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

The Spy Who Loved Us 67
the interventionists, the Americans, while at the same time I was
working for them. But you can’t kill all the time. When the
war was over, these were the people I would have to live with.”
Among this farrago of spies were two men who would become
An’s fast friends. Cao Giao was a bespectacled man with
a wispy goatee who worked for the Communists. Nguyen Hung
Vuong, who had the caved-in face of an opium addict, worked
for the CIA. An and his colleagues spent so much time together,
palling around town and sipping coffee on the rue Catinat,
that they came to be known as the Three Musketeers.
They tipped each other jobs and information and remained
loyal friends throughout Vietnam’s numerous wars. In the beginning,
An played little brother to his more experienced colleagues,
as they taught him what they knew about the business
of spying.
Born in 1917 into a mandarin family south of Hanoi, where
his father worked as an official in the French judiciary, Cao
Giao was irrepressible and brilliant. He had a rapier wit that
spared no one’s feelings. In turn, every political party that came
to power in Vietnam would throw him in jail and torture him.
He never recanted, never shaved the truth. Up to the day he
died in exile in Belgium in 1986, he belonged to an intellectual
aristocracy, like a Renaissance courtier forced to flee from one
principality to another but always dawdling a bit too long at the
café, lingering over one final story, one last joke, so that time and
again he was captured by invading forces which always presumed
he was on the wrong side. “He was the kind of man
who goes to jail all the time, under any regime, just go to jail,”
An says, laughing at the thought of poor Cao Giao offending
everybody.
The first to throw him in jail were the French. Cao Giao had
allied himself with the Japanese when they invaded Vietnam.
With their slogans about Greater Asia and Asia for the Asians,
he thought they might hold the key to liberating his country.
“This was my first lost cause,” he quipped. Cao Giao then went