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

The Spy Who Loved Us 69
“Vuong, who worked for the CIA, was fighting against my
cousin, who worked for the Deuxième Bureau,” An says. “They
were keeping track of each other’s activities, reporting back to
their bosses on what was happening. But they were good friends
who played around together. There is nothing wrong with that.
Each one had his own responsibilities. I learned a lot of things
from these people. No one ever suspected that I was working
for the Communists. I was so innocent and so open. Anything
I didn’t know, I would just ask about. Since no one had taught
me about intelligence, I had to ask those who knew about it to
teach me.”
From his cockpit at G5, An was getting a global introduction
to psyops. “They had borrowed from the British and the
French various ideas about counterinsurgency warfare,” he
says. “From the British, they relied mainly on the ideas of Sir
Robert Thompson and his experience in Malaya. From the
French, they relied on the ideas of Colonel Roger Trinquier, an
expert in counterinsurgency warfare, first in Vietnam and then
in Algeria. He had been a professor at a high school in France,
and then in World War II he became a military man. Trinquier
was the first person to work out a plan for fighting the war in
Indochina. He is the key to understanding the French strategy
of counterinsurgency. His ideas were later adopted by the
Americans. You should read Trinquier if you want to understand
what we were doing back then.”
Born in 1908 in the French Alps and trained as a schoolteacher,
Trinquier got his start in 1934 as a young military officer
fighting Vietnamese pirates and opium smugglers in the
wild territory known as the Land of One Hundred Thousand
Mountains, which straddles the Chinese-Vietnamese border. He
was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. After the
war, Trinquier devoted the next fifteen years of his military career
to fighting wars of independence, first in Vietnam and