Chapter 1: What is the Aswang and why is it significant in Filipino culture?
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Chapter 2: How did the CIA utilize the Aswang legend during the Cold War?
And this week we are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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.
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.
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. It can be a giant vulture.
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Chapter 3: Who was Edward Geary Lansdale and what role did he play in the Philippines?
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.
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 Asawang, which means dog, I think, in Tagalog. Oh. All right. So people are like, okay, great. 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 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.
Do you have a lick hole?
Horrible, horrible words put together. 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.
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Chapter 4: What tactics did the CIA employ to manipulate local beliefs?
It would suck them from the outside in. Or inside out, rather.
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. 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 pretty sharp tech. 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 GI's girlfriends are hooking up with other guys back home. Right.
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Chapter 5: How did the Aswang rumor impact local communities during the conflict?
But those are psyops and they're really kind of a 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.
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And I'm Hari Kundabolu.
It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of the CIA's actions involving the Aswang?
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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 and 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 saysaw. 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.
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Chapter 7: How does the Aswang legend compare to Western vampire myths?
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. But after the war, they, along with their leader, whose name was, I guess, Louis Tarouk,
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 hawks were actually, like, communist. or if they were just labeled as communist insurgents to help drum up public support against them. Because they really were this revered infantry that really helped get the Japanese out of the Philippines. And the U.S. troops even fought alongside of them. But after they broke with this American-backed administrationā
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.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from the CIA's use of folklore in psychological operations?
It'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.
show it's michael fosbender richard dear does it like i've never seen him act like he is in this one um jeffrey wright it's just this really great 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 do people want that let's find out all right so uh some of these cywar tactics they got busy doing their stuff like kind of doing research on the the filipinos and like what would kind of 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 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 and tagalog. If anyone was like, if you're a villager and you're going to help the Huk 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 kind of a scary looking thing on houses of Hulk 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? Yeah.
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 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. But they took it one step further and they had these agents go in and Oswang them basically.
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