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

72 THOMAS A. BASS
younger, innovative French officers had abandoned the conventional
war tactics that essentially visualized Indochina as a
depopulated staging ground for fortified lines, massive sweeps,
and flanking maneuvers,” writes McCoy. “Instead, Indochina
became a vast chessboard where hill tribes, bandits, and religious
minorities could be used as pawns to hold strategic territories
and prevent Viet Minh infiltration.”
Trinquier was given a large expanse of territory in which to
experiment with these new ideas. Operating along the Annamite
Cordillera, mountains which stretch from central Vietnam to the
Chinese border, Trinquier recruited and trained more than
thirty thousand tribal mercenaries, who busied themselves attacking
Viet Minh supply lines and aiding the French military
effort. This included cultivating poppies in Laos and converting
them into heroin—the lucrative business French intelligence
services used to support themselves. Since it had no strategic
value, save as a way station between the coast and Trinquier’s
inland empire, Dien Bien Phu was another component in Trinquier’s
strategy. Hmong opium cultivators produced a substantial
crop of raw opium in the hills around Dien Bien Phu,
and the fort was supposed to keep Laos from falling into the
hands of the Viet Minh.
As recounted by Belleux and Trinquier in their interviews
with McCoy, Trinquier financed his operation by having French
paratroopers fly raw poppy sap from Laos to Vung Tau (then
known as Cap Saint Jacques), where it was transported to
Saigon. Here the Binh Xuyen river pirates, who controlled the
city’s police department and opium dens, transformed the raw
poppy sap into a smokeable product. The proceeds from this operation
were split between the pirates, France’s Deuxième Bureau,
and Trinquier’s “supplementary forces” in the mountains.
Graham Greene wrote extensively about Dien Bien Phu because
he considered it the most decisive battle in modern history,
but there was one thing about the battle he never
understood. “What remains a mystery to this day,” Greene