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

The Spy Who Loved Us 231
While An watched his fellow revolutionaries in the south get
wiped out, the Vietnamese Communist Party had held back, at
China’s insistence. It was only when the southerners began attacking
Diem on their own without Hanoi’s approval that the
north belatedly jumped into the battle. “The Chinese were
afraid of getting their nose bloodied, as in Korea,” An says.
“Only when the Americans escalated were they forced to support
us. But we Vietnamese keep our mouths shut. We are so
damn afraid of big brother,” An says, using Vietnam’s familial
term for its huge neighbor to the north.
By 2002, the year of An’s first official retirement, the Vietnamese
Communist Party considered him sufficiently accessible
to commission a biography, Pham Xuan An: Ten Nguoi Nhu Cuoc
Doi (Pham Xuan An: A Life Like His Name). The title of the book
plays on the word an, which in Vietnamese means “hidden.” An
dodged most of the questions put to him by the book’s author,
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hai, about what he had actually done during
the war, but Hai was an energetic reporter who tracked down An’s
colleagues and collected information that An himself would not
divulge. Her book appeared at the same time as a fifty-three-part
series of newspaper articles published in Thanh Nien, official
newspaper of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League. An
English translation of some of this material was published in
2003 as Pham Xuan An: A General of the Secret Service. A third
biography, Nguoi im Lang (The Silent One), was written by author
Chu Lai for Tong Cuc II (TC2), the Vietnamese intelligence
service. Another book-length series of articles was
published in Vietnam News in 2007, and Thanh Ninh in May
2008 began producing a second series of articles on Pham Xuan
An. In the meantime, two biographies have been published in the
West: Un Vietnamien Bien Tranquille (The Quiet Vietnamese), by
former Le Monde reporter Jean-Claude Pomonti, and Perfect
Spy, by American professor of government Larry Berman.
After he retired, An also began to appear on television and
in movies. An hour-long appearance on a Vietnamese talk show