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

196 THOMAS A. BASS
than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and other targets during
the New Year’s cease-fire in January 1968. Planning for the
offensive had begun two years earlier, when the head of An’s intelligence
network, a forty-year-old major known by his nom de
guerre, Tu Cang, moved from the jungle into Saigon. Tu Cang
was a famous cowboy, a hearty, affable man, who packed a pair
of K-54 pistols and could plug a target at fifty meters with either
his left or right hand. A former honor student at the French
lycée in Saigon, Tu Cang had lived underground in the Cu Chi
tunnels for so many years that by the time he reentered Saigon
in 1966 he had forgotten how to open a car door. An replaced
Tu Cang’s jungle sandals with new shoes and bought him a suit
of clothes. Soon the two men were driving around town in An’s
little Renault 4CV like old friends.
Pretending to be chatting about dogs and cockfights, they
were actually sighting targets for the Têt Offensive. Tu Cang
proposed attacking the Treasury to get some money. “They
only hand out salaries there,” An told him. A better target
would be the courthouse, where lots of gold was stored as evidence
in the trials of South Vietnam’s legion of burglars and
smugglers. He advised Tu Cang to bring an acetylene torch.
Tu Cang and An isolated twenty targets in Saigon, including
the Presidential Palace and the U.S. embassy. Beginning at
2:48 A.M. on Wednesday, January 31, Tu Cang personally led the
attack on the palace, where fifteen of the seventeen members
on his team were killed outright. He himself barely escaped to
the nearby apartment of Tam Thao, where he fired shots out the
window and then hid with his two pistols held to his head, vowing
to kill himself before being captured. When soldiers rushed
into the apartment, Tam Thao convinced them that she was a
South Vietnamese loyalist and perhaps even the mistress of
the American officer—her boss—whose photo she prominently
displayed. Later that morning, Tu Cang and An drove around
the city, counting the bodies of the Vietcong soldiers who had
died in the attack. (To commemorate the role these two men