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

The Spy Who Loved Us 113
In the spring of 1959 he graduated from Orange Coast
College with an associate’s degree in journalism. He drove up
the coast to Monterey and on from there to Sacramento, where
he stayed for two months, working at the Sacramento Bee in an
internship arranged for him by Eleanor McClatchy, a member
of the newspaper’s founding family. An’s stipend was paid by the
Asia Foundation, which had also arranged for him to fly to
New York at the end of the summer for another internship, this
one at the United Nations.
“Mrs. McClatchy was a very nice lady,” An says. She in turn
thought he was a very nice man, and with introductions from the
CIA and Edward Lansdale and An’s other good friends in U.S.
intelligence, she was glad to welcome this young Vietnamese
gentleman to Sacramento. There was a slight problem when he
was denied lodgings because the landlord didn’t accept “mongoloids,”
but An shrugged off this racist slight. “This is normal
in America,” he says. “Even Henry Kissinger wasn’t allowed to
stay in certain hotels because he was Jewish.”
McClatchy took him to meet the governor, Edmund G.
Brown, who was hosting a state visit from the prime minister of
the Soviet Union. “I was allowed to tag along, to see how they
covered the story of a big shot paying a visit to the governor of
California.” An had already met the governor and had his photo
snapped while standing next to him at a conference of student
newspaper editors, but it wouldn’t hurt to meet him again. An
was assuming the professional demeanor that would serve him
so well as a spy. He was compiling a résumé of CIA recommendations
and McClatchy service that suggested he might be
working for the Agency. Soon after his arrival in Sacramento, the
Bee ran a story on its new summer intern headlined, “Vietnam
Journalist Aims to Fight Red Propaganda.” As An wryly remarked
to an interviewer in 2005, “I used everything Lansdale
taught me for this article. He was an excellent teacher.”
An paid a visit to the Asia Foundation headquarters in San
Francisco, hoping to convince them to allow him to drive across