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

236 THOMAS A. BASS
steel-frame spectacles. “I don’t know how this story got out in
the open,” he says, obviously regretting that I know enough to
ask the question. “He would have been great if we had sent him
to the United States,” Tho says, indicating that it was not his decision
to hold him back.
I know before I ask that my next question will go unanswered.
“What exactly did An do for you?”
Minister Tho smiles and offers me another cup of tea. “An
had the best sources and access to secret information. He had
his ear to the ground like no one else in Saigon. If you wanted
to know what was happening, An was the man to ask. After
the war, we made him a general and a Hero of the People’s
Armed Forces. Without giving you any details, that alone should
tell you the importance of what he did for his country.”
At another meeting with Tho the following year, I ask him
to list Vietnam’s top spies. (At one point, the CIA estimated
there were fifteen thousand of them.) Heading Tho’s list is
Pham Xuan An, followed by Dang Tran Duc, also known as Ba
Quoc, who succeeded An in working for South Vietnamese intelligence.
Two entrepreneurial spies, Vu Ngoc Nha and Pham
Ngoc Thao, are listed in third and fourth place.
Vu Dinh Long, better known by his nom de guerre Vu Ngoc
Nha, was born into a landowning Catholic family in Phat Diem,
the North Vietnamese village that figures prominently in The
Quiet American. It was here in the midst of a pitched battle between
the Viet Minh and their Catholic opponents that Alden
Pyle and Thomas Fowler began their own fight to the death
over Phuong, “the most beautiful girl in Saigon.” It was in
the midst of the actual battle that Nha threw in his lot with the
Communists. At the urging of Ho Chi Minh, he became a secret
agent whose cover was ordination as a Catholic priest.
Nha was evacuated from the north with one million other
Catholic refugees who fled south in 1954. He picked grapes in
France and worked as a parish priest in Saigon until he caught
the attention of the Diem family and moved into Independence