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

The Spy Who Loved Us 133
British Gurka division from Rangoon and some French paratroopers
from Calcutta arrived in the city on September 12.
Ten days later, on September 23, after British General
Douglas Gracey had ordered French troops released from internment
and rearmed, they rampaged through the city, killing
hundreds of Vietnamese and reclaiming Saigon as French territory.
Dewey implored Gracey to intervene. As he wrote in a
prophetic report to his OSS colleagues in Hanoi, “Cochinchina
is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we
ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.” Gracey declared Dewey
persona non grata and ordered him to leave Saigon. In a fateful
move, he forbade him from flying an American flag on his
jeep. On September 26, Dewey left the Continental Hotel and
headed in his jeep to the airport. Mistaken for a French officer,
he was killed in a Viet Minh ambush: the first American casualty
in what would become the Vietnam war and, since his
body was never recovered, the first MIA. Appalled by the mistake,
Ho Chi Minh sent an apology and letter of condolence to
President Truman.
The day Dewey was killed, Cao Dang Chiem was commanding
a troop of soldiers guarding the bridge to Dakao,
where Alden Pyle would later meet his demise. All we know of
Chiem’s involvement in Dewey’s death is that he was one of the
few people in Vietnam who knew where the body was buried.
Chiem rose quickly through the ranks to become Vietnam’s
preeminent spymaster. After providing security for the Communist
leadership in the south, he went on to direct the most
powerful of Vietnam’s three intelligence agencies—the Office
of Strategic Intelligence, which was run from inside the Communist
Party’s Central Committee. (The other two agencies
were Public Security, run by the police, and Military Intelligence,
attached to the army.)
Pham Xuan An always insisted that he worked in “strategic
intelligence.” To his Western visitors, this sounded like a cerebral