The Cold War in Southeast Asia: ‘Men on the Spot’ & the End of Empire
Alfred W. McCoy
Harrington Professor of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
During the Cold War (1947-1991), the superpowers soon achieved a nuclear-armed stalemate that made any direct confrontation excessively dangerous, shifting their rivalry to surrogate conflicts in more remote battlegrounds like Southeast Asia. Sometimes the U.S. sent its own troops, as it did disastrously to South Vietnam in 1965. But most of the time, Washington dispatched individual CIA operatives armed with impunity to do whatever — and I mean whatever — they wanted to deflect Moscow’s gambit and secure a contested terrain. Usually misfits, even oddballs at home, these consequential historical actors, whom I call “men on the spot,” often proved quite successful abroad. Using the cruelest instruments in the toolkit of modern statecraft — assassination, coups, slaughter, torture, or psychological warfare – these covert operatives fought for control of foreign capitals as diverse as Jakarta, Manila, Saigon, and Vientiane. Americans were by no means alone in this clandestine realm, and were joined there by British, Dutch, French, and Vietnamese operatives — all of whom played a surprisingly significant role in shaping the destiny of Southeast Asia as it emerged from colonial rule.