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

The Spy Who Loved Us 179
veloped the habit of speed reading these documents and returning
them immediately. This was sufficient for what I
needed. Remember, I worked in strategic intelligence. I wasn’t
a spy. Spying is a different thing. You steal documents. You
take pictures of documents. The material you send into the
field is transmitted verbatim. I wasn’t supposed to do this sort
of thing, unless they forced me to do it. This happened when
they didn’t trust my way of analyzing things. They would demand
proof, and I would give them some documents to support
my analysis. ‘Without the documents, we can’t understand what
you are telling us,’ they would say to me.”
As the war continued and An became increasingly important
and his situation ever more perilous, he became less
deferential to his superiors. He had access to secret documents
and was privy to every aspect of the enemy’s war plans and intelligence.
His Communist bosses—like intelligence agents
everywhere—were hungry for this material. When they pressured
An to steal it and film it, he refused. He was not going to
die for trafficking in pieces of paper marked top secret. Instead,
he would narrate what he had read and recount the facts
in reports written to Ho and Giap. They had to believe him, because
An’s word was gold.
“If they didn’t trust me I didn’t care,” he says. “For me it was
very simple. I worked for them. I worked for the right cause, for
the Vietnamese people. I didn’t work for any individuals. If
they didn’t trust me, I could just wash my hands and walk away.
Sometimes they said, ‘We trust you, but we need more detail to
understand what you’re saying.’ In that case, I might send them
pictures of the documents. But this was a dangerous practice,
to photograph documents that were never supposed to be removed
from someone’s office.”
According to An, “a spy faces three challenges. The first is
lies. He is in danger if the fictions and myths he is disseminating
are recognized. The second is mistakes. If you are captured
by chance, no one will save you. There is another kind of