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

The Spy Who Loved Us 171
1961 to 1975, she picked up his secret correspondence and
film canisters. Eking out a living as an itinerant vendor of toys
and knickknacks, she lived away from her children and was
often sick with malarial fevers. “An, too, often suffered from
diseases . . . I felt great compassion for him,” Ba told Tan Tu,
who coauthored one of the three Vietnamese biographies written
about An. For years, Ba and An were the only people who
fully understood the reality of each other’s existence.
Using live drops, dead drops, couriers, and radio transmitters
hidden in the jungle that linked him through the Central
Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) to military headquarters in
North Vietnam, An was supported by dozens of intelligence
agents detailed to work on his behalf. Of the forty-five couriers
devoted to picking up his messages from Ba and running them
out of Saigon, twenty-seven were captured and killed. “There
were times before my departure on a mission when my wife and
I agreed, if I were arrested, it would be best if I were killed,”
An told the writer Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hai. “It would be more
horrible if they tortured me for information that put other people’s
lives at risk. Sometimes it got so dangerous that, while
my hands were steady, my legs were shaking uncontrollably. Despite
my efforts to keep calm, the automatic reflexes of my
body made me shiver with fear.”
On a steamy day in January 2006 my translator and I ride
our motorbikes out toward the airport to interview Nguyen
Van Thuong, one of An’s former couriers. In the scrub land
surrounding the approach to the main runway, we find a new
housing development full of three-story brick and stucco homes.
With so much money to be made in Saigon’s building boom, no
one has bothered paving the streets. A jet roars overhead with
its landing lights flashing. We stop at the big steel gate in front
of Thuong’s house and peer inside at a courtyard containing
lotus flowers and a carp pond. After being admitted by Thuong’s
wife, who carefully locks the gate behind us, we walk up a
flight of pink marble steps into a foyer filled with plastic orchids.