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

The Spy Who Loved Us 71
camps and employ terror and other techniques developed in the
increasingly effective domain known as psychological warfare.
When they arrived in Vietnam to take over the French war,
the Americans, often unknowingly, reinvented all of Trinquier’s
methods. Thinking themselves great innovators in fighting the
Vietnamese revolutionaries, they were actually latter-day Trinquiers
duplicating all of his methods for fighting a modern
war—with no better luck. The Americans developed the Green
Berets and other special forces operating with small, mobile
teams of commandos. They employed torture and terror, most
notably the Phoenix Program, which cultivated informants and
assassinated fifty thousand suspected Communist sympathizers.
They adopted wholesale the forced relocation of the Vietnamese
population into armed camps, first known as agrovilles and
then called strategic hamlets. Finally, they employed with gusto
the psychological warfare methods designed to win the hearts
and minds of the civilian population, whose allegiance would be
the ultimate weapon in this people’s war.
When asked to comment on his wartime reporting in Vietnam,
David Halberstam remarked to British journalist Phillip
Knightley, “The problem was trying to cover something every
day as news when in fact the real key was that it was all derivative
of the French Indo-China war, which is history. So you
really should have had a third paragraph in each story which
should have said, ‘All of this is shit and none of this means anything
because we are in the same footsteps as the French and
we are prisoners of their experience.’”
In the spring of 1971, historian Alfred McCoy interviewed
Trinquier and his superior officer, General Maurice Belleux, former
chief of French intelligence for Indochina. McCoy at the
time was traveling around the world researching his classic text
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (published in 1972, with
a revised edition, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in
the Global Drug Trade, published in 1991). “By 1950–1951