The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

82 THOMAS A. BASS
task was navy medical officer Tom Dooley, who was assigned to
one of the U.S. military ships that ferried refugees from the Gulf
of Tonkin south to Danang. Dooley’s book about the Catholic
exodus, Deliver Us from Evil (1956), was a bestseller. The dashing
doctor and his humanitarian exploits “located Vietnam on
the new world map for millions of Americans,” says James
Fisher, Dooley’s biographer. With Lansdale’s assistance, Dooley
went on to write other bestsellers about life in Indochina,
which paved the way for America’s military engagement in
Southeast Asia. (Later, when Dooley was being vetted for
Catholic sainthood, it was discovered that he was a closeted homosexual
and literary fraud whose books were heavily edited,
if not ghostwritten, by the CIA.)
After his success in generating Catholic refugees, Lansdale
turned to consolidating the power of Ngo Dinh Diem, the rolypoly,
fifty-three-year-old bachelor who had been named prime
minister in the postwar government of Emperor Bao Dai. Born
in 1901, Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem was a Catholic mandarin
who had become a provincial governor at the age of twenty-five.
After brief service as interior minister in one of Bao Dai’s pro-
French cabinets, he resigned from the government, accusing
the emperor of being a “tool” of the French. He collaborated
with the Japanese during World War II and was imprisoned by
Ho Chi Minh for six months before going into exile. In 1950 he
traveled to the United States, where he spent two years living in
Maryknoll seminaries in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Ossining,
New York. Diem was residing in a Benedictine monastery in
Belgium when the United States pressured Bao Dai to call
him back to Vietnam.
Lansdale protected Diem from two coup attempts before
organizing his first successful military campaign, the “battle of
the sects,” an attack on the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Binh Xuyen
private armies. Since the Binh Xuyen river pirates were financing
the French colonial administration, which included
a monthly check to Bao Dai, the battle of the sects was in fact