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

2 THOMAS A. BASS
as the best news source in Saigon. He was called “dean of
the Vietnamese press corps” and “voice of Radio Catinat”—the
rumor mill. With self-deprecating humor, he preferred other
titles for himself, such as “docteur de sexologie,” “professeur
coup d’état,” “Commander of Military Dog Training” (a reference
to the German shepherd that always accompanied him),
“Ph.D. in revolutions,” or, simply, General Givral.
We now know that this was only half the work An did as a
reporter, and not the better half. An sent the Communist government
in Hanoi a steady stream of secret military documents
and messages written in invisible ink, but it was his typed dispatches,
now locked in Vietnam’s intelligence archives in Hanoi,
which will undoubtedly rank as his chef d’oeuvre. An wrote
four hundred and ninety-eight reports (the official figure revealed
by the Vietnamese government in 2007), averaging
about one per month, during his fifty-five-year career as an intelligence
agent.
Using a Hermes typewriter bought specially for him by
the North Vietnamese intelligence service, An wrote his reports,
some as long as a hundred pages, at night. Photographed and
transported as undeveloped rolls of film, An’s dispatches were
run by courier out to the Cu Chi tunnel network that served as
the Communists’ underground headquarters. Every few weeks,
beginning in 1952, An would leave his Saigon office, travel
twenty miles northwest to the Ho Bo woods, and descend into
the tunnels to plan Communist strategy. From Cu Chi, An’s dispatches
were hustled under armed guard to Mount Ba Den, on
the Cambodian border, driven to Phnom Penh, flown to
Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China, and then rushed to the
Politburo in Hanoi. An’s writing was so lively and detailed that
General Giap and Ho Chi Minh are said to have rubbed their
hands with glee on getting these reports from Tran Van
Trung—An’s code name. “We are now in the United States’ war
room!” they exclaimed, according to members of the Vietnamese
Politburo.