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

The Spy Who Loved Us 161
the CIA. Other friends in Hong Kong were Agency people.
People said, ‘Oh, he must be working for them,’ but I don’t
think this was the case. He traded in information, he breathed
it, he lived it. He would have been of incredible interest to the
Agency, but was he a spy? I don’t think so. For one thing, he was
never rich. What money he had came from The New Yorker.”
Peter Shaplen has another reason for doubting that his father
was a spy. “Bob couldn’t keep a secret. ‘Tell Western Union
or tell Shaplen,’ said one of his former wives. He lived big, he
lived huge. He was a large man, six feet three inches tall, weighing
two hundred pounds. He was a handsome guy with dark
hair, who sat down at his typewriter at 7:00 A.M. and worked
through lunch before heading off in the afternoon for a game
of tennis. He had a booming, gravelly baritone, made raspy
from smoking small cigars during the day and a big cigar at
night. He liked his Scotch, his cigars, his women. He loved the
life of a foreign correspondent. He relished the attention and
being at the center of things. We’re gossips,” says Peter Shaplen.
“That’s what journalists are, gossips.”
In the early 1970s, when Peter was beginning his own journalism
career, he checked in to the Continental Hotel, where
he was shown to his father’s old room. Soon he was surprised by
a steady stream of people knocking on his door—fixers, money
launderers, journalists, ladies of the night, and other traffickers
in the gossip that his father loved to retail. Word had got out that
“Shap-ah-lain” was back in town, and people presumed it was
Bob who had returned. Before he became ill during a visit to
Saigon in 1988 and was flown back to New York, where he
died of thyroid cancer, Robert Shaplen was writing one last
story out of Vietnam: an article on Pham Xuan An.
According to his son, Shaplen felt “crushed” and rejected”
when he visited Vietnam in the early 1980s and was told that An
did not want to see him. (An told me that he too felt crushed
when he learned that the government, without informing him,
had blocked their meeting. He rushed to Phnom Penh to catch