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

124 THOMAS A. BASS
projected forward on the board, five or six moves ahead? What
does it mean that a Communist spy advised the South Vietnamese
government on how to build more effective fortifications
in the countryside? After all, the move from agrovilles to
strategic hamlets entailed an increased military presence,
beefed up armaments, and more coercion and brutality directed
at Vietnam’s peasants. Is An’s advice an example of compartmentalization?
Was he thinking like a Westerner by day
and a Communist by night? Or was there something deeper at
work? If you immiserate the populace, uproot and brutalize
them, will they become increasingly ardent in their support
for the Communists? Was An offering “information” or “disinformation”
or some third category of “truth”? In any case, he
was now launched on the career that would make him at once
the most trusted adviser and the most effective spy in twentiethcentury
Vietnamese history.
As we sit talking in his living room, An keeps himself positioned
near the telephone and a pad of paper, and there is always
a pen tucked in his breast pocket. Old colleagues call to ask
him out for coffee. Foreign visitors request meetings. News arrives
that old friends have died. An keeps these conversations
brief. We always return to where we left off. In this case, I ask
him what he means when he talks about an area being infested
with Viet Minh in need of pacification.
“I use this language because I had to think like an American,”
he says. “I had to think like a nationalist. If I had thought like a
Communist, I would have been finished, finished completely.”
While working for Dr. Tuyen, An was once asked to interpret
for a distinguished American professor. Tuyen, who had
been detained by the Communists in 1945 in North Vietnam
before he escaped to the south, was fiercely anti-Communist
and highly suspicious of anyone sympathetic to their cause.
After a three-hour interview, the American professor invited
An to lunch. An was surprised when the professor announced
that Tuyen was either a Vietnamese Communist or a member