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

80 THOMAS A. BASS
Japan who performed their part brilliantly), and in writing detailed
notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations.”
These plans to blow up power plants, oil storage facilities,
harbors, and bridges were unfortunately curtailed, laments
Lansdale, because of “U.S. adherence to the Geneva Agreement,”
which ended the First Indochina War.
With an attempt at James Bondian flair, the Lansdale report
describes the exploits of Lucien “Black Luigi” Conein and his
SMM operatives in Hanoi, who “had a bad moment when
contaminating the oil” used to run the city’s buses. “They had
to work quickly at night, in an enclosed storage room. Fumes
from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. Dizzy
and weak-kneed, they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and
completed the job.”
By 1955, Lou Conein was training paramilitary saboteurs in
the Philippines and landing them on the shores of North Vietnam.
The CIA launched a parallel effort with agents trained on
Saipan Island. The infiltrators carried weapons, radios, and
gold—a lot of gold—with an estimated value of close to a million
dollars. With only a handful of exceptions, every agent
who landed in the north was captured immediately on hitting
the ground. Worse yet, many captured agents, without Lansdale
or the CIA knowing that they had been captured, started broadcasting
disinformation back to the south.
What Lansdale had begun as part of his cold war combat
mission was taken over in 1964 by the U.S. military and expanded.
When the Vietnam war ended in 1975, five hundred
captured agents were incarcerated in North Vietnamese prisons,
where they were left to rot for the next decade. “They
must have had someone on the inside to roll up the entire network
the way they did, all at one time,” Conein told an interviewer
in 1995. He wondered if a mole or spy had tipped them
off, with the most likely candidate being Conein’s “good friend”
Pham Xuan An.