Bill Rapp’s Vietnam: A Different Kind of Cold War
BOOK REVIEW: Assignment In Saigon: A Cold War Thriller
By Bill Rapp/Coffeetown Press
Reviewed by Kenneth Dekleva
The Reviewer – Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; he is also a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations and a Salzburg Global Fellow. He is also the author of The Negotiator’s Cross, The Last Violinist, and his upcoming spy novel, The Russian Diplomat’s Wife. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
THE REVIEW — Bill Rapp is a highly-regarded former senior CIA official, diplomat, academic historian, and author. His most recent excellent book, Assignment in Saigon: A Cold War Thriller, is the latest spy novel in his thrilling ‘Cold War’ series, with Karl Baier, a CIA case officer, as the main protagonist. But unlike his earlier novels, set in Europe and Turkey, his latest takes place in Vietnam, a different place, with a novel sensibility, and involving a more nuanced, challenging type of intelligence war. One of the challenges in writing spy fiction about Vietnam is that one already knows the outcome, and during the war’s duration, there were numerous participants, all operating quietly, ambiguously, and with dangerous lethality: the Viet Cong, the French, the CIA, South Vietnamese intelligence, North Vietnamese intelligence, and Russia’s GRU and KGB.
Rapp’s novel begins with Karl Baier, now serving as a special advisor to CIA Director McCone, sent on a temporary assignment (in early 1964) to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission, to prepare a detailed report for the Director — and the White House. This part of the novel is somewhat bureaucratic, and it’s not where the real gems and most fascinating characters are situated. Upon arrival Baier finds himself drawn to ‘the slow burn’ – to borrow the title of Orrin DeForest’s classic memoir of his duty in Vietnam – of the ruthless intelligence war in Vietnam. He quickly meets a shady group of characters, including the CIA station chief, a grizzled, opium-addicted OSS veteran, a former French Legionnaire, and survivor of Dien Bien Phu, and now, owner of La Maison des Rêves; there are Vietnamese police and intelligence officials, and former French Sûreté officials, now liaising with their South Vietnamese counterparts, and other various American intelligence and senior officials, including a cameo appearance by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Early in the novel, Baier is sent to Laos on a familiarization trip to Long Tieng, where he encounters Tony Purvis, a notorious CIA veteran based upon the legendary Tony Poe. There are various encounters with the enemy – an unseen enemy – and firefights, bombings, assassination attempts, intrigue, and betrayals. Along the way, Baier encounters a possible Soviet KGB officer, with his own deadly network and skills, and this too, drives the plot. Increasingly, Baier finds himself drawn into a series of complex intelligence operations – against the advice of the CIA Director – which in turn create tension and excitement throughout Rapp’s novel. It is this ambiguity, uncertainty, and sense of unknowing, which give Baier’s experiences in Vietnam a certain flavor, more so than his final report.
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Baier’s operations cause confusion and deadly risk, because increasingly, he doesn’t know whom he can trust. The OSS veteran Pyle? The former Legionnaire Henri? The French officials? The South Vietnamese officials? Baier cannot foresee, what we now know, that the North Vietnamese brilliantly and patiently executed and achieved their intelligence objectives with ruthless, singular efficiency. We know this through the various books about their ‘perfect spy’ – the late General Pham Xuan An – who deceived American intelligence officers, military officers, diplomats, and even his fellow journalists – in his legendary exploits as the greatest double agent of the war. And Baier could not know what would come later, as described in the writings of former CIA officer and historian Merle Pribbenow, in other battles, other scenarios. Baier couldn’t foresee how North Vietnamese intelligence operatives would later exploit Jane Fonda as an agent of influence, or how their top intelligence operative Nguyen Tai, would undergo – and never break – during many years of interrogation in his “snow white cell.” But after reading Rapp’s fine and intriguing novel, such events begin to make more sense.
Overall, Bill Rapp’s Cold War novel about Vietnam is a most worthy read. It could be said, that to truly understand the intelligence war in Vietnam, fiction may offer more to the reader. Bill Rapp’s Cold War tale, along with other excellent writings by Robert Olen Butler (such as the early Vietnam novels, as well as his magnificent stories in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain), Seymour Topping’s Fatal Crossroads: A Novel of Vietnam 1945, Charles Gillen’s Saigon Station, and Tom Glenn’s Last of the Annamese, captures the tension, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the most challenging Vietnam spy dramas.
Assignment Saigon: A Cold War Thriller earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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