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

90 THOMAS A. BASS
“The second Lansdale who dealt with American bureaucrats
often came across as a kind of idiot—a guy with crazy ideas,
naive, and simplistic. He was not at all afraid to appear simpleminded
to anyone he did not want to reveal himself to,
which was ninety-nine out of a hundred people. To journalists,
other than a couple he was close to like Robert Shaplen of The
New Yorker, he was very guarded and careful about what he told
them. To put them off, he spoke in the most basic terms about
democracy and Vietnamese traditions.
“Then there was the third Lansdale you saw only if you
were on his team or worked with him closely. After giving a journalist
his hayseed routine, he would join us and his mood would
change immediately. He would present an analysis of a situation
that was filled with shrewd and perceptive, even cynical, detail
about who was doing what to whom.”
A less flattering view of Lansdale is provided by another former
aide, air force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty. As chief of special
operations at the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964, Prouty was
the Defense Department official who provided military support
for CIA covert operations around the world. This included the
counterinsurgency warfare that Lansdale was conducting in
Vietnam. When Lansdale moved from Vietnam back to Washington,
Prouty served on his staff. Prouty ended his career with
a dark view of CIA malevolence, which he saw as a corrupting
influence in American life. (Prouty was adviser to Oliver Stone
when he filmed his conspiracy-laden movie JFK, and he makes
a fictional appearance in the film as Man X—the military insider
who knows where the bodies are buried.)
According to Prouty, the Vietnam war was a clandestine
CIA operation run out of the Agency’s black budget, until it got
too big and the marines were forced to hit the beach in 1965.
“From 1945 through the crucial years of 1954 and 1955 and on
to 1964, almost everything that was done in South Vietnam, including
even a strong role in the selection of generals and ambassadors,
was the action of the CIA, with the DOD playing a