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

The Spy Who Loved Us 77
their conversation “translated.” They had a “psychotic suspicion
of everything I did,” Lansdale said of his French colleagues.
Assembled “from various intelligence services,” they spent
their days eavesdropping on his telephone conversations and
writing reports on his activities. Never afraid to play the village
idiot, Lansdale took his revenge by poking fun at the French
chief of staff. Whenever they met at a social event, Lansdale
would drape his arm over the man’s shoulder and drawl in a
grating American twang, “This guy is my buddy. You treat him
right, you hear?”
Forbidden by the French from getting involved in the important
business of the general staff—G1, administration;
G2, intelligence; G3, operations; and G4, quartermaster—
Lansdale was left with G5, civil affairs. This involved both white
and black operations, ranging from propaganda to covert activity,
including sabotage and assassination. “There was a large
headquarters staff, three armed propaganda companies in the
field, a staff of artists and writers, a radio unit broadcasting
daily programs to the troops from the government radio station
in Saigon, access to major printing facilities, and combat psywar
equipment, such as portable sets for voice amplification, of a
quality far superior to anything I had known,” Lansdale writes
in his autobiography. “What was lacking, fundamentally, was a
real purpose to which all this talented manpower and fine
equipment could be directed.”
G5 “had a heavy political handicap,” says Lansdale, owing
to the fact that “Vietnamese in uniform were teamed with the
soldiers of French colonial forces, fighting a Communist enemy
amongst a population yearning for independence from France.”
In other words, South Vietnam’s psywar operations were directed
toward maintaining France’s colonial power in Indochina.
“I started an educational effort with the French staff officers
I had met,” Lansdale says. “They found my ideas alien and
suggested laughingly that I take up smoking opium instead.”
This suggestion was only half in jest. During his undercover tour