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

The Spy Who Loved Us 85
this fancy café with a tiger on a leash. “He was a bit of a clown,”
says Philippe. “But while you were laughing at his jokes and
amused by his fabulous stories, you still knew that he was capable
of killing you if he wanted to.”
Lansdale’s next move was to engineer an election victory for
Diem. Supposedly a puppet for American interests, Diem
never moved his arms the way the Americans intended. In this
important psyops lesson on how to rig an election, he got carried
away. In October 1955, the South Vietnamese were supposed
to vote for Bao Dai or Diem. Lansdale arranged for the
election to be conducted with colored ballots—red, which in
Vietnam signifies good luck, for Diem, and green, which signifies
bad fortune, for Bao Dai. After adding a stiff dose of
vote rigging and intimidation, Diem announced that he had
“won” the election with 98.2 percent of the vote. So began the
history of the democratic, freedom-loving country of South
Vietnam, whose interests the United States would selflessly
defend during the next twenty years of its stillborn existence.
Diem set up a dynastic dictatorship oriented toward enriching
his family and rewarding fellow Catholics with jobs.
His younger brother, Ngo Dinh Can, ruled central Vietnam as
a feudal warlord. Ngo Dinh Thuc, a Catholic archbishop, ran
the family’s rubber and timber estates. Ngo Dinh Luyen was appointed
ambassador to Great Britain, while Diem’s fourth
brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, controlled the secret police and Diem’s
private political party. Nhu’s wife, Tran Le Xuan, served as
South Vietnam’s First Lady, and under her beautiful but austere
gaze the country outlawed divorce and abortion and made the
wearing of ao dais, the traditional Vietnamese costume, mandatory.
The 1954 Geneva Conference, which had temporarily divided
Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel, called for a
general election to reunite the country in 1956. With Ho Chi
Minh set to win this election, Diem invented reasons for canceling
the vote and set about arresting his opponents. Communists
and socialists were scooped up along with journalists,