overshadowed the risks, and the United States embarked on its 21-year effort to create in South Vietnam a permanent barrier to Communist expansion in Southeast Asia." Covert action The new CIA team in Saigon was the Saigon Military Mission, headed by United States Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, who arrived on June 1, 1954. His diplomatic cover title was Assistant Air Attaché. The broad mission for the team was to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and to train the South Vietnamese in the arts of psychological warfare, just like Lansdale had done in an earlier conflict in the Philippines. Although Lansdale worked for the OSS briefly in World War II, he was never a CIA employee. Working in close cooperation with the U.S. Information Agency, a new psychological warfare campaign was devised for the Vietnamese Army and for the government in Hanoi. Shortly after, a refresher course in combat psy-war was constructed. One example of psychological warfare dealt directly with misinformation. Lansdale would later recall the event in his memoirs: "The first idea was used just before the French quit the city of Hanoi and turned over control to the Vietminh. At the time, the Communist apparatus inside the city was busy with secret plans to ready the population to welcome the entry of Viet Minh troops. I suggested that my nationalist friends issue a fake Community manifesto, ordering everyone in the city except essential hospital employees to be out on the streets not just for a few hours of welcome but for a week-long celebration. In actuality this would mean a seven-day work stoppage. Transportation, electric power, and communication services would be suspended. The simple enlargement of plans already afoot should give the communists an unexpectedly vexing problem as they started their rule." The celebration did not last a week. The Communists thought that this manifesto was French counterpropaganda and attempted to order everyone back to work, which took three days. The second SMM member, Major Lucien Conein, arrived on July 1. A paramilitary specialist, well known to the French for his help with French-operated maquis in Tonkin against the Japanese in 1945, he was the one American guerrilla fighter who had not been a member of the Patti Mission. In August, he went to Hanoi with the assignment of developing a paramilitary organization in the north.... A second paramilitary team for the south was formed, with Army