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

230 THOMAS A. BASS
While we talked so amiably, I also had the feeling that he was
monitoring our conversation, recording it in his head so faithfully
that he could play it back later word for word. Sometimes,
the following day, or even two or three days later, he would
return to something he had said and clarify or correct it. Sometimes
he asked me not to repeat something he had said, which
made me wonder why he said it in the first place. As An wrote
to his old college girlfriend Lee Meyer, after she got in touch
with him and they began corresponding in 2000, “I have not
written anything worthwhile for the last twenty five years but
[have spent my time] yakking and yakking with former foreign
colleagues who have happened to come here to visit with me.”
In 1997 the Vietnamese government apparently denied An
permission to visit the United States for a conference at the Asia
Society in New York, to which he had been invited as a special
guest, and it was not until March 2002 that the seventy-fouryear-old,
emphysema-stricken general was supposedly allowed
to retire. (He “retired” again in July 2005, but he was actually
working up to the day he died.) “They wanted to control me,”
he says. “That’s why they kept me in the military so long. I talk
very wildly. They wanted to keep my mouth shut.” All we can say
for sure is that for at least thirty years after the end of the war
An was still an active member of Vietnam’s intelligence service.
There was often a touch of bitterness in An’s voice when he
talked about life in postwar Vietnam. The government could be
stupid or corrupt. The opportunity to build a united, prosperous
Vietnam had been squandered on ideological blunders,
like the decision in 1978 to nationalize the rice markets and
seize the property of urban merchants, which resulted in a
flood of ethnic Chinese boat people fleeing the country. If An
occasionally criticized Vietnam’s party cadre, he reserved his
fiercest comments for China, which he considered an everpresent
danger and the worst colonial meddler in Vietnam’s
history. It was China in the 1950s that had forbidden North Vietnam
from launching the war against Diem and the Americans.