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Satanic Tomatoes and Other Weird Details Not Taught in History Class

Khalid Elhassan July 4, 2020 33 min

South Lawn - Goat — Wilson's sheep. Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

13. Deploying Vampires Against the Huks

In 1950, the CIA brought in Air Force brigadier general Edward Lansdale, a pioneer in clandestine and psychological warfare who believed in tailoring psy-ops to the specific culture targeted. The specific culture of central Luzon, where the Huks throve, happened to believe in a weird, mythical shape-shifting vampire called an aswang, which killed by draining its victims’ blood with a long, sharpened tongue.

So Lansdale mimicked aswang attacks by abducting and killing Huk fighters. Puncture wounds were then placed on their necks, their blood was drained, and the bodies left for other Huks to find – and conclude that their comrade had been killed and drained of their blood by an aswang. It proved highly effective in clearing Huk fighters out of an area. Between that weird tactic and other effective counterinsurgency measures, the Huk Rebellion was crushed within a few years.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.