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

The Spy Who Loved Us 65
was ambitious and smart, earning quick promotions as he
moved through the ranks of the French intelligence services
until he emerged as head of G5, the psychological warfare department
of the army general staff.
Giai made his cousin an adjutant, the highest-ranking noncommissioned
officer, and put him to work at army headquarters
on the rue Gallieni, near Cholon. This is where Colonel Edward
Lansdale found An when he came to offer his services—and
money—to Captain Giai. Lansdale, a former advertising man
and expert in psychological warfare, had been sent to run the
CIA’s covert operations in Vietnam. Officially arriving in Indochina
soon after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Lansdale
found G5 and the rest of the old colonial military apparatus
in a shambles. The southern forces were totally demoralized,
with no idea what to do with themselves, until Lansdale and his
innocuously titled Saigon Military Mission began turning
Cochin China into a country called South Vietnam.
Finding a promising student in the young Pham Xuan An,
Lansdale and his colleagues began teaching him the tradecraft
that he would employ for his next fifty years as a Communist
spy. “I am a student of Sherman Kent,” An says, referring to the
Yale professor who helped found the CIA, including what today
is called the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis.
“Strategic intelligence,” Kent wrote in his classic text Strategic
Intelligence for American World Policy (1949), is a “reportorial
job” based on studying the personalities of world leaders. “It
must know of their character and ambitions, their opinions,
their weaknesses, the influences which they can exert, and the
influences before which they are frail. It must know of their
friends and relatives, and the political, economic, and social
milieu in which they move.”
Pham Xuan An, the psyops intelligence agent, was beginning
to acquire the reportorial method that he would later employ so
brilliantly as Pham Xuan An the Time correspondent. “People
usually have one career, while I had two, the job of following the