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

The Spy Who Loved Us 127
Tuyen instructed his foreign agents to get “serious in your
work” and start filing stories like An the “professional pressman.”
Tuyen was An’s patron for three years, until he fell from
power after an attempted coup in December 1962. “Whenever
he cooked up something he discussed it with me,” An
says. “When he was planning to pull off a coup, he asked me to
come to his office and help him.” After his failed coup attempt,
Tuyen spent the next thirteen years under house arrest, scheming
to bring down one government after another. The bonds of
friendship and obligation between An and Tuyen held fast up
to the last day of the war, when An helped his friend escape the
Communist forces advancing on Saigon. “I helped Dr. Tuyen
get out of here. I knew I would be in trouble. This was the chief
of intelligence, an important man to capture, but he was my
friend. I owed him. He had been nice to me. He helped me
with everything.”
An’s working method continued unchanged as he moved
from Tuyen’s office to VTX and on from there to a full-time position
at Reuters. Recognized as one of the hardest-working
journalists in town, always ready to help his colleagues with
informed opinions or telling anecdotes, An gave information in
order to get it. “Their food is information, documents,” An
says of the similarities between journalists and spies. “Just like
birds, one has to keep feeding them so they’ll sing.”
“From the army, intelligence, secret police, I had all kinds
of sources,” An says. “The commanders of the military branches,
officers of the special forces, the navy, the air force—they all
helped me.” In exchange for this steady stream of information,
An gave his South Vietnamese informants the same thing
he gave his Communist employers. “We discussed these documents.
As the South Vietnamese tried to figure out what they
meant, they had a problem. How were they going to deal with
the Americans?” An then turned around and advised the Americans
on how to deal with the Vietnamese. It was a high-level
confidence game, with death hovering over him should he be