During the early Cold War, U.S.-backed forces in the Philippines carried out a psychological warfare campaign that drew on local vampire folklore to intimidate communist insurgents. Although it is often called the “CIA vampire operation,” it depended on manipulating belief in the aswang, a catch-all Filipino term for monsters. The creature at the center of this episode was the manananggal, a vampire-like being that appears as an ordinary woman by day but, at night, detaches her lower body, leaves it behind, and sprouts wings from her upper half. Its long tongue is said to be used to prey on unborn children. Folklore holds that it can be killed with a stake to the heart, or by sprinkling salt on the abandoned lower half so the two halves cannot rejoin before sunrise.
The operation took place during the 1950s amidst the Hukbalahap rebellion, a guerrilla force that is characterized as communist. While that description was merit, it would be an innacurate statement statement since most were simply farmers and labor unions that emerged during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, fighting the Americans, Japanese, and other Filipino forces during WW2, subsequently continuing even when the war was over against the Philippine government.
Declassified records and historical studies show that U.S. advisers supported Philippine forces not only through military assistance but also through psychological operations designed to weaken insurgent morale and influence behavior. It's a campaign most closely associated with the infamous Edward Lansdale, a U.S. Air Force officer and one of the crucial founders of the CIA. The operation called for capturing and killing a Huk insurgent, with their body altered to resemble an attack by an aswang, including puncture wounds to the neck and the apparent draining of blood. The body was then placed along a path used by other insurgents, with the intent of convincing them that a supernatural force was targeting their group.
Reports indicate that it was remarkably effective as a localized intimidation tactic, though historians view it as one part of a broader, multi-faceted military and political strategy rather than a single decisive weapon.
The Source of this came from the Aswang Project
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