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

170 THOMAS A. BASS
loved both of them. When I was over there with the family, the
dogs were very much present, and An wanted them that way,
which is another reason why he seemed so American.”
“An had come from a wealthy landholding family in the
delta. We were told he had lost his land to the Vietcong, and
this provided An with a perfect cover. He could and did sound
anti-Communist.”
“Did he tell you this story?” David Felsen asked McCulloch
in their taped interview.
“I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember if he told us that
story, or if it came from somewhere else,” says McCulloch.
One reason An refrained from joining what McCulloch calls
the “beery society” of American correspondents in Saigon
was the fact that he had two jobs—a day job at Time and a
night job that involved photographing documents and writing
reports. After his children went to sleep, An transformed his
two-room house and bathroom darkroom into a news bureau of
his own. As his dogs guarded the door, he used a camera and
lights bought for him by the Communist Party to work through
the night photographing documents slipped to him by his
friends in the Vietnamese intelligence agencies and the police.
In the morning, he disguised his film canisters to look like nem
ninh hoa, grilled pork wrapped in rice paper, or he hid them in
the bellies of fish that had begun to rot. More fish and nem
would be piled into baskets that looked like the offerings presented
at a Buddhist funeral. When An left his house and drove
to the horseracing track where he walked his German shepherd
every morning, he would deposit his nem canisters in an empty
bird’s nest high in a tree. For larger shipments, he hid his rolls
of film under the stele of what he pretended was a family grave.
An’s wife sometimes followed him at a distance. If he were arrested,
she would alert his couriers.
Throughout his career, An worked with Nguyen Thi Ba, a
female courier who wore her hair pulled into a bun. From