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

130 THOMAS A. BASS
rebuilt after Muoi Huong was captured. She was An’s original
courier. She had a false wall built in her apartment for evading
the police, and this hiding place was used by the head of their
intelligence cell during his visits to Saigon. Tam Thao had her
own career as a spy, working as secretary and confidante to a
number of U.S. military officers. Chin Chi did similar work
until she was summoned into the jungle in 1965. Four years
later Tam Thao was also moved to the jungle, where she found
a husband approved by the Party and was allowed to marry.
When I learn that Tam Thao and Chin Chi, now widows, are
once again living in Saigon, I arrange to meet them for tea. I
find them sitting on the ground floor of a three-story house on
a quiet street in one of Saigon’s nicer neighborhoods. After
threading my way through the motorbikes parked in the courtyard
and removing my shoes, I enter the downstairs living
room, which is formally decorated with a large red upholstered
couch and matching chairs covered with lace antimacassars.
On top of a mahogany curio cabinet sits the family altar. Inside
the cabinet, among other souvenirs, is a small Statue of Liberty
which Tam Thao tells me she has recently bought on a trip to
the United States.
Both women are trim and elegant, with carefully coiffed
hair. A tall woman with a handsome, even-featured face, Chin
Chi wears a white silk pants suit, embossed with flowers and
decorated with bone buttons and black piping. I see that she was
once a great beauty, with sensual lips, high cheekbones, and
large brown eyes. Today she has frosted hair and the retiring
manner of a younger sister who has always allowed her elders
to speak for her. She and Tam Thao are the kind of meticulously
assembled matrons who could be chatting with me about their
bridge club, but are instead describing their lives as spies and
jungle soldiers.
Born a year apart, the girls were teenagers studying English
and French at Gia Long lycée in Saigon when they met An, who
was four years older than Tam Thao. He tutored both girls in