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

The Spy Who Loved Us 61
over by Le Duc Tho. A graduate of Poulo Condore, Tho was in
charge of the southern resistance against the French. He would
later spend four years negotiating with Henry Kissinger at the
Paris peace talks. Tho’s younger brother, Mai Chi Tho, as head
of security for the Communist forces in the south, was An’s boss.
“They asked me to join the Communist Party because I
worked in a sensitive section,” An says. “If I hadn’t joined, they
wouldn’t have trusted me. They explained all the measures
they took for security reasons, and I had to study the resolutions
of the Party congresses. The Indochinese Communist Party had
been officially disbanded, but it continued to work underground.
The Communists feared the loss of popular support if they
operated openly, so they carried out their activities in secret.”
An had provisionally joined the Party the preceding year
during a ceremony in the jungle near Cu Chi. “There is a probationary
period of three to six months for a worker to join the
party,” An explains. “For a member of the middle class, a student,
or someone who works for the government, the probationary
period is at least a year, before you move from alternate
to become a full member of the Party.”
An did his homework, reading Party resolutions and the
works of Marx and Engels, but he drew his real political lessons
from Karl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian
general who fought Napoleon at Waterloo and then, as director
of the Prussian war college, wrote his unfinished masterpiece,
On War. What An found most compelling in Clausewitz
is the idea of total war, which includes attacking the citizens and
property of an enemy nation in every way possible. An often returned
to this idea, explaining over and over again the importance
of the idea of total war to Vietnamese strategy.
“To fight a strong opponent from a foreign country, you
have to carry out a prolonged war,” he says. “You have to mobilize
all the human beings and resources of your country toward
one end—defeating this opponent. Faced with this general
mobilization, the enemy will eventually conclude that carrying