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

78 THOMAS A. BASS
of Indochina, Lansdale had discovered that General Salan,
commander in chief of the Expeditionary Corps, was financing
French military operations by selling opium from the Laotian
highlands. “We don’t want you to open up this keg of worms
since it will be a major embarrassment to a friendly government.
So drop your investigation,” Lansdale was told, when he reported
the news to Washington.
“As 1954 ended, the rhetoric said that Vietnam was an independent
nation,” writes Lansdale in his autobiography. “There
still was a large French Expeditionary Corps present in the
country, however, and there still were many Frenchmen
throughout the Vietnamese civil and military establishments,
although most of them were stepping down from positions of
executive authority to assume the role of advisers. The French
presence was evident and heavy. At most, Vietnamese officials
were getting sniffs, not deep breaths, of the air of freedom and
independence.”
Lansdale, in a rather poetic passage, tries to describe the
true Vietnam behind the colonial facade. I am not certain if
he ever visited the house of psywar officer Pham Xuan An, but
the description sounds remarkably like the neighborhood where
An lived in a two-room house located between Chinatown and
Saigon’s central market. “Behind the façade of French provincial
buildings and colonial life on the main thoroughfares of the
Saigon-Cholon metropolitan area lay the real city, a denselypacked
complex of Vietnamese hamlets. It was almost like a
conjuring trick. Down alleys and byways past the concrete and
stucco office buildings, shops, and villas there were the hidden
hamlets, throbbing with an intense life of their own, with thousands
of people crowded into wooden dwellings along a block
or two of dirt lanes. A total of perhaps a million people inhabited
these hamlets in Saigon-Cholon, out of the sight and ken
of those on the paved thoroughfares. Few foreigners, except for
groups of police, ever visited these hamlets. They made up a