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

276 NOTES
country’s high officials. The surveillance he faced was standard
operating procedure for an intelligence officer with
security clearances. Apart from his military service in 1945,
An had never worn a uniform or saluted commanding officers.
He may have been irked about restarting this business
in 1978, but his being sent to Hanoi’s Nguyen Ai Quoc
Political Institute was an honor comparable to enrolling for
a year at the U.S. Army War College or Saint-Cyr. It signaled
that An was beginning to move up the ranks into the general
staff.
The Vietnamese who make this argument imply that
An, after his cover was blown in 1975, adopted a second
cover—the face he presented to Western visitors as an accidental
Communist who remained steadfast in his love for
the West. An neglected to mention to these visitors that he
was still a working intelligence agent and Communist Party
member, and none of his friends seems to have inquired
too deeply about what exactly he was doing for the last thirty
years of his career as a spy.
The contrary view is argued most forcefully by An’s
friend and fellow journalist Bui Tin, who was himself a
colonel and high-ranking Party official until he defected to
France in 1990. During the year that An was enrolled at
the Nguyen Ai Quoc Political Institute, he spent his Sundays
at Tin’s house in Hanoi lunching, napping, and complaining
about the curriculum, which Tin describes as “a steady diet
of political cant and Communist propaganda.”
According to Tin, An’s military promotions came late
and begrudgingly. (Even the dates of these promotions are
a matter of dispute.) From 1945 to 1947, An was a battalion
commander fighting the French in the south, Tin says. By
1955 he held a rank in the Communist forces equivalent to
that of major. He remained at this rank for the next twenty
years, while working as Vietnam’s preeminent spy. According
to Tin, An was promoted to Trung Ta, Lieutenant