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

68 THOMAS A. BASS
to work for the Communists. Among the crucial tips he gave
them was advance notice of the Japanese coup d’état against the
French. “He was the only source for this information,” An says.
“He contributed a lot to the revolution, particularly under the
Japanese occupation and the French.”
Nonetheless, when the Communists come to power in the
north, it was their turn to arrest Cao Giao and torture him for
having worked for the Japanese. Eventually he fled to the south.
Here Cao Giao got in trouble with Ngo Dinh Diem, another
collaborator with the Japanese who had emerged as America’s
ally against the Communists. On being released from Diem’s
torture chambers, Cao Giao went to work for Newsweek. He
was the inseparable twin of his fellow Vietnamese journalist at
Time, but while the discreet An never got in trouble with anyone,
Cao Giao was a lightning rod for suffering. By 1978 he was
being tortured again in Saigon’s infamous Chi Hoa prison, this
time for supposedly collaborating with the CIA. After four
years in prison, including thirteen months in solitary confinement,
Cao Giao was finally allowed to fly into exile.
While Cao Giao was a born storyteller whose round, nutbrown
face was invariably animated with a smile, his colleague,
the frail, stoop-shouldered Vuong, spoke in a cadaverous whisper
that made him sound as if he were trying to disappear from the
space in front of you. He had a head full of straight, graying hair
and the transparent, papery skin of an opiomane. Born in 1923
in Kunming, southern China, into a Vietnamese family who
worked for the French, Vuong was a brilliant student who passed
his high school exams in Hanoi before going on to study medicine.
In August 1945, after a brief stint as a censor, he left
Vietnam for Hong Kong. Then he traveled to Thailand, where
he became friends with Pham Xuan Giai, An’s cousin. While
Giai was attached to the Deuxième Bureau, Vuong was working
for the CIA, first in Thailand, Laos, and Hanoi, and then finally
in Saigon, where Giai recruited him to work for G5.