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

The Spy Who Loved Us 197
played in the battle, Tu Cang’s pistols and Pham Xuan An’s Renault
are now displayed in the museum of military intelligence
at army headquarters in Hanoi. The display includes the Canon
Reflex camera An used to photograph his reports and secret
documents. Also exhibited is one of the four suits of clothing
that the Communist Party bought An for his travels in America.)
The Têt Offensive, engineered by General Tran Van Tra—
the southern commander who had planned the ambush that
killed An’s French teacher—was a simultaneous assault by
eighty thousand Communist troops on targets throughout South
Vietnam. Apart from holding the Hué citadel for three weeks,
the offensive was quickly suppressed, and it never sparked the
popular uprising it was supposed to engender. The attack was
a military disaster, with the Communists losing over half of their
committed forces in the south and perhaps a quarter of their NVA
regular forces from the north. “The offensive destroyed the
Vietcong as a fighting force,” An says. “Then the United States
introduced the Phoenix Program, which was extremely effective
in assassinating thousands of Vietnamese Communists and
neutralizing the opposition in the south.” As the war ground on
for another seven years, the brunt of the battle would be increasingly
borne by mainline forces from the north.
In spite of its failures, Têt was also a brilliant military success.
The offensive shocked the American public and dealt a
major psychological blow to the U.S. military. In March 1968,
Lyndon Johnson quit the presidential race and partially halted
the bombing of North Vietnam. In May, the Paris peace talks
began, commencing the protracted negotiations that would
end, seven years later, with America’s disorderly retreat from
Vietnam. Only when the cable traffic was released after the
war did we learn that U.S. commanders had contemplated
using nuclear weapons and chemical warfare to counter the
attack. General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, former math teacher at
West Point who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
cabled General William Westmoreland, former superintendent