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

252 THOMAS A. BASS
An’s biographers argue over his legacy, debating whether he was
a romantic or a revolutionary, a lover of Americans or a Communist
committed to killing them, the old man is cutting a
caper and laughing at us, taking his secrets to the grave.
I ask An about another sensitive subject, the T4-TC2 affair,
which is named after two competing factions in the Vietnamese
government. The dispute pits pro-Chinese elements against
old Vietnamese patriots like General Giap, who claim that
China’s threats and bribes have cowed Vietnam into a vassal
state. As soon as I mention the affair, An walks over to the buffet
under the window and opens the drawer to remove a seventeen-page
letter from General Giap. “He is complaining
about T4-TC2,” An says of the letter. “I think he is correct, although
I don’t take sides. I was trained to be objective. What I
should say is that he is correct in describing his side.”
“I like politics. I don’t like politicians,” he adds. “If you
want to kill the dog, say the dog has rabies. This is what they are
trying to do with General Giap. What is the term they use in
English? ‘Character assassination.’ It is hard to know if the
Chinese have used bribes. This affair involves too many tricks.
What we know is that the Vietnamese have buried the story
about our war against China in 1979. We have wiped our memories
clean.”
An tells me that thirty generals have signed a petition in support
of Giap. “It is dangerous to take sides,” he muses, before
turning to look at me. “The way you write, you could go to
jail,” he says. “The reason we have no history of Vietnam written
by Vietnamese is that you can’t tell the truth. That’s why all
the books on my shelf are written by foreigners.”
I ask An about another sensitive subject. What would Vietnam
look like if America had won the war? Bui Tin has put me
up to asking this question. Tin is the North Vietnamese journalist
who accepted the surrender of the South Vietnamese
government and rose high in the Party ranks before defecting
to France in 1990 as a pro-democracy advocate. Several times