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

14 THOMAS A. BASS
An has pendulous ears, a high, square-domed forehead,
close-cropped dark hair, and lively brown eyes. His left eye is
slightly larger than his right, as if he were simultaneously taking
both the long and short view of the world’s affairs. Photographs
of him from the 1950s show him wearing narrow suits,
white shirts, and black trousers. An looks like one of the nice,
clean-cut young men who joined fraternities and mastered
social drinking. He was taller than the average Vietnamese, a
scrappy boxer and swimmer who once thought, after failing
his school exams for the second year in a row, that he might become
a Vietnamese gangster.
“I don’t want to talk about myself,” An says frequently.
“There is too much to remember.” Then without skipping a beat
he begins recalling in minute detail scenes from fifty years ago.
He leans forward in his chair. He gesticulates with his fingers,
which are long-boned and nearly translucent with age. He
shapes the air in front of him as if it were a doughy ball, taking
a punch at it from time to time. He divides his remarks into
Confucian triads and pentads while waving his fingers through
an arc that represents one of the déesses, the protective goddesses
to whom he credits his success in life. An can also talk for
hours about world events, drawing parallels between Vietnam
and the Iraq war (“techniques first developed in Asia have been
moved to the desert”) or evaluating the world’s intelligence
services (“The Americans are masters at gathering intelligence,
but they don’t know what to do with it”).
Pham Xuan An was born in the Vietnamese Year of the Cat,
at the Hour of the Buffalo, on September 12, 1927, twenty
miles northeast of Saigon, in the Bien Hoa psychiatric hospital,
which at the time was the only European medical facility
in Cochin China open to Vietnamese. As the firstborn son of
a cadre supérieur, an educated member of the colonial administration,
he received a French birth certificate, an unusual
privilege.