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

The Spy Who Loved Us 141
market on Nguyen Hue Street, An would inquire curiously
about Herndon’s visits to the field. He was particularly interested
in descriptions of military units, their strengths and weaknesses.
“I had a car and driver in Vietnam, which I leased to the
Reuters bureau for two hundred and fifty dollars a month,”
says Herndon. “An would disappear with my car for several
days at a time.”
“‘I have gone hunting,’ he would say when he returned to
Saigon. Then he would present my wife and me with a leg of
venison or a piece of wild boar. Maybe it crossed my mind to
wonder if he was a courier, running antibiotics and other supplies
out to the Vietcong. My wife, who is Eurasian, was also suspicious
of An. He seemed to show up in too many places at once
and be too interested in observing what was happening. Of
course, our side was spying on us too. The CIA put an agent
named Don Larrimore on our staff. I caught him once inside
my apartment riffling through my telephone book. So we were
suspicious of everybody, An included.”
I had long wondered why An was called to the countryside.
Why make him cross enemy lines and report to Cu Chi,
a hotly contested war zone northwest of Saigon? He was sometimes
caught in crossfire, and once he had to spend the night
hiding in a ditch. “An was summoned to Cu Chi in the same way
we summoned our own assets to Saigon,” says former CIA analyst
and interrogator Frank Snepp, who now works as a TV producer
in Los Angeles. “This is what you do in the business.
You call people in for debriefing. It was a way to keep tabs
on him. You want to make sure he hasn’t been turned. You eye
him. You see if he’s still with you. It’s very dangerous, but that’s
what you do.”
An says he last went to the Cu Chi tunnels in 1966. After
that, with the 25th Infantry Division stationed there, it was too
dangerous. They had defoliated the jungle with herbicides and
flattened the trees with Rome plows. “Before 1966, I went
there all the time,” he says. “After that, we relied on couriers.”