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

112 THOMAS A. BASS
I understood.” As An tells me this story, one of his birds starts
screaming in the background like a police cruiser with its
whoopee siren going full blast. If his younger brother Dinh
got off relatively easily, the same was not true for Muoi Huong.
He was tortured in the Nine Caves prison in central Vietnam for
six years. He did not reveal An’s name, but it was a perilous moment
for all the agents in his network.
An’s friend Cao Giao was also serving a term in Ngo Dinh
Can’s infamous prison. “He knew Muoi Huong, that he was a
high official in the Communist Party and chief of intelligence
in the south. The two had worked together when Cao Giao
was passing information to the Communists, giving them advance
warning of the Japanese coup d’état. He stood to gain his
freedom by denouncing Muoi Huong, but Cao Giao never denounced
anyone, even under torture. He walked by him with
a stone face that revealed nothing of their past association. He
was one of the brave ones who never lost their morale.”
“How can I get in touch with my leaders who have been
captured, I wondered. I wasn’t supposed to look for them or
contact them. It was their job to contact me, but if I stay in
America how will they find me? If I don’t return to Vietnam, I’ll
be abandoning the fight for independence, but if I return now
that my leaders are in jail, I risk being arrested and going to jail
myself. If Muoi Huong had informed, I would have been finished.
I strongly believed he would confess. He was a human
being. I had already seen many cases like this. But he didn’t confess.
Others did, but not Muoi Huong.”
After An learned that he was being summoned back to Vietnam,
he started studying Spanish. If his cover were blown,
maybe he could slip over the border and travel home via Cuba,
where Fidel Castro was coming to power. An also learned, while
visiting his friend at the foreign language school in Monterey,
that the Communists, after holding them back for several years,
were finally allowing the revolutionaries in the south to resume
guerrilla warfare. “That’s why I decided to go back,” An says.