True Spy Stories Behind ‘