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

The Spy Who Loved Us 235
the former Swiss embassy—I am ushered into a sumptuous reception
room on the ground floor, which is filled with mahogany
furniture and sculptures carved from rocks gathered at Vietnam’s
famous revolutionary sites. Dominating the far end of the
room is an altar covered with flowers and bowls of fruit. Above
the altar are four hand-tinted photographs of Tho’s mother
and father and his two famous brothers: Dinh Duc Thien, the
two-star general who helped build the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and
Le Duc Tho, the four-star general and Nobel Peace Prize winner
who snookered Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Accords.
Standing at the altar, Mai Chi Thao holds a lighted bundle
of incense in his hand and bows before his father’s picture.
Today is his father’s death day, not customarily a time for receiving
strangers, but Tho knows my stay in the country is
short. He places the incense on the altar and comes to shake my
hand. Dressed in gray slacks and a purple shirt, he is an imposing,
white-haired man with a direct gaze. Bigger than most
Vietnamese, Tho had an extra-large tunnel dug for him during
the ten years he lived underground at Cu Chi.
Schooled in all the best prisons in Vietnam, including what
was later known as the Hanoi Hilton, where John McCain
spent five years, and Poulo Condore, the Devil’s Island where
two-thirds of his fellow inmates died before he was released in
1945, General Tho is a war-hardened opponent who today is an
affable host, offering his American visitor tea and fruit. “It was
really hard work, but we had to do it,” he says of his effort to
raise the funds that sent An to America in 1957. “The Party had
very little money, but we thought the effort was worth it—An
was the first person we sent to America—to learn the culture
of the people who were taking over from the French to become
our enemy.”
“An was the perfect man for the job,” he says. “It was a
major coup for us.”
When I press Tho about the missed opportunity to send An
to the United States again in 1975, he stares at me through his