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

100 THOMAS A. BASS
through my nose, and then they taught me how to smoke cigars.
It was great, really good,” says An, laughing. “That’s how I got
addicted, more than fifty years ago, and this is why I have lung
problems today. Every time I smoked, I thought of my two advisers,
Colonel Glenn and Colonel Hicks.”
An also succeeded in grafting an American brain onto
his Vietnamese brain. He learned the skills of Western
journalism—its analytical methods and repertoire of investigative
techniques—and applied them to becoming Vietnam’s
greatest spy. An had good teachers. He used them.
In one of our last conversations in 2006, An spoke again
about his conflicted cultural inheritance. “I spent so many
years working with the Americans that as time went on, my
brain became resistant to the training and intoxication of the
Communists.”
He corrects himself. “I mean to say indoctrination of the
Communists. Unfortunately, an American brain got grafted
onto my Vietnamese brain. It became in the process a kind of
composite substance, very hard and very difficult to break. At
this point nothing can be done about it. It’s best just to leave it
there. I’ll soon be dead anyway, and then no one will have to
worry about what I think.” An laughs, one of the long, hearty
laughs he reserves for life’s good jokes.
Then he tells me a story about a king and his adviser. “One
day the king is invited to dine at the house of his adviser. This
mandarin has an excellent cook and domestic staff, but they hate
him because he is a tough bastard. So they decide to get their
revenge. At lunch they serve their master the stone of a jackfruit,
cooked in a special way, so that he doesn’t recognize what
he is eating. By evening, as the jackfruit ferments in his stomach,
the mandarin begins farting.”
Here An makes the pfftt, pfftt popping sounds of a farting
mandarin. “By the time the king comes to dinner, the mandarin
is farting one fart after another, pfftt, pfftt, pfftt.”
“‘What is that noise?’ demands the king.