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

126 THOMAS A. BASS
is so logical, so appealing, so clear. It took me three years to
learn how to imitate their way of thinking. Now I talk this way
naturally. I didn’t realize that one of these days an American professor
would figure out what I was doing, and maybe I wasn’t
even aware of what I was doing, but this is a big mistake,”
Tuyen admitted.
“Lesson learned! You will have to correct your way of talking.”
An chided him in the singsong voice of a schoolboy teasing
one of his classmates.
“I had to learn this lesson for myself,” An says. “I had to
learn how to talk like an American, think like an American.
Actually, learning how to write balanced stories, like an American
journalist, helps you a lot as a strategic intelligence officer.
It makes you more objective.”
When asked if he used this “objective” language in writing
his reports to the Communists, An said he did. “I would talk
about pacifying areas filled with Vietcong terrorists. They
knew what I meant. This is why the government sent me to
school in 1978 and 1979. They found after the fall of South
Vietnam that I used a lot of foreign words. I tried using the
new Communist words, but I didn’t understand them. I speak
an archaic Vietnamese. I learned the new words, but I’ve forgotten
most of them by now.” An laughs again, a deep guffaw
at life’s absurdities.
An was eventually moved into the job for which he had
been groomed by the Asia Foundation when Tuyen sent him to
work for the Viet Tan Xa (VTX), the official government news
agency, which was affiliated with Reuters. Before An officially
severed his ties as a South Vietnamese intelligence agent, he was
getting paid simultaneously by Tuyen, VTX, and Reuters. At
VTX, An was put in charge of the foreign correspondents.
Many of them, with no training as journalists, had never filed a
story. An ordered them to file at least one a week. They complained
to Tuyen, saying that doing journalism would get in
the way of their work as spies—their real job. Supporting An,