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

202 THOMAS A. BASS
Speaking to me in the schoolboy French he learned sixty
years ago, before lapsing into Vietnamese, Tu Cang explains how
he worked for the North Vietnamese Army, rather than the
southern forces supposedly directed by the National Liberation
Front. “The NLF was created for diplomatic purposes,” he
says. “It gathered together people in the south who weren’t
Communists. But it was under the control of the Party.”
“Did the southerners know this?”
“No,” he says. “Not everyone knew the NLF was directed
by the Communist Party.”
When I ask if I can see his famous K-54 Chinese semiautomatic
pistols, Tu Cang tells me that his guns, along with An’s
Renault 4CV, have been sent to Hanoi for display in the museum
of military intelligence on Le Trong Tan street. Unfortunately,
entrance to the museum is reserved for employees of
Vietnam’s intelligence services. Other than An’s car, which is
now up on blocks, the museum is filled with telescopes, radio
transmitters, decoders, and the camera An used to photograph
secret documents.
“Are there any poison-tipped umbrellas?”
“We are not like the Russians,” he says.
I ask about An’s two instructors in military intelligence, one
schooled by the Chinese, one by the Russians. “I don’t know
anything about Russians or Chinese,” he says. “Only the Americans
trained An. He was like me. I never studied intelligence.
I just did it. People knew how to keep secrets. That was the key
to our success. Our organization was simple. There was nothing
fancy about it.”
When I ask Tu Cang if he ever made any mistakes, like jeopardizing
his network by firing at American soldiers, he reaches
down to scratch his foot. Then he waves toward the horizon outside
the open door. “Mistakes were unavoidable,” he says.
I ask him if it was a good idea, when they were planning the
Têt Offensive, for Tu Cang and An to drive around Saigon