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

122 THOMAS A. BASS
business, but he paid Tuyen the protection money that kept
it going.”
A number of sawmills in Cholon operated as fronts to
Saigon’s opium refineries. “They cut down trees in the mountains
on the Laotian border and hollowed them out. These
hollowed-out trees were filled with opium and trucked down to
Saigon’s ‘lumber yard factories’ in Cholon. Tuyen knew about
it. His men took bribes, and he himself had funds deposited in
foreign bank accounts. But he was a modest man,” An assures
me. “He never stole money hand over fist, which is the style of
today’s crooks.”
Tuyen used An as his interpreter for foreign financial transactions,
and he relied on him for other sensitive assignments,
such as dealing with visiting Americans. On one such assignment
An met Gerald Hickey, the expert on traditional Vietnamese
culture who loaned his anthropological services to the
U.S. government (and was subsequently blackballed by academia).
An describes how he accompanied Hickey when he went
out to examine Vietnam’s agrovilles—Diem’s first strategy for
fighting the Communists.
If revolutionaries swim like fish in the sea of peasant life,
the way to kill them is to dry up the sea. First, you remove the
peasants from the countryside and relocate them into fortified
enclaves known as agrovilles. The only people remaining in
the countryside will be, by definition, revolutionaries, who can
be bombed or gassed out of existence. In practice, Diem’s
agrovilles were forced labor camps full of alienated peasants.
They flew the Republican flag by day and nurtured the revolutionaries
by night. Diem was forced to abandon this initial experiment
in counterterrorism after a year, but he and his
American advisers refloated the scheme again in the 1960s,
when agrovilles were renamed “strategic hamlets.”
“I liked Gerry Hickey,” An says. “He was very intelligent and
always cheerful. He wanted to find a political solution for the
war. Unfortunately, people didn’t listen to him.” It was Hickey’s