Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War? | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

What this episode is about

This piece explores the role of a Filipino vampire legend, known as the aswang, in the context of Cold War propaganda tactics employed by the CIA. It examines how the myth, which embodies fear and misfortune, was leveraged to influence perceptions and actions during this geopolitical conflict, linking cultural beliefs to covert operations.

Key takeaways

• In a culture with 7,000 islands, the aswang embodies fear of the unknown—vampires meet folklore in a unique twist.
• Ed Lansdale turned local folklore into psychological warfare, weaponizing superstition against communist rebels in the Philippines.
• Forget Dracula: the aswang preys on children and pregnant women, embodying deeper societal fears that US media exploited.
• Lansdale's ad-man background made him a master manipulator; wartime SCOPs evolved from leaflets to lore as propaganda.
• The Hooks fought valiantly in WWII, but post-war labels turned them into 'terrorists'—a classic case of history rewriting itself.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Josh Clark (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Chuck Bryant (Host) · 6 min speaking
• Jerry (Guest) · 1 min speaking
• Dave Ruse (Guest)
• Jordan Clark (Guest)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: aswang, Cold War, flem, Edward Giri Lansdale
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II, Dracula, Tokyo Rose
3. 6:00 – 9:00: World War II, Louie Taruk, Philippine Trade Act of 1946, The Agency: Central Intelligence
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Jordan Clark, aswang, Dave Ruse, Dracula
5. 12:00 – 12:59: Hooks

Notable quotes from "Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War? | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

• 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 fleg, which is completely disgusting to me.

  about aswang · at 1:02

• Is what we're talking about. In the Cold War in the 50s, there was a guy whose name was Edward Giri Lansdale, and he worked for the CIA, and he used the tale of the Oswang to…

  about Edward Giri Lansdale · at 2:10

• That's right. so Ed Lansdale comes along. He was pre-war World War II.

  about World War II · at 3:33

• But after the war, they along with their leader whose name was, I guess, Louie Taruk said nuts to this government, to borrow a Josh Clark term, because the Philippine Trade Act…

  about Louie Taruk · at 6:06

• Since we're talking about the CIA, I have another show recommendation for you. It's called The Agency Colon Central Intelligence. It's a really stupid name, but it is a really…

  about The Agency: Central Intelligence · at 7:25

• There's a researcher I think his last name was Clark. What's Jordan Clark he talked to I think he talked to Dave Ruse who wrote this for How Stuff Works.

  about Jordan Clark · at 10:58

• 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 Yeah.

  about Hooks · at 12:01

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Edward Giri Lansdale — Person · Core historical figure referenced · 1 mention · first at 2:15
  CIA/OSS psychological-operations specialist described as leveraging Filipino folklore (aswang) to intimidate Huk guerrillas during the Cold War.
• Jordan Clark — Person · Referenced researcher/commentator · 2 mentions · first at 11:01
  Cited as a researcher who discussed the story and questioned details (e.g., which creature was locally feared; whether the tactic 'worked').
• Louie Taruk — Person · Referenced insurgent leader · 1 mention · first at 6:10
  Named as the leader of the Huks; his opposition is linked to the Philippine Trade Act of 1946 and he later surrenders (1954) per the episode.
• Ramon Magsaysay — Person · Referenced political leader · 1 mention
  Identified as the Philippine president whom Lansdale advised (while undercover), situating Lansdale within the U.S.-backed government effort.
  Adviser to the president... Ramon mages.
• Dave Ruse — Person · Referenced writer/source · 1 mention · first at 11:03
  Credited as writing the HowStuffWorks piece that Jordan Clark discussed, serving as a secondary source behind the episode's claims.
  Name was Clark. What's Jordan Clark he talked to I think he talked to Dave Ruse who wrote this for How Stuff Works.

Books & papers

• Philippine Trade Act of 1946 — Book · Referenced policy/legislation · 1 mention · first at 6:16
  Cited as a reason the Huks opposed the postwar government, because it allegedly granted the U.S. equal rights to Philippine natural resources.
  Louie 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 Hawks weren't down with that.

Companies & orgs

• Hooks — Company · Primary opposing force discussed · 1 mention · first at 12:06
  Described as Huk guerrillas/insurgents fighting the U.S.-backed Philippine government; the target of Lansdale/CIA psychological operations.
• Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — Company · Referenced predecessor organization · 1 mention · first at 3:46
  Presented as the WWII-era predecessor to the CIA where Lansdale was assigned to do propaganda/psyops work.
  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…

