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

148 THOMAS A. BASS
one hundred thousand regional and village militia. “These numbers
are correct,” An says. “The Americans and Vietnamese
captured a lot of documents from the enemy. They gave them
to the CID [Criminal Investigation Department] to be translated.
I relied on the Vietnamese Central Intelligence Organization
[CIO] and on Vietnamese military intelligence,
Vietnamese military security, and the Saigon secret police to
show me this material, which I read and analyzed every day.” An
covered his tracks by publishing only information that was already
known in the south, and never anything that he got from
his Communist bosses. “It was a one-way street,” he says. “This
was for security reasons.”
“I couldn’t say I was using these documents from the CIO.
I had to say I was quoting ‘reliable sources.’ Communist documents
are reliable enough,” An says with a laugh, amused by
the thought of “reliability” in this most unreliable of wars. An’s
editorials also served to alert the Communists to what was
known about them in the south. “They should know that anything
I wrote about the Communists relied on captured documents.
They had to be careful. All the Communist resolutions,
for example, I know better in English than in Vietnamese. This
is the trouble with me,” An says, smiling.
An had another source of information that was even more
reliable than captured Communist documents. Every day, he
saw the raw intelligence data on military interrogations, including
interrogations of Communist defectors. These may not
have been useful for his daily journalism, but they were invaluable
for his spying. An kept North Vietnamese intelligence
apprised of every breach in their operations. He was the bell on
the American cat who, time and again, leaped into a Communist
nest only to find it empty. Soon after the Têt Offensive in
January 1968, a North Vietnamese agent named Tran Van Dac,
also known as Tam Ha, defected to the south. It was a serious
blow to the Communists. He was a high-ranking officer and political
commissar who knew a great deal about their strategy, par-