From War Widow to Diplomatic Mistress: Pat Yapcino Kelly and Edward Lansdale's Cold War Diplomacy

Pat Yapcinco Kelly found herself a young war widow early on in WWII, her American-Filipino mestizo husband James Kelly having perished while stationed in the Philippines. Kelly was a modern and independent woman, and she worked both as a journalist and for the US War Damage Commission in Manila after Philippine and American forces ousted the Japanese military from the islands. In her work with the American administration in Manila, she met Edward Lansdale, considered by many foreign relations scholars to be the “father of psychological warfare.” They forged a decades-long relationship in which Kelly traveled as Lansdale's mistress—an open secret, as he was married to an American woman at the time—on diplomatic/military intelligence trips across Southeast Asia. From her media covered beach trips in Vietnam with unofficial first lady Madame Nhu, to her aid to Lansdale in becoming acquainted with the communist landscape in the Philippines, Kelly not only forged a wartime path that followed the contours of Cold War Diplomacy in Southeast Asia, she shaped Cold War Policy. This paper highlights the ways that Kelly leveraged her skills and her relationship with Lansdale to build a transnational life for herself and indeed, for her Filipino. This paper considers the gendered work of psychological warfare and how postcolonial women helped “win” the cold war.