The spy who came in from the heat: how an idealistic spy in Asia challenged the American way of war, and what his tragedy teaches us about finding allies today.

• Author: Cain, Geoffrey
• Position: Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War - Book review

The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War

by Joshua Kurlantzick

Wiley, 272 pp.

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Hours after World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh referenced an unlikely charter when he announced his country's independence from the latest of its long line of imperial masters, Japan and France. "All men are created equal," proclaimed this communist admirer of George Washington, standing before a crowd in Hanoi. "They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It is now hard to imagine this, but in 1941 it was with American support that Ho led his guerrilla coalition, the Viet Minh, against the Japanese military, who had acquired control of Indochina in a power-sharing deal with Vichy France. Ho saw the United States as an ally that would help him rid his people of the French colonial rule that had degraded them for eighty years. Viet Minh soldiers also worked alongside spies from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, to rescue downed American pilots.

That same year, an OSS spy named dim Thompson was sent to Bangkok, where he immediately saw the value of cultivating popular rebels like Ho Chi Minh. He began wooing the Viet Minh, Cambodian, and Laotian nationalist fighters--sometimes operating with the tacit approval of his superiors at OSS, but sometimes working completely off the grid. Thompson was convinced that these partisans, who saw themselves primarily as nationalists, would someday become well-placed allies in what was shaping up to be a protracted struggle for influence in Indochina between the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union. Thompson also believed that the United States could become a great force for good in the impoverished countries of Southeast Asia.

But Thompson, like Ho, had not factored in the fervid anticommunism that would grip the United States for nearly three decades after the end of World War II. The result, writes Joshua Kurlantzick, Southeast Asia fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, was that the U.S. turned against those anti-colonial insurgents.

By the late 1940s, the U.S. was no longer seen as a harbinger of democracy. In 1950, Washington gave diplomatic recognition to the corrupt anticommunist fief known as the Republic of Vietnam...