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

66 THOMAS A. BASS
revolution and the job of being a journalist,” An told writer
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hai. “These two professions were very contradictory,
but also very similar. The intelligence job involves collecting
information, analyzing it, and jealously keeping it secret,
like a cat covering its droppings. The journalist, on the other
hand, collects information, analyzes it, and then publishes it to
the world.”
In addition to the writings of Sherman Kent, An was given
Paul Linebarger’s classic text, Psychological Warfare (1948).
“The Communist magic is a strong, bad magic,” writes
Linebarger of the “hostile operators” at work in psywar. “Psychological
strategy is planned along the edge of nightmare.” As
a quadruple agent who was moonlighting for France’s Deuxième
Bureau while working for his cousin’s indigenous Vietnamese
intelligence organization and its CIA sponsor, and at the
same time reporting to his Communist handlers, An was beginning
to live along the edge of his own personal nightmare.
“I was never relaxed for a minute,” he says. “Sooner or later as
a spy, you’ll be captured. I had to prepare myself to be tortured.
This was my likely fate.”
It was scant solace that most of An’s colleagues in G5 were
in a similar predicament. “The guy in the office who worked for
the CIA was fighting against my cousin, who worked for the
Deuxième Bureau. They were keeping track of each other’s
activities, reporting back to their bosses on what was happening.
But they were good friends. They played around all the time.
This is the Vietnamese way, pure Vietnamese. We were thrown
together like a bunch of crabs from the world’s five oceans.”
“When we weren’t spying on each other, we smoked opium
and played together as friends. That was just the way things
worked. I had to compartmentalize. It was hard. First you do
it by reflex, and then, after a long period of time, you become
accustomed to it. I always had to be vigilant. My cousin, my
boss, was pro-French. So I had to pretend to be on the French
side, while I was actually against the French. I was also against