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

54 THOMAS A. BASS
the Americans and the French that discussed intelligence and
apply them as best I could.”
While An describes this scene to me, his birds start screeching,
as if they are trying to transport us back into the jungle on
that fateful day. They sound like a mocking menagerie, hooting
like chimpanzees and meowing like cats. They even bark like
An’s dogs. When I listen to the tape of our conversation, I strain
to hear An’s voice through a nonstop chorus of peeping, chirping,
singing, calling. The birds repeat the same notes over and
over again, with one bird giving out what sounds like a mayday
distress call, “Help me, help me, I’m drowning.” A microphone
hidden in An’s wall would record nothing but this idiotic din of
screeching, babbling, cooing, complaining birds.
The first problem An confronted on slipping back into Saigon
as a newly recruited spy was how to avoid being drafted
into the French colonial forces. The Communists feared that An
would end up as a colonel—not high enough in rank to be a
good source of information. The sleepy world of the Indochinese
customs house yielded little news, so An began moonlighting as
a press censor at the Saigon post office. Here he was told to
black out the dispatches written for British and French newspapers
by Graham Greene, a “troublemaker” the French assumed
was working for British intelligence.
Sitting under the soaring iron columns and revolving ceiling
fans that decorated this impressive building designed by
Gustave Eiffel, An worked at the post office in the late afternoon.
Journalists posting stories from Saigon faced delays from
faulty transmissions and other technical problems, but their
biggest hurdle lay in the censor’s office. An, a self-taught English
speaker with a loose grasp of the language, was instructed to
censor dispatches from Graham Greene, one of the great literary
ironists of the twentieth century.
“The French gave us orders to watch Graham Greene very
closely,” An says. “He had worked for British intelligence dur-