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

76 THOMAS A. BASS
CIA, Lansdale began doing double duty as military officer and
spy. A decade after enlisting, Lansdale was in the Philippines
masterminding his first “regime change”—cultivating a CIAfriendly
candidate, Ramon Magsaysay, and engineering his
election to the presidency. Lansdale’s management of this campaign
was a public relations triumph. Nationalists (representing
a wide spectrum of political beliefs) who opposed U.S.
strategy were transformed into “Communist” rebels who could
be hunted down and dispatched with impunity.
In Vietnam, which Lansdale visited perhaps as early as 1950,
he was charged with working the same magic he had brought
to the Philippines. Traveling undercover, he made a six-week investigative
tour of Indochina in June and July 1953. A year later,
he arrived officially in Vietnam as “assistant air attaché.” Colonel
Lansdale was nominally working for the Military Assistance
Advisory Group (MAAG) under General John “Iron Mike”
O’Daniel, who was helping the French create a Vietnamese
army. Unhappy with the Americans who were moving into town,
the French had given O’Daniel a former Japanese military
whorehouse in Cholon as his headquarters. A shed in the courtyard
with a dirt floor and folding chairs lit by two bare bulbs dangling
from the ceiling served as Lansdale’s office. Here he began
creating the training relations instruction mission (TRIM), whose
job was to rush loyalist troops into parts of the country that
were being given up by the Viet Minh. (After the signing of the
Geneva Accords, Vietnam was “temporarily” divided at the
seven teenth parallel, with each side retreating north and south
of the line, until national elections could be held to reunite the
country. These elections, scheduled for 1956, never took place.)
“There was too little amity in TRIM for me,” Lansdale
writes in his autobiography, In the Midst of Wars: An American
Mission in Southeast Asia (1972). TRIM’s French chief of staff,
who was nominally Lansdale’s boss, refused to speak to him. The
officer placed his adjutant between himself and Lansdale, and
even when they were talking in English, he insisted on having