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

The Spy Who Loved Us 63
Following Tho’s speech, he asked the cadre to introduce An
to marriageable women in the Party. “They would introduce
me to several girls, and I would choose among them.”
“Did he introduce you to any girls himself?”
An chuckles at the thought of Vietnam’s future prime minister
functioning as a dating service. “No, he ordered his men
to do it.”
“They did introduce me to girls, and I liked one of them,”
An says. Before I can ask for her name, he launches into the
story of another relationship. “The first girl I loved was an
eleven-year-old classmate in Can Tho named Pauline Taget. She
was a beautiful métisse whose father worked for the police.
She joined the revolution. She was captured. Her father intervened
to release her. After that, she lived with a man in a relationship
organized by the revolution until he was killed in 1947
or 1948. At his funeral, Pauline insisted on draping over his coffin
the revolutionary flag, the red flag with the big star in the
middle.”
I ask An if he has any photos or documents recording the
moment when he joined the Party.
“No, you didn’t sign anything,” he says. “There was just
this small ceremony. That’s why many people later on had no
way of proving that they were members of the Party. They had
to go through the process all over again. My liaison officer,
Nguyen Thi Ba, had to join the Party three times, even though
she had been working for the Communists since she was a
young girl of eighteen.”
When not serving him tea and cakes and introducing him
to eligible girls, An’s Communist handlers could be stern. They
held one black mark against him. He was a landowner who
collected rent from peasants, a petit bourgeois oppressor of
the working class. As described by his Vietnamese biographers,
An had two tails, both of which he had to chop off.
“You are a petit bourgeois guy, but one who in his blood
wants to be a hero, who has a passion for the movies, so it’s easy
to botch the work,” An’s handlers told him. “The son of a petit