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

The Spy Who Loved Us 155
the person who gave the order. The same thing is true for the
Communist Party, for the atrocities committed on our side.”
If Deepe was a spunky welterweight, Robert Shaplen was a
world-class writer, producing a steady stream of articles and
books out of Asia for fifty years. Shaplen was the dean of the
American press corps in Vietnam, a big, gruff, gravel-voiced,
cigar-smoking man who was Far Eastern correspondent for
The New Yorker. He lived in a hotel room overlooking Hong
Kong Bay, except when he was in Saigon, where he stayed in
Room forty-seven at the Continental Palace Hotel. Shaplen
wrote four New Yorker articles a year, long, detailed, exquisitely
nuanced examinations of government and military policy, informed
by sources at the highest levels. “He was one of our favorite
journalists,” says former CIA officer Frank Snepp. “We
had orders from the top to give him unbelievable access to the
embassy and high-level intelligence.”
Former Newsweek bureau chief Kevin Buckley, who also
lived and worked at the Continental, describes how Shaplen,
who occupied the central room over the front door of the hotel,
opened his suite every afternoon for a cocktail party that drew
the most influential journalists in town, including Pham Xuan
An. “Following the daily military briefing at 4:45 P.M., we would
stop off at café Givral or Shaplen’s room or both,” says Buckley.
“He always had a bottle of Scotch, and there would be waiters
bustling in and out with ice buckets, glasses, and soda. He was
a great host.”
“Shaplen presumed that his room was wired better than a
recording studio,” says Buckley. “Living next to him were the
Canadian, Polish, and Indian diplomats who made up the International
Control Commission. The ICC had been set up to
monitor the 1956 elections, which were supposed to unify Vietnam.
When the elections were canceled, these guys had nothing
better to do for the next twenty years than eavesdrop on