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

The Spy Who Loved Us 223
the government moved to get An’s wife and children repatriated
to Vietnam. Bucking the tide of refugees flooding out of
the country, An’s family would spend a year trying to get back
into Vietnam by means of a circuitous route that passed
through Paris, Moscow, and Hanoi. Nguyen Thi Binh, An’s
childhood friend, finally got them home. An’s family had been
camped for four months in the corridors of the Vietnamese
embassy in Paris, buffeted between Vietnam’s competing intelligence
and security departments, when one day Binh found
them sitting there. Vietnam at the time had two embassies,
one run by the Communists and the other by Ambassador
Binh, who was representing the National Liberation Front.
Following her work as NLF negotiator at the Paris Accords,
Binh’s last act of diplomacy was to arrange safe passage home
for An’s family.
As the last man remaining in Time’s Saigon office, An became,
by definition, bureau chief. His name remained on Time’s
masthead until May 3, 1976. He answered queries and filed reports
for a year after the fall of Saigon, but he wrote less and less
as the gray net of state security closed in on the city. “After 1975,
Saigon turned into Ho Chi Minhgrad,” he says. “They cut off the
teletype machine and made every story go through the PTT.
They crossed out this, crossed out that. The censorship was so
tight it was like back in the days of Graham Greene. I didn’t file
many stories because I didn’t know how to dodge the censors.
All they wanted was propaganda for the new regime, so I spent
my days going to cockfights and fish fights.”
The first official announcement of An’s wartime allegiance
came in December 1976, when he flew to Hanoi as an army delegate
at the Fourth Party Congress. Friends who saw him walking
around Hanoi in a dark green military uniform, which he
was wearing for the first time in his life, were astounded by An’s
transformation from journalist into beribboned hero. “So many
VC from the south were surprised when they saw me,” An
says. “They thought the CIA had left me behind.”