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

The Spy Who Loved Us 163
with his Chinese goatee and silver spectacles. Nguyen Dinh Tu,
a journalist for Saigon’s Chinh Luan newspaper, holds his pipe
in his hand, and Nguyen Hung Vuong, Shaplen’s assistant,
smiles a toothy grin from the caved-in face of an opium addict.
On one of my trips to Vietnam I gave An a copy of Avedon’s
book. Together, we looked at the photograph of him with
Shaplen, and then An got up to riffle through a drawer, where
he retrieved a small black-and-white print, another shot from
that day’s session, given to him by Avedon. When I asked An to
tell me about the published photo, he described the twentyseven
members of the Communist Party in Cao Giao’s family and
Vuong’s work for the CIA, which resulted in his being arrested
in 1978 and tortured for more than four years in Saigon’s Chi
Hoa prison. “Shaplen got all his information from the Three
Musketeers,” An says, referring to himself, Cao Giao, and Vuong.
“He used all three of us because we covered every angle available.
The information got funneled into Radio Catinat and then
was given to Bob for his articles in The New Yorker.”
The truth of An’s statement is revealed when one consults
Shaplen’s notebooks. They show that page after page of Shaplen’s
minutely noted conversations with Pham Xuan An were
redacted and published in The New Yorker as part of Shaplen’s
analysis of what was happening in Vietnam. There is nothing unusual
about this. Shaplen had a good source, and he used it.
After the war, Frank Snepp broadcast an allegation that
Shaplen’s reporting was “shaped” or manipulated by the CIA.
He claimed that Shaplen was one of the Agency’s “favored”
journalists. “We would leak to them on a selected basis, draw
them into our trust and into our confidence, and then we
could shape their reporting through further leaks because they
trusted us.”
In a statement released to the New York Times in Hong
Kong, Shaplen called Snepp’s accusation nonsense. “I, at no
time, accepted at face value what anyone in the agency, Snepp