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

48 THOMAS A. BASS
puppets were prone to cutting their strings and dancing to
their own tune.
When France dispatched its best general, Jean de Lattre de
Tassigny, to carry out this new plan for fighting the Viet Minh,
An and his fellow students met de Lattre in 1950 with another
round of street protests. “I was one of the organizers. Because
I knew how to dodge the police, I was not arrested or killed. I
was lucky. Many of the other organizers were not so lucky.”
It was during the Tran Van On demonstrations that An
began working with Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, a French-trained
medical doctor and Communist Party member who was “in
charge of intellectual proselytization and student politicization”
in Cochin China. A specialist in treating tuberculosis,
Thach went on to become Ho Chi Minh’s personal physician
and North Vietnam’s minister of health. (The number one
cause of death for Communist soldiers during the French and
American wars was malaria. Thach would die of malaria in
1968 while he was in the jungle searching for a cure.)
An had been introduced to Thach by a fellow student, Do
Ngoc Thanh, better known by his alias Ba Hoc Sinh. “He was
the leader of the student group in Saigon, before he was captured
by French security. They tortured him to death and threw
his body in the Saigon River. I was very upset when my friend
was killed.” A member of the Communist Party since the age
of seventeen, Ba tutored An in socialist ideology. He was also
a member of the Marxist Club in Saigon, which met at the
house of French educator Georges Boudarel. Later Boudarel
went into the jungle to join the Communists, where he too
worked for Dr. Thach.
“Ba gave me all sorts of books published by Editions Sociales
in France. The first book I read was L’Economie. Then
I read about the history of the Bolshevik Party and Leninism. I
wasn’t a member of their Communist reading group, so I read
all these books on my own.