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

84 THOMAS A. BASS
leader of Saigon’s Corsican underworld was the respected merchant
Mathieu Franchini,” says historian Alfred McCoy. “Owner
of the exclusive Continental Palace Hotel, Franchini . . . controlled
most of Saigon’s opium exports to Marseille.” He also
managed the opium and gambling profits of the Binh Xuyen as
their “investment counselor.”
The Binh Xuyen remained in power until Lansdale and
Diem succeeded in chasing them back to the Forest of the Assassins.
From April 28 to May 3, 1955, the Vietnamese army
fought the pirate forces house to house for control of Saigon.
“More troops were involved in this battle than in the Têt Offensive
of 1968, and the fighting was almost as destructive,” says
McCoy. Five hundred people were killed, two thousand
wounded, and another twenty thousand were left homeless.
“This battle was a war by proxy; the Binh Xuyen and Diem’s
army were stand-ins, mere pawns, in a power struggle between
the French Deuxième Bureau and the American CIA,” writes
McCoy. One client army was fighting another, as the First Indochina
War shaded into the Second.
In the official version of the story, a valiant Diem—whom
Dwight Eisenhower called the “George Washington of
Vietnam”—fought a heroic battle against the sects and vanquished
them in combat. Later it was revealed that Lansdale
had bought off the sects with more than twelve million dollars
in CIA money, which allowed their leaders to retire happily to
the French Riviera. (Lansdale, when asked about these funds,
called them “back pay.”) One of Lansdale’s former assistants,
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, maintains that the money also
bought a lot of political theater, with Lansdale scripting battles
to produce fake combat scenes.
Philippe Franchini, son of Mathieu, former investment
counselor to the Binh Xuyen, remembers meeting Bay Vien in
Paris several years after Diem’s war against the sects. The young
Philippe accompanied his father to Fouquet’s on the Champs
Elysées for an afternoon aperitif with Vien, who showed up at