Thompson made little effort to conceal his sympathies for these Southeast Asian militants, men like Ho. He quietly met regularly with the prime minister of the Free Lao movement, who was living secretly in Bangkok, brought the leaders of the Free Cambodian groups to meet with other American officials, and even got a clandestine rendezvous with Prince Suphanouvong, a leftist member of the Lao royal family who, during the Vietnam War, allied himself with the communists and would become known as the Red Prince. Thompson assured the Indochinese insurgent leaders that they would eventually get their independence, with America's backing -- a bold promise he would not be able to back up.

The more time Thompson spent watching French colonialism, the more bitter he seemed to become. France feels locals "must be browbeaten and kept in place," he complained in one secret report. "The sooner the European suckups of the State Department realize that the days of colonies are over, the better. ... I see a great deal of the Laos, the Vietnamese, and the Indonesians here and they are a very intelligent bunch and not ones to be fooled."

Instead, Thompson told his OSS bosses back in Washington, the U.S. should support self-determination, and democracy, for these new nations, even if that meant they would be led by men like Ho Chi Minh -- a policy, he believed, that would ensure goodwill toward America indefinitely. Still, Thompson recognized, even when some of his bosses did not, that with the Soviet Union growing more powerful, these contested countries would soon become critical -- and the U.S. could still beat the Soviets, he believed, by siding with men like Ho, who desired a relationship with the U.S. above all. Ho Chi Minh, Thompson wrote, "stated several times since 1946 that he will have to count mainly on the United States. The Viet Minh fighters, like the Cambodians and the Laotians, were nationalists first, Thompson wrote -- they might embrace communism to force out the French and get their country back, but only if the United States shunned them. Thompson's niece reported that her uncle called Ho the "George Washington of Vietnam" and could have been a buffer against China -- exactly the type of relationship Washington is pursuing with Vietnam today.

Some of Thompson's predictions would come true: The American legation in Bangkok, understaffed, only slowly began to realize that the entire region around it could be descending into war. "Thompson was an idealist, maybe the extreme, but a lot of people in OSS thought like him ... and he did see the future," said Rolland Bushner, who worked in the American embassy in Bangkok.

As Thompson traveled through Indochina, predicting the coming of a major war between the U.S. and communists there, he laid plans to set up new information-gathering stations that would feed intelligence back to Washington, with Thompson at the hub of the network -- even if he had to use his own personal money to get the intelligence operation started. The network, he planned, would recruit official U.S. government staff, freelancers working as businesspeople throughout Asia, and local Southeast Asians who could be trusted--it would be a whole network of agents, the kind of peacetime intelligence operation the United States had never tried before. In another cable, Thompson boasted that the Southeast Asian militants would bare their souls to him, as they would to no other foreigner.