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

The Spy Who Loved Us 205
tory. An understood the psychological value of the operation. It
was a propaganda coup, a master stroke of Lansdalian PR, with
resounding consequences in Vietnam and the United States.
“All the Vietnamese supported it,” An says of the Têt Offensive.
“They knew it would force the Americans to negotiate and it
succeeded. It did force them to negotiate.”
Not all of An’s colleagues had supported the offensive. It was
not like General Giap’s heroic battle at Dien Bien Phu. Têt
was a modern move, a kind of psyops ballet, which could only
succeed if given the right spin. Many of the targets under attack
had been held only briefly, sometimes no longer than was required
to snap a picture of the U.S. embassy or an American airbase
under attack. Even Tu Cang, in his first report back to
COSVN, had missed the point. He was depressed about the
dead bodies of his colleagues, with the Communists having
lost forty-five thousand soldiers, ten times more than the other
side. Then An, with his eye on the Time wire and the news
pouring in from around the world, explained the larger picture.
Americans were shocked and dismayed that nothing in
Vietnam, not even the American embassy, was safe from attack.
The South Vietnamese government was not defendable, and the
American government had been shaken to its foundations.
The offensive would drive President Lyndon Johnson from office
and General William Westmoreland from command. It
opened the credibility gap—the disparity between official propaganda
and firsthand reports from the front—and it engendered
in the United States a fundamental distrust of government that
persists to this day.
An was the one person uniquely positioned to explain to
General Giap and the Politburo how Têt was playing around the
world. He interpreted its psychological impact for his colleagues
and convinced them of its importance. Once he had converted
Tu Cang to his view, the two of them worked assiduously to get
the rest of the Communist command to accept their interpretation
of events, and they obviously succeeded, as evidenced by