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

The Spy Who Loved Us 95
polite. They know how to behave.’ The French children used
to beat me when I was young. They would come up and punch
me for no reason at all. I wanted to fight back but my father
wouldn’t let me.”
An made friends with another military man, Mills C. Brandes,
one of Lansdale’s intelligence officers, who also had three
children. The Americans were not encumbered by the racism
and arrogance of the petits blancs colons. They were vehemently
anti-Communist, and they organized the world along an
axis that flipped from white to black. But at this early stage in
the war, they acted like deferential guests who were pleased to
be visiting the land of their Vietnamese hosts. “They taught
me all kinds of things, and their children taught me,” An says.
“I learned from them, preparing myself before going to the
United States.”
The three Lansdale team members closest to An were Lucien
“Black Luigi” Conein, the “indispensable man” who directed
Lansdale’s black operations; former OSS officer Mills C.
Brandes; and Rufus Phillips, who later ran CIA operations in
Laos and then directed Vietnam’s strategic hamlet program.
When I ask An if any of these men suspected him of being
a Communist, he says, “No, no one knew, not even Lou Conein,
and he knew everything. He was a very good friend. He came
here first as a major, working for Lansdale. He had been a French
soldier. He swore like a trooper. Whenever we got together
for a drink at the Continental, Lou Conein and Bob Shaplen
and I, Conein would be swearing in French, Shaplen in English,
and I in Vietnamese. It was like hell in a very small place.”
“Lou Conein was always the man the Vietnamese trusted,”
An says. “When they pulled a coup in 1963, he was the only
outsider invited by the generals to watch the operation. They
allowed him to phone the embassy and keep them posted on the
progress of the coup.” Thanks to Giai, his cousin, An also knew
that Conein had fallen into a “woman trap” set for him by the
Deuxième Bureau. “They used lots of pretty girls for gathering