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

160 THOMAS A. BASS
being a journalist who, though he works for the Americans, is
also trusted by the Vietnamese, makes a point of visiting at
least five such places each morning before he heads for Givral;
then, after lunch, he goes to the official American and Vietnamese
briefings and back to Givral. ‘It takes a long time to
build up your sources,’ he says. ‘You have to be frank and sincere,
and you have to protect your sources. You must also do
them favors—tell them things they want to know, buy them
lunches and dinners, give them Têt gifts. Saigon operates in this
pattern of social circles. If you’re not qualified for one particular
circle, you won’t be accepted in its restaurant. The people
will just ignore you. Journalists—the good ones—are the most
useful informants, because they are in a position to hear things
from so many different sources. The whole thing is like a school.
You can graduate from one circle to another, just as you would
from one class to another, once you’ve passed your tests.’”
In his book Bitter Victory, which he wrote after traveling
through Vietnam and Cambodia in 1984, Shaplen refers to An
as “surely one of the best-informed men in town. . . . In our conversations
over the years, often lasting for hours, I discovered
that the facts and opinions he furnished about the Communists,
the government, and the many contending individuals and
groups—including Buddhists and Catholics who opposed both
sides in the conflict—were more on the mark than anything I
could obtain from other sources, not excluding the American
Embassy, which often knew surprisingly little about what was
going on among the non-establishment Vietnamese.”
“Pham Xuan An was one of the great double agents of the
twentieth century, maybe of all time,” says Peter Shaplen,
Robert’s son, who became a journalist and producer for ABC
News. “He had entrée to all the high-level sources in Vietnam.
The country consisted of a multitude of strange, shadow-like
connections, and An was at the center of all of them.”
Peter describes to me how his father, like An, was well connected.
“When he went to Washington he would see friends at