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

178 THOMAS A. BASS
confound the enemy. In my New Yorker article, I wrote that An
had been awarded four military exploit medals. He did not
correct me, and it was only after An’s death, when his medals
were pinned onto a black field and framed under glass, that I
learned he had been awarded sixteen medals, fourteen of which
were associated with specific military operations. The medals
credit An with winning or helping to win numerous battles
that might otherwise have been lost.
An describes for me the trips that he used to make to the Cu
Chi tunnels. “I would go stay for a few days to write reports and
brief them,” he says. “When using secret ink on rice paper,
you can’t write very much. Another way to do it was to go to Cu
Chi and type up longer reports.”
He also typed reports at home, using a portable Hermes
typewriter bought for him by the Communists. “To keep my reports
from being traced back to me, the typewriter had to be
saved exclusively for writing these reports,” An says. “Between
thirty and a hundred pages, depending on the circumstances,
these were long-range reports on how the war and political situation
would evolve over the next few months. After the war
was over, I threw this typewriter in the river.”
The Communists also bought An a camera, a Canon Reflex,
which he used to photograph his reports one page at a time. He
left the film undeveloped, being careful to leave the leader
hanging out of the roll by not rewinding the film completely.
“This way, if the courier were captured, he could pull out the
film and expose it. He would probably be killed, but no one
would be able to read what I had written.”
I ask An if he ever photographed secret documents. “Yes,
sometimes I did this, but it was very dangerous,” he says. “These
documents were stamped secret, eyes only, top secret. You had
to be very careful about how you handled this kind of material.
They might be baiting you. Somebody hands you the document
and you take it home and photograph it. Suddenly the
police break into your house and arrest you. This is why I de-