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

224 THOMAS A. BASS
Nguyen Khai, the well-known Vietnamese author who
would later write a novel about An, was one of these people.
“You belong to the revolution!” he exclaimed. “I belong to
everything,” An answered. “The French, the Americans, and
now the revolution too.”
As hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese disappeared into
prisons and labor camps, An was also sent to what he jokingly
called “reeducation.” In August 1978, he was enrolled for ten
months’ instruction at the Nguyen Ai Quoc Political Institute
in Hanoi. This was a training course in Marxist-Maoist thought
for high-level cadres. “I had lived too long among the enemy,”
he says. “They sent me to be recycled.”
Always a bad student, An finished near the bottom of his
class. “They didn’t like my jokes,” he says of the dour northerners
who were trying to teach him to speak the “new” Vietnamese
full of political terms borrowed from China. An suffered through
the bone-chilling rains of a Hanoi winter, sleeping on a wooden
bed with a cotton mattress. “I wore a Chinese cotton jacket that
made me look like a mummy. I asked for a Russian jacket but
I was still cold, so I went back and asked for a one hundred and
eleven degrees centigrade jacket. ‘What’s that?’ asked the head
of the institute.’ ‘Three girls,’ I said, ‘one sleeping on my right,
one on my left, and one on top of me.’”
“They didn’t like me at all,” An says of his political reeducators.
“But I haven’t made a big enough mistake to be shot yet.”
An was put in the political deep freeze for a decade. He was
forbidden to meet with former American colleagues visiting
Vietnam, and speculation abounds about why he was shuffled
into seclusion. He was too close to the Americans, too fluent,
and too well versed in Western politics. He had allowed spymaster
Tuyen to escape. He refused to finger Vietnamese colleagues
who had worked for the CIA. Perhaps, as An himself was
heard to complain, the Communists considered him a rentier
who had collected money from the peasants living on his land.