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

4 THOMAS A. BASS
almost impossible for us to imagine. In looking back, I see he
was a man split right down the middle.”
In his 1965 book on Vietnam, The Making of a Quagmire,
Halberstam, with unintentional irony, described An as the
linchpin of “a small but first-rate intelligence network” of journalists
and writers. An, he wrote, “had the best military contacts
in the country.” Once Halberstam learned An’s story, did he bear
him any grudges? “No,” he told me, when I called him to discuss
An’s wartime duplicity. “It is a story full of intrigue, smoke,
and mirrors, but I still think fondly of An. When you mention
his name, a smile comes to my face. I never felt betrayed by
An. He had to deal with being Vietnamese at a tragic time in
their history, when there was nothing but betrayal in the air.”
In 2005 I published an article about Pham Xuan An in The
New Yorker. Shortly after the piece appeared, I signed a
contract to develop the article into a book. What I thought
would be a simple assignment turned hard as I became enveloped
by yet more intrigue, smoke and mirrors. I began to
suspect that I had fallen into the same trap as An’s former colleagues.
They had swapped ignorance for willful ignorance and
remained charmed to the end by An’s smiling presence. Was he
a “divided man,” as Halberstam maintained, or was he a “man
of the revolution,” as the Vietnamese say, with the rest being his
cover? Was he an accidental Communist or a Communist tout
court, who worked at his job until the day he died?
As I dug deeper into this project, I realized that An, while
presenting himself as a strategic analyst, someone who merely
observed the war from the sidelines, was actually a master tactician
involved in many of the war’s major battles. He was an
award-winning soldier bedecked with medals, a central player
in a long string of military engagements marking Communist
victories and American defeats. An had not received four
medals—as I reported in The New Yorker—but sixteen. These
were not ceremonial citations. All but two of them were battle