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

The Spy Who Loved Us 123
long-held belief that Vietnam’s warring parties should negotiate
their own settlement.
When Hickey and other Americans came to visit the president’s
office, An was tasked with showing them the agrovilles.
“I took them across the Mekong River into Kien Hoa province
(the old Ben Tre province). They were pacifying that area. It was
infested with Viet Minh after the First Indochina War. A year
after it was started, the program failed. Dr. Tuyen gave me a car
and asked me to visit the agrovilles and report to him on what
I found. He knew that people were lying to him, the district
chiefs and province chiefs. He needed someone he could trust,
who could go out in the field and give him a secret report on what
was really happening. I drove all the way to Rach Gia, on the
Gulf of Thailand in the south. Then from there I drove through
central Vietnam to Hué in the north. I came back and reported
to Dr. Tuyen, ‘The agrovilles program is finished. Forget about
it. You have to do something new.’ That’s why he dropped the
agrovilles and switched, with the help of the Americans, to
building strategic hamlets.”
An’s handling of this assignment reveals how he became a
trusted adviser to so many South Vietnamese and American officials.
When asked to study a sensitive military issue, he examines
the matter firsthand, like an investigative journalist,
and returns with a blunt report: “Your strategy is not working.
Find a new strategy.” At the end of the day, he looks like the one
honest man in Vietnam, the person to consult for confidential
evaluation of what is really happening. He tells the truth to
Dr. Tuyen. He tells the truth to his Communist handlers. It is
the same truth but it has different meanings, depending on
who is hearing it. Tuyen confronts a strategic weakness that
needs fixing. The Communists learn about a strategic weakness
that can be exploited.
An protected his cover by telling his Western bosses the
same truth he told to his Communist comrades. But what
happens when this “truth” is converted into a chess piece and