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

The Spy Who Loved Us 87
but it was also attuned to the social mores of Vietnamese society.
By dispersing power from the central government to the
sects, the French had created fiefdoms which the Communists
would have had a hard time dislodging.
Opposed to this was the American approach to ruling South
Vietnam. It consolidated power in a presidential dictator. It
created an authoritarian regime which was so tone deaf to the
mores of Vietnamese society that it worked as a huge recruiting
program for the Communists. It generated revolutionaries
by the thousands, as Vietnamese peasants were uprooted from
their native villages and thrown into forced-labor camps. It
laid down roads and built up a magnificent network of centralized
state control, which the North Vietnamese, if they
bided their time, could incorporate into their own authoritarian
regime.
“The Communists were not ready to take over,” An says.
“We needed Diem to push people into the revolution.”
From this perspective, Lansdale was a great, if unwitting,
friend to the Communists. “Lansdale came to Asia as the mastermind
of America’s strategy of unconventional warfare,” An
says. “He was the kingmaker. He made Diem president of Vietnam.
He was in charge not only of American counterinsurgency,
but of everything in Vietnam: military affairs, politics,
intelligence—they were all run by Lansdale’s Saigon mission.
He had a lot of experts to help him, like Lou Conein and Rufus
Phillips. He recruited World War II veterans and young people.
They knew how to do it. Lansdale was excellent, really excellent.”
When asked to evaluate the world’s most successful spies,
An would never rank himself as high as Lansdale. An distinguished
between “offensive” and “defensive” spies. Offensive
spies work in enemy territory. They form strategic alliances
and reconfigure world maps. Defensive spies operate in a narrower
field. Even if they cross enemy lines, their goals are conservative
and limited. An had a keen appreciation for Lansdale’s
brilliance. He felt as if he were studying at the feet of a master,