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

The Spy Who Loved Us 97
ation and development of a secret, elite political party called the
Can Lao. It was controlled by Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
It was almost a carbon copy of the Communist Party as an organizational
weapon. The idea was to build up a kind of personality
cult around Diem and to have one party that would, in
effect, swear people to loyalty. When Lansdale argued against
it with Allen and Foster Dulles, he was told he was being naive.
So we aided and abetted the worst side, not just of Diem but of
the Vietnamese who had no experience in democratic politics.”
An and Phillips became close friends. Phillips respected
An’s knowledge of Vietnamese history and his political acumen.
An respected Phillips’s intelligence and sincerity. “Vietnamese
women were crazy about him, but he avoided the
woman trap,” An says. “He remained formal, aloof. He learned
French and played the game very well.”
Something curious happens when the two men speak of
each other. They don’t sound like enemies on opposite sides
of a war. They sound like teammates rooting for the same side.
“The Americans should have listened to him,” An says of
Phillips. “He wanted to put pressure on Diem to correct his mistakes.”
But Phillips failed to realize that An was thinking ten
moves ahead on the chessboard of Vietnamese politics. He
wanted Diem to succeed, but only as a way station to Communist
rule. Diem was their unwitting agent, fighting off river
pirates and crazy religious sects to unify southern Vietnam in advance
of the day when the Communist Party would replace
the Can Lao Party with its own police network. How simple it
would be to swap the real thing for the carbon copy.
An’s career as a spy was inadvertently advanced when his
cousin, Pham Xuan Giai, was forced to flee the country after a
failed coup attempt. “The French gave him money to pull off
a coup against Diem in December 1954, but the coup failed.
The Americans found out about it and spoiled it, so he had to
go into exile in Laos.”