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

222 THOMAS A. BASS
my dogs alive. All I could do was wait for someone from the jungle
to come out and recognize me.”
An and his mother moved into the Continental Palace
Hotel, where they occupied Robert Shaplen’s old room.
(Shaplen had pressed the key into An’s hand as he left the
country.) Eventually An moved into Time’s two-room office.
He was summoned for repeated interrogations by the police
until intelligence officials intervened. People began to suspect
that he was “a man of the revolution” when they saw him ride
his bicycle to the military supply depot and leave with bags of
rice and meat tied to his handlebars. They assumed, though,
that he was an “April 30 revolutionary,” someone who had
jumped to the Communist side only after the fall of Saigon.
Not even military officials as highly placed as Bui Tin, a
North Vietnamese colonel and intelligence agent, knew An’s
story. Working as deputy editor of the North Vietnamese army
newspaper, Tin rode a tank up to the Presidential Palace on
April 30. Accidentally finding himself the highest ranking officer
on the scene, he accepted the surrender of the South Vietnamese
government and then sat down at the president’s desk
to file a dispatch for his newspaper. Like most journalists newly
arrived in Saigon, the next thing he did was go looking for
Pham Xuan An. As Tin recalled, “On the morning of May 1, I
went to meet An at his office in the Continental Palace Hotel.
I had no idea at the time that he was a spy. All he told me was
that he was a correspondent working for Time-Life. He introduced
me to all the journalists in town, and I helped them
send their articles abroad. Three months after the end of the
war, I still didn’t know An was a spy.”
An was supposed to follow his family to Washington and
carry on his work as a Vietnamese intelligence agent, but this
assignment was blocked at the last minute. Hints of the power
struggle over An—between the military intelligence agents
who wanted to send him to the United States and reticent officials
in the Politburo—were revealed to Bui Tin only when