Concepts & topics

• aswang — Concept · Core topic (folklore concept used in psyops) · 3 mentions · first at 1:07
  Presented as a widespread Filipino folk belief akin to (but distinct from) a vampire; the CIA allegedly weaponized fear of it to dislodge Huk rebels.
• lick hole — Concept · Folklore detail · 1 mention · first at 2:46
  A vivid detail describing how the aswang allegedly feeds through a ceiling opening, reinforcing the horror element used in the episode's narrative.
  Y and had a long tongue, sort of like a proboscus that it could lower through what's called a lick hole in the ceiling of your home.
• Manananggal — Concept · Alternative local boogeyman referenced · 1 mention
  Mentioned as possibly the actual local creature feared, raising doubt about whether the CIA's 'aswang' framing was accurate.
  Mana Mananal... was the local boogeyman.
• self-segmenting aswang — Concept · Corrective folklore detail · 1 mention
  Jordan Clark is cited as saying the locally feared creature may have been a self-segmenting aswang variant focused on fetuses rather than blood-sucking.
  Have done their research, they would have believed that the true local creature they were scared of was not oswang. It was a self-segmenting kind of oswang, but it kind of…
• flem — Concept · Folklore detail (disgust element) · 2 mentions · first at 1:15
  Mentioned as something the aswang feeds on; used to heighten the grotesque nature of the creature in the hosts' description.
  Vampire potentially because it does suck blood. but it also feeds on organs and it feeds on fleg, which is completely disgusting to me.

Places & events

• World War II — Event · Historical context · 3 mentions · first at 3:36
  Used to explain Lansdale's transition into OSS work and the Huks' earlier role fighting Japan before becoming insurgents.
• Cold War — Event · Historical backdrop · 2 mentions · first at 0:18
  Frames the era in which the CIA allegedly conducted covert and psychological operations in the Philippines.
  During the Cold War in this case. but first we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right?

Media & podcasts

• Dracula — Character · Comparison reference · 2 mentions · first at 3:22
  Used as a Western analogy for aswang, while emphasizing that the similarity is limited and that CIA 'neck puncture' details resemble Dracula more than aswang lore.
  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…
• Tokyo Rose — Character · Illustrative psyops example · 1 mention · first at 4:20
  Used as an example of conventional WWII psychological operations (broadcast demoralization), contrasted with Lansdale's culturally tailored approach.
  SCOPs 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…
• The Agency: Central Intelligence — Media · Recommended media · 1 mention · first at 7:28
  Recommended by the hosts as a suspenseful/dramatic show about the CIA, tangentially connected to the episode's CIA theme.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:04 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.

0:11 That's right. And this week we are talking about uh more nefarious business by the American CIA.

0:17 Yeah. Uh during the Cold War in this case. Uh but first we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right?

0:24 Yeah. There's 7,000 islands in the Philippines. more than I did not know that but that's a lot of

0:30 that's a lot. Yeah. Um there's 175 different languages. Tagalog is one of the um 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 uh that we're going to talk about today is the awang.

1:02 That's right. Uh we don't have an exact correlation here in the in the United States, but um you might call it like a vampire potentially because it does suck blood. Um, but it also feeds on uh organs and it feeds on fleg, which is completely disgusting to me.

1:19 One of the worst things I've ever heard. Yeah. Feeds on fle uh unborn children. Uh pregnant women. Um it can be a giant pig. It can be a giant vulture. It can be like a dog shaped thing.

1:31 Um and sort of like I can't What was the one we did this past October about the the Mexican uh folklore?

1:38 The owl called? Yeah, similar to that. I can't remember the name of that one, but um 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 uh blame on the aswang,

1:52 right? And you mentioned a dog. I saw somewhere that the um name comes from Aso Wong, which means dog, I think, in tagalog.

2:00 Oh, all right. So, um you 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 Giri Lansdale, and he worked for the CIA, and he used the the um tale of the Oswang to try to u manipulate people into turning against a gorilla army there.

2:30 That's right. Uh and you know, if you're afraid of something like this, it's probably because it's truly horrific. Aside from feeding on flem, uh, this thing in humanoid form would, uh, lurk on rooftops at night

2:42 y and had a a long tongue, sort of like a proboscus that it could lower through what's called a lick hole in the ceiling of your home.

2:53 Do you have a lick hole? Horrible, horrible words put together. Feeding on flem and lick hole. Uh 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, disembowled and devoid of blood. It would suck suck them from the outside in or inside out rather,

3:16 right? Yeah. And again, um 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 eat sucking or eating blood or consuming blood is that's where the similarities end.

3:33 That's right. Uh so Ed Lansdale comes along. He was pre-war uh World War II. He was a ad guy. And so once he got in the war uh they said, "All right, you're pretty sharp tech. uh 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 SCOPs. Um you know, using media and marketing and propaganda to help win the war, like um demonize the enemy because that's basically what you do as an advertiser.

4:06 Exactly. And he was a whiz at it, so he excelled at SCOPS himself. And he took a different view of things. He said normally that when people think about SCOPs conventionally um 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 um hooking up with other guys back home. Those are SCOPs and they're really kind of a lowhanging fruit. What Landdale 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.

4:48 That's right. Uh 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. All right. So, I promised talk of 1950. That is when Lansdale came to the Philippines. Uh, he was undercover as a CIA guy. He was officially there as an air force officer and adviser to the president of the Philippines who was uh Ramon uh mages magi.

5:39 I'm going with magi. May. I don't know why I said seesaw. Uh so he was assigned there in the Philippines uh because the US uh was backing that regime and they were fighting a war against communist rebels there uh known as the hooks. It was H U KS and they were, you know, they fought uh the Hooks fought, you know, pretty heroically in the Philippine Army um against the Japanese in World War II. But after the war, uh they along with their leader whose name was, I guess, uh Louie Taruk um said nuts to this government, uh to borrow a Josh Clark term, uh 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.

6:25 Yeah. 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 because they really were this revered like like infantry that really helped the get the Japanese out of the Philippines and the US troops even fought alongside of them. But after they broke with this American backed um administration, they were they were persona nonrada, right? They they had to be gotten rid of because they weren't just like protesting. They were carrying out a guerilla war to try to overthrow this USbacked um regime, I guess.

7:06 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, uh it was all dirty dealing going on in the CIA uh back then. Um not like these days.

7:22 No, not like today. And by the way, um, since we're talking about the CIA, I have another show recommendation for you. It's called The Agency Colon Central Intelligence. It's a really stupid name, but it is a really well done um, suspenseful, but also really dramatic um, show. It's Michael Fospender, Richard Deer does it like I've never seen him act like he is in this one. Um, Jeffrey Wright,

7:50 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.

7:59 You know what we should do? We should do a little 15inute show once a week where we recommend stuff to people.

8:04 That's a great idea. Where'd you get that idea? I don't know. Let's hear from you. Do Do people want that?

8:09 Let's find out. All right. So, uh, some of these cy tactics, uh, 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. Uh they did some studies of the people like especially the peasants living in the hook areas. Um one of the sort of I guess sort of low hanging fruit like you were talking about that they used was uh they would fly over these areas with you know kind of low-flying light aircraft

8:37 to broadcast curses and tagalog. Um if anyone was like if you're a villager and you're going to help the hook soldiers this curse will befall you.

8:45 Um that sort of worked a little bit. Uh he would also um paint the what's called the eye of God. It was just kind of a scary looking thing

8:54 on houses of hook sympathizers like on their front door and that would kind of scare people out. Uh but kind of nothing like what he did with Oswang, right?

9:03 No, this was definitely a different level than those other ones that you mentioned because there was a CIA trained um that Lansdale helped oversee um group of government Filipino government military operatives. That's a really clumsy way to put it, but um they were basically set out, they were unleashed on this village um where a bunch of hook uh rebels, I think a 100 to 300 of them were encamped nearby and they were intimidating the villagers into um being quiet, giving them supplies, that kind of stuff. So the CIA found out about this and they really wanted to get this hook um detachment out of this area. And this is when they they um unleashed this Oswang rumor.

9:50 They they basically had these Filipino commandos go into the village and start a rumor that the um Oswang was haunting this area where the Hook rebels were were camped out.

10:02 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 there in the nearby hills. Uh but they took it one step further and they had uh these these agents go in and oswang them. Basically, they would kidnap hook fighters and disembowel them and and clean them out uh asswang vampire style and leave their bloodless corpses behind.

10:31 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.

10:52 Yeah. I mean there was a guy that wrote a book about this uh in addition to Lansdale wrote his own memoir but um there's a researcher I think his last name was Clark. What's

11:01 Jordan Clark he talked to I think he talked to Dave Ruse who wrote this for How Stuff Works.

11:06 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 uh was not oswang. It was a a self-segmenting um kind of oswang, but it kind of strictly fed on the fetuses of pregnant women and was not a blood sucker.

11:25 Uh 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? Uh, Mana Mananal.

11:39 Yeah, I think so. Was the was the local boogeyman. Uh, 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."

11:56 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 um insurgents, but the the war was run by grinding them out. They basically fought Yeah.

12:14 over the years and Luis Terra um finally surrendered in 1954. I think he secured a pardon for himself and his troops.

12:23 That's right. And he said, "Did you see what happened with the Osw years back?" Yeah. And they were just like,

12:32 "That's it." Does that mean your stuff is out? All right. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War? | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

Josh Clark (Host), Chuck Bryant (Host), Jerry (Guest), Dave Ruse (Guest), Jordan Clark (Guest).

What is "Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War? | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

This piece explores the role of a Filipino vampire legend, known as the aswang, in the context of Cold War propaganda tactics employed by the CIA. It examines how the myth, which embodies fear and misfortune, was leveraged to influence perceptions and actions during this geopolitical conflict, linking cultural beliefs to covert operations.

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

18 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including aswang, Edward Giri Lansdale, Hooks, World War II, Cold War, Jordan Clark. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War? | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 13 min; the transcript is about 2,208 words in 42 timestamped sections.

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