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

The Spy Who Loved Us 139
importance of Ap Bac was that this is exactly what the VC did,
for the very first time. But they did it according to their own
carefully laid plan, not through being cornered and forced to defend
themselves.”
Following Ap Bac, An busied himself covering the other big
stories of 1963, including the Buddhist protest against Diem’s
increasingly repressive government. Monks began sitting in
the lotus position in Saigon streets, dousing themselves with
gasoline, and burning themselves to death. To amplify their
protest, they needed a journalist who could broadcast word of
impending immolations without tipping off the police. “Before
they burned themselves, the monks would ring me and give
me the story first,” An says. “I knew that someone was going to
die. If I reported it to the police, a life would be saved, but this
was against the rules. The source had given me the story on condition
that I shouldn’t reveal it before it happened. These are
the ethics of the press. You have to observe them, no matter how
tough it may be.” These are also the ethics of an intelligence
agent who knows the propaganda value of burning monks.
On November 1, the Diem government was overthrown in
an American-supported coup d’état. Ngo Dinh Diem and two
of his brothers were killed. The CIA officer supervising the
operation, with an open telephone line to the U.S. embassy
and forty two thousand dollars in Vietnamese piastres stuffed in
his pocket, was Pham Xuan An’s friend Lou “Black Luigi”
Conein. Three weeks later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated
in Dallas, Texas.
Technically, I may have fired him,” says Turner, revealing by
his choice of words that this is a complicated subject. “An
was the best Vietnamese journalist in town. He had a sophisticated
mind. He had the best contacts among the military and
intelligence communities. The Americans trusted him. He had
entrée to Colonel Lansdale’s outfit. He was my intelligence officer.
Things were extraordinarily devious in Saigon in those