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

156 THOMAS A. BASS
Shaplen’s telephone calls to the CIA. Whenever a question
came up that needed to be answered, Shaplen would get on the
phone and call down to the lobby. ‘Hello, this is Bob Shaplen,
get me extension 4—.’” Buckley lowers his voice and starts
growling in the stentorian whisper that Shaplen adopted when
speaking to his friends at the embassy.
Whether or not he worked for the CIA, Shaplen is known
to have loaned his services to the U.S. government on at least
one occasion, when he carried back-channel communications
for the State Department between Washington and Hanoi. By
mid-1966, the U.S. government had begun to fear for the welfare
of American pilots and other prisoners held in Hanoi. Captured
in the midst of an undeclared war, these men were labeled
war criminals—what today would be called “enemy combatants.”
Anxious to make certain that they were covered by the
Geneva Conventions and not tortured into making “confessions”
or brought to trial and executed, U.S. Ambassador-at-large
Averell Harriman asked Shaplen to contact North Vietnam.
Shaplen was dispatched from New York to Phnom Penh,
where he was instructed to find his old acquaintance Wilfred
Burchett. A Communist sympathizer and prolific reporter from
Vietnam’s “liberated” zones, Burchett was thought to be the
quickest route to Hanoi. Shaplen penned a letter detailing
America’s concerns and offered a deal, either medical supplies
or a reciprocal exchange of prisoners, following the release of
U.S. pilots. Two days after Burchett delivered Shaplen’s letter
to the NLF representative in Phnom Penh, he got a reply. Referring
to American prisoners as “criminal nationals,” the letter
declared, without naming a date, that the “prisoners [would] be
returned to their families.” (Another seven years would pass
before this happened.) Shaplen asked Harriman for permission
to write another letter thanking the Communists for “understanding
the humanitarian aspects of the problem.” He also
wanted to clarify that his original letter, although coming from a
“private person,” had been authorized by the U.S. government.