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

132 THOMAS A. BASS
documents in his house were to be given to Tam Thao. She was
the one who knew where they were hidden.”
At the end of the afternoon, Tam Thao takes my notebook
and draws a map of the neighborhood where they lived during
the war, with directions on how to find Pham Xuan An’s old
house. Giving the old and new street names, she tells me that
An’s house was at the end of an alley off Ngo Tung Chau Street,
which is now called Le Thi Rieng. His parents owned the house
next door, where his mother lived until her death. An lived with
his wife and four children in two rooms because, as Tam Thao
explains, “he was saving his money for when he was arrested.”
Only recently have we learned the identity of the man who
directed Pham Xuan An’s spying after he returned from America.
On the day he and Tam Thao drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels,
they went to see Cao Dang Chiem, a shadowy figure who
long held a position at the top of Vietnam’s intelligence services.
Living in a safe area outside of town, Chiem was the Viet Minh
police chief of Saigon by 1947. Earlier he had played an accidental
role in America’s decision to go to war in Indochina
when, in September 1945, Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey
became the first American killed in Vietnam. His death was a
mistake for which the Vietnamese apologized, but it set in motion
the next thirty years of warfare in Southeast Asia.
Colonel Dewey led the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
intelligence team that arrived in Saigon on September 4, 1945.
Charged with recovering two hundred and fourteen Americans
who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese, Dewey
met with members of the Japanese high command and with Dr.
Pham Ngoc Thach, who was serving as minister of foreign affairs
for the Viet Minh. Dewey, who had studied French history
at Yale and law at the University of Virginia, was the son of a
prominent U.S. congressman and, at twenty-eight, a distinguished
veteran of OSS operations in Europe. He and his
seven-person team were the only Westerners in Saigon, until a