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

The Spy Who Loved Us 105
didn’t even own a suitcase. Luckily, Mills C. Brandes gave me
his old World War II Samsonite, made out of cardboard.”
An’s last hurdle lay in getting his visa. This time he was
aided by Diem’s secret police. He began by contacting his
cousin, the same one who had hired him to work in the psychological
warfare department. Pham Xuan Giai’s sister was
married to Le Khac Duyet, who was head of security and ran
the police in central Vietnam for Ngo Dinh Can, the youngest
brother in the ruling family. Can, on Duyet’s recommendation,
sent a message to Tran Kim Tuyen, the diminutive genius who
ran Ngo Dinh Diem’s family affairs. “He was in charge of political,
cultural, and social affairs at the Presidential Palace,” An
says. “Actually he was the front man of the secret police. Everything
was under his authority.”
With a Hanoi law degree and training as a military medic,
Tuyen was one of the Catholic refugees who had come south in
1954. He hailed from Phat Diem, which is described in The
Quiet American as a medieval town “under the shadow and
protection of the Prince Bishop,” who had his own private
army. Greene, a Catholic convert, describes Phat Diem as “the
most living town in all the country.” By living he means faithful
or religious. Phat Diem, like other Catholic enclaves in
North Vietnam, was destroyed during a pitched battle between
the Viet Minh and the French colonial forces. (Greene visited the
battlefield and overheard soldiers, “most of them Germans,” exclaim
Gott sei dank when they saw more dead Vietnamese than
Legionnaires floating in the city’s canals.)
As An would say of the way he obtained his visa, “This is the
Vietnamese way, pure Vietnamese.” You ask a cousin to ask his
sister’s husband in central Vietnam to intervene with his boss,
who in turn sends a message back to Saigon via your cousin’s sister’s
husband, who actually travels there in person, that you
should be given an exit visa, and voilà, the visa that yesterday
was impossible to obtain suddenly appears on the desk of