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

96 THOMAS A. BASS
information. They succeeded in fooling many people. They
failed to trap Lansdale and his other men, like Rufus Phillips,
who was very handsome, but the French were successful in
fooling Lou Conein.”
Mills Brandes, who was working under MAAG cover as an
“engineer,” became a kind of surrogate father figure for An,
whose own father was an engineer. “He was very quick, very
agile with the punching bag. He worked out every day,” says An,
who makes the sound of someone hitting a punching bag rattattattatta.
“He was husky, very strong, very friendly. He helped
me learn English. When he was busy, his wife did it at home.
Anytime I was free, I would give him a ring and come over. I
would write stories, and they would correct my writing.” Brandes
was the man who gave An a copy of The Quiet American,
perhaps without realizing how poorly Americans are depicted
in Greene’s novel.
Another of Lansdale’s energetic spies was Rufus Phillips, a
strapping, six-foot football player from rural Virginia who graduated
from Yale in 1951 and joined the army. After being
reassigned from Korea to Vietnam in 1954, he worked on Lansdale’s
team for a year and then moved to Laos. He returned to
Vietnam in 1962 with the Agency for International Development
and continued working in Vietnam as a consultant from
1965 to 1968.
“The South Vietnamese government existed in name only,
a collection of French-trained civil servants who didn’t have a
clue what to do without the French giving them orders,” Phillips
said in an interview with Christian Appy. “We didn’t know if
Diem would survive or even if South Vietnam would survive. I
think most of the Americans on the spot had pretty well written
it off. They were extremely pessimistic.
“When I was in Laos I knew the Diem government was beginning
to go off the rails. . . . Instead of insisting on democracy
when Diem was still open to advice, the U.S. supported the cre-