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

The Spy Who Loved Us 219
the final battles in the war which ended with the fall of Saigon
on April 30, 1975. An’s last deed in the war was an act of friendship.
Hours before the city fell, he arranged the escape of his
old patron, South Vietnamese spymaster Tran Kim Tuyen. In
Hubert Van Es’s famous photo of the last flight out of Saigon,
the final person climbing the rickety ladder up to the waiting
helicopter is Tran Kim Tuyen. Out of the frame, down below on
the street waving good-bye with tears in his eyes, stands Pham
Xuan An.
“Tuyen had suddenly appeared in my office,” An says. “He
had waited too long to get out, and now he was trapped. Maybe
God had decided that I had to help the man. I think he deserved
that I return the help he had given to me. So he was the
last man who stepped on the last CIA helicopter to get out. I
was not wrong,” he concludes.
In the summer of 2007, I met Vietnamese refugee Tran
Tu Thanh for dinner at a restaurant outside of Washington,
D.C. Thanh had worked for General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in police
intelligence. He interrogated captured soldiers, and, as a
friend of An’s, he had inadvertently provided him with some of
the information he sent to the north. The son of a math professor
who had once served as South Vietnam’s deputy prime
minister, Thanh was captured at the end of the war. He was imprisoned
and tortured for fifteen years. For four and a half of
these years, he was shackled at the ankle and held in a box the
size of a coffin.
“Why would An spend the last day of the war working so
hard to get Tuyen out of the country?” Thanh asks, as we begin
our dinner. He speculates that An must have had a good reason
for getting Tuyen removed from the scene. If Tuyen had been
captured and tortured, as he surely would have been, what
name might have come to his lips? This would have been embarrassing
for his former colleague and loyal assistant An. If all
that talk about An being a double agent were true, then Tuyen
was the best source for confirming these rumors.