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

64 THOMAS A. BASS
bourgeois has a tail. That tail is a bourgeois lifestyle, an arrogant
and condescending speech and behavior toward the people, especially
poor people whom they call the lower class. Even if you
are clever enough to hide it, sooner or later the tail will protrude;
it’s very disgusting. You must find a way to cut it off.”
After this lecture, An reported to the docks every day to eat
lunch with the stevedores. This effort at worker solidarity was
guided by the motto of the “three togethers”: eat together,
work together, rest together. An thought he was making good
progress, until one day he revealed the second tail to be
chopped off.
An punched a Frenchman in the nose. The lout was abusing
some workers when An grabbed him by the neck and flung
him to the ground. Instead of being praised for revealing “the
tail of a patriot,” he was chastised by the Communists. “An intelligence
agent cannot be impatient and egoistic. It’s not permissible
to act like the boss defending his workers. Having
been charged with secret work in the bowels of the enemy, if
you show an unwillingness to associate with colleagues, turn
down bribes, refuse to go for drinks or flirt with girls, how can
you get anything done? Only a Communist guy would be so serious
and determined. How can you fight if you show your tail
like that?”
In spite of his freelance work at the post office for the Deuxième
Bureau, An was drafted in 1954 into the Armée Nationale
Vietnamienne. To avoid getting shot during the waning
days of the French colonial war in Indochina, he played on
the family connections by which business gets done in Vietnam.
He asked his cousin, Captain Pham Xuan Giai, for help. “He
was the head of the family,” An says of Giai, the eldest son of his
father’s elder brother. Eight years older than An, Giai was born
in Hué. Trained as a military officer by the French, he fought
alongside Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and then switched sides the following
year, going back to work for the French. Captain Giai