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

The Spy Who Loved Us 117
skyward. “It was the Soviet policy at the time to support wars
of liberation. The Chinese under Mao Tse Tung were doing the
same thing. To meet this challenge, the Americans were developing
the doctrine of counterinsurgency to fight against
wars of liberation. The strategy was the same in Vietnam and
elsewhere around the world. Liberate the former colonies.
Pretend to launch them on the road to self-determination,
while introducing special forces and using unconventional warfare
to fight the revolutionary forces. This policy actually goes
back as far as 1950, when the United States signed the agreement
supporting the French in Indochina and setting up Lansdale’s
Saigon mission.”
“I wasn’t opposed to Americans. I was opposed to their
strategy. I had no choice. They were fighting a war. We had to
counter it. We on the Communist side had to understand this
strategy. We had to pull together all the information we could
get and analyze it. This is not an easy thing to do, but without
it, you are fighting a war in the dark. You may win the war by
accident, but it is more likely that you will lose it by ignorance.”
I ask An if it was hard for him to live his double life of intrigue
and subterfuge. “It is hard,” he says, repeating the statement
three times. Then he mentions a former lieutenant colonel
in the U.S. army who had befriended him while he was a student
in California. An was returning from his first visit to Monterey
when he missed the bus stop for Orange Coast College.
He got off down the coast in Laguna Beach. It was New Year’s
Eve, and no more buses were running. The colonel, coming to
pick up his daughter who was visiting for the holidays, offered
him a lift to the college and later invited him to his house,
where An became a regular visitor.
After An had returned to Vietnam and started working as a
reporter, the colonel wrote to him, asking if he would look
after his son, who was being sent to Vietnam as a lieutenant in
the air force. “After thinking about it, I refused to get in touch
with his son,” An says. “I was working for the other side, in