Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War?

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

During the Cold War, the CIA used the legend of a vampire named Aswang to scare locals into not helping the communists. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second. season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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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. That's right. And this week. We are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA. Yeah. During the Cold War in this case. But first, we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right? Yeah.

There's 7,000 islands in the Philippines, more than. I did not know that, but that's a lot of islands. That's a lot. Yeah. There's 175 different languages. Tagalog is one of 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 their very, very old, like, folk beliefs.

And one of them that we're going to talk about today is the Oswong. 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. Yeah. But it also feeds on organs, and it feeds on phlegm, which is completely disgusting. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard.

Yeah, feeds on phlegm. Unborn children, pregnant women. It can be a giant pig. It can be a giant vulture. It can be like a dog-shaped thing. And sort of like, I can't remember, what was the one we did this past October about the Mexican folklore? The owl. What is that called?

Yeah. Similar to that, I can't remember the name of that one, but 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 on the Oswang. Right. And you mentioned a dog. I saw somewhere that the name comes from Osso Wong, which means dog, I think, in Tagalog. Oh, all right. So people are like, okay, great. 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 Geary Landsdale. And he worked for the CIA.

And he used the tail of the Oswang to try to manipulate people into turning against a guerrilla army there. That's right. And, you know, if you're afraid of something like this, it's probably because it's truly horrific, aside from feeding on phlegm. this thing in humanoid form would lurk on rooftops at night and had a long tongue, sort of like a proboscis, that it could lower through what's called a lickhole in the ceiling of your home. Do you have a lickhole?

Horrible words put together, feeding on flim and lickhole. And like we said, pregnant women, children, they would suck out their insides with this tongue and essentially leave something, you know, know, devoid of organs and, you know, disemboweled and devoid of blood, it would suck them from the outside in, or inside out, rather. Right.

Yeah. And again, 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 really, sucking or eating blood or consuming blood is, that's where the similarities in. That's right. So Ed Lansdale comes along. He was pre-war.

World War II, he was an ad guy. And so once he got in 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 you're an ad guy, you know what you'd be great at is Psiops, you know, using media and marketing and propaganda to help win the war, like demonize the enemy, because that's basically what you do as an advertiser. Exactly. And he was a, Whiz added, so he excelled at SIOPs himself. And he took a different view of things. He said normally that when people think about SIOPs conventionally, they're talking about dropping leaflets that try to demoralize the enemy, maybe using like a Tokyo Rose type to talk about how

Chi-I's girlfriends are hooking up with other guys back home. Those are siops and they're really kind of low-hanging fruit. What Landstale 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. That's right. 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. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed

Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses.

Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel. If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years, but both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right.

The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I promised talk of 1950. That is when Lansdale came to the Philippines. He was undercover as the CIA guy.

He was officially there as an Air Force officer and advisor to the president of the Philippines, who was Ramon MagSaysa. Mag Sase. I'm going with Mog Sasei. Mug Sese. I don't know why I said Sesao. So he was assigned there in the Philippines because the U.S. was backing that regime and they were fighting a war against communist rebels there known as the Hooks. It was H-U-K-S. and they were, you know, they fought, the hooks fought, you know, pretty heroically in the Philippine army against the Japanese in World War II.

But after the war, they, along with their leader, whose name was, I guess, Louis Tarouk, 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. 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. Right. Because they really were this revered, like, infantry that really helped get the Japanese out of the Philippines. And the U.S. troops even fought alongside of them. But after they broke with this American-backed administration, they were persona non-grada. They had to be gotten rid of because they weren't just like protesting. They were carrying out a guerrilla war to try to overthrow this U.S.-backed regime, I guess.

Yeah, not only U.S. backed, but sort of U.S. elected because those supposedly free elections in the Philippines that brought this party into power were totally rigged by the CIA and U.S. operatives. So it was all dirty dealing going on in the CIA back then, not like these days. No, not like today. By the way, 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, suspenseful, but also really dramatic show. It's Michael Fosbender, Richard Deere. I've never seen him act like he is in this one.

Jeffrey Wright. It's just this really great show. It's a great cast that everybody does. wonderfully, even the people I've never heard of before, everybody does great. You know what we should do? We should do a little 15-minute show once a week where we recommend stuff to people. That's a great idea. Where'd you get that idea?

I don't know. Let's hear from me. Do people want that? Let's find out. All right. So some of these Cy War tactics, they got busy doing their stuff, like kind of doing research on the Filipinos and like what would kind of what would sway them, what would work. They did some studies of the people, like, especially.

especially the peasants living in the hook areas. One of the sort of, I guess, sort of low-hanging fruit light you were talking about that they used was they would fly over these areas with, you know, kind of low-flying light aircraft to broadcast curses in Tagalog. If anyone was like, if you're a villager and you're going to help the huck soldiers, this curse will befall you. That sort of worked a little bit. He would also paint what's called the Eye of God. It was just kind of a scary looking thing on how. houses of hook sympathizers, like on their front door, and that would kind of scare people out. But kind of nothing like what he did with Oswang, right?

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

this area where the hook rebels were camped out. 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. They're in the nearby hills. But they took it one step further, and they had these agents go in and Oswong them, basically. They would kidnap hook fighters and disembowel them and clean them out, Oswang vampire style and leave their bloodless corpses behind. 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 research of a poor quality if you're really trying to scare off people based on their super-sum. Yeah, I mean, there was a guy that wrote a book about this. In addition to Lansdale wrote his own memoir, but 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 House Dep Works. 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 was not Oswong. It was a self-segmenting kind of Oswong, but it kind of strictly fed. on the fetuses of pregnant women

and was not a bloodsucker. 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 Oswang or whatever the local, I can't even, how do you pronounce that? Menna-Manan-Nan-A-L? Yeah, I think so.

Was the local boogeyman? 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 either way, don't mess with these guys. It's awful. Yeah.

But it worked. It didn't win the war. Jordan Clark points out, like, 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 over the years. And Luis Tirok finally

surrendered in 1954. I think he secured a pardon for himself in his troops. That's right. And he said, did you see what happened with the Oswang years back? Yeah. And they were just like, that's it? Does that mean sure stuff is out? All right.

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