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

The Spy Who Loved Us 111
twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. She
was pleased to be back in touch after so many years, and they
struck up a correspondence that lasted until her death in 2003.
An was “very, very dear to Lee,” says Janet Simms, Lee’s domestic
partner when she was a practicing psychologist in Los
Angeles. An wrote in return, “You have often been in my heart
and thoughts.”
After his first year at OCC, An attended summer school to
finish more credits, and then he traveled up the coast to visit a
Vietnamese friend who was teaching at the army language
school in Monterey. His plans had changed and he would be
heading home as soon as possible, if he could get there. An’s
sunny year in California was the darkest time in history for the
southern Viet Minh, the sixty thousand Communists who had
remained below the seventeenth parallel when Vietnam was divided
in 1954. “The Diem administration dragged a guillotine
around the countryside, decapitating Communists, and by the
end of the campaign in 1958, eighty-five percent of the Party
members had been wiped out, either killed or jailed,” An says.
He learned in a coded letter from his younger brother, Pham
Xuan Dinh, that Muoi Huong, his case officer, had been arrested.
He also learned that he was being summoned home
because the Viet Minh—soon to be reborn as the Vietcong—
were finally embarking on the armed struggle that would
launch the Second Indochina War.
“My brother was arrested while I was in America,” An says.
“They asked him about Muoi Huong and why he had come to
visit me at my house. My brother was detained by the Saigon
police until after Têt in 1958. My cousin got him out of jail—
the one who worked for Ngo Dinh Can as chief of security
and head of the police in central Vietnam. He came to Saigon
to see the chief of police. My brother was released directly
into his custody.
“My brother wrote me a letter implying that my two direct
superiors had been captured. He gave me enough hints so that