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

The Spy Who Loved Us 79
nearly secret city of timeless Vietnamese ways within a surface
city that had taken to foreign modes.”
America’s first glimpse of the real nature of Lansdale’s activities
in Vietnam came when his former deputy, Daniel Ellsberg,
released the Pentagon Papers—the top-secret History of
United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, completed in 1969.
Ellsberg copied forty-three of its forty-seven volumes and leaked
them to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971.
(Lansdale had two official postings to Vietnam, a two-year tour
beginning in 1954, and another two-year stint from 1965 to
1967. In between, he directed the CIA’s effort to assassinate
Cuban president Fidel Castro. Ellsberg served as Lansdale’s assistant
in Vietnam for a year and a half, beginning in the summer
of 1965. A swashbuckling hawk with a death wish, Ellsberg loved
to carry a machine gun into the field and play weekend warrior.
His transformation into an antiwar activist came later.)
Included in the Pentagon Papers is a document entitled
Lansdale Team’s Report on Covert Saigon Mission in 1954 and
1955. This anonymously authored report on Lansdale’s Saigon
military mission (SMM) presents itself as “the condensed account
of one year in the operation of a ‘cold war’ combat team.”
“The SMM was to enter into Vietnam quietly and assist
the Vietnamese, rather than the French, in unconventional
warfare. The French were to be kept as friendly allies in the
process, as far as possible. The broad mission for the team was
to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and to
wage political-psychological warfare.”
The report goes on to describe the covert acts of sabotage
and terror that Lansdale launched against North Vietnam before
his agents were evacuated from Hanoi in April 1954. The
team “spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil
supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in
the buses, in taking actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad
(which required teamwork with a CIA special technical team in