people want that?

• 10:18Josh Clark?

  Let's find out.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  All right. So some of these cywar tactics, they got busy doing their stuff, like, kind of doing research on the Filipinos and like, what would sway them, what would work. They did some studies of the people, like, especially the peasants living in the hook areas. One of the sort of, I guess, sort of low hanging fruit like 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. That sort of worked a little bit. He would also paint what's called the Eye of God. It was just

• 11:00Speaker 02

  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?

• 11:12Josh Clark?

  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 in camp nearby. And 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

• 11:55Josh Clark?

  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.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  They're in the nearby hills. But they took it one step further and they had these, these agents go in and oswang them, basically. They would kidnap hook fighters and disembowel them and, and clean them out, oswang vampire style, and leave their bloodless corpses behind.

• 12:39Josh Clark?

  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 research of a poor quality if you're really trying to scare off people based on their superstitions.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there was a guy that wrote a book about this. In addition to, Lansdale wrote his own memoir, but there's a researcher, I think his last name was Clark, what's?

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  Jordan Clark. He talked to, I think he talked to Dave Roos, who wrote this for How Stuff Works.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Oh, 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 oswang. It was a, a self-segmenting kind of oswang, but it kind of strictly fed on the fetuses of pregnant women and was not a bloodsucker.

• 13:33Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  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 oswang or whatever the local, I can't even, how do you pronounce that? Menanongal?

• 13:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Was the, was the local boogeyman?

• 13:50Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But it worked. It didn't win the war. Jordan Clark points out, like, this, this worked this one time. I think it was only used one time. And it did dislodge those hook insurgents, but the, the war was run by grinding them out. They basically fought.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:23Josh Clark?

  Over the years. And Louis Tarrac finally surrendered in 1954. I think he secured a pardon for himself and his troops.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 14:32Josh Clark?

  And he said, did you see what happened with the oswang years back?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:37Josh Clark?

  And they were just like.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  That's it. Does that mean short stuff is out? Mm-hmm. All right.

• 14:48Speaker 00

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