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

172 THOMAS A. BASS
We enter a living room with shiny wood floors, big upholstered
sofas, and a wide-screen TV, to find Thuong sitting in his
chair. He is a sturdy man with a large, square face and broad
chest. But he is only half a man—his lower half has been
chopped off. They began with his right foot and moved in successive
amputations up from there. Thuong’s left leg is completely
gone. The right leg is cut to a knob that ends at the
knee. After each cut, he was given a chance to sell out, but he
maintained to the end that he was an illiterate farm boy who had
been roaming the countryside trying to dodge the draft. Thuong
sits ramrod straight as he describes how he became a Hero of
the People’s Armed Forces.
He was born in 1938 in the Mekong delta near the Cambodian
border. His mother was arrested by the French in 1947
and died on Poulo Condore. His father, a courier for the Viet
Minh, was arrested and died in prison under the Diem regime.
Continuing in his father’s line of work, Thuong joined the intelligence
services and started running messages for various
spy networks, including those of Vu Ngoc Nha and Ba Quoc—
two high-level spies in the South Vietnamese government—and
Pham Xuan An.
Thuong worked at the interface between the civilian couriers
who ran messages from Saigon to the suburbs and the armed
couriers who ran them through the jungle and across the Cambodian
border. It was a dangerous assignment, requiring alter -
nately that he melt into city crowds and crawl in darkness
through the Cu Chi tunnels. “I was the best person,” says
Thuong matter-of-factly. “They counted on me to run all the important
messages from the city to the countryside.”
In November 1962, he was put in charge of transmitting
An’s messages. For security reasons, he had limited knowledge
of who he was working for, and he still refers to Pham Xuan An
by his nom de guerre, Hai Trung. He had actually met An the
preceding year, when An was summoned into the jungle for one
of his debriefings. “In 1961, Mr. An was sent to the forest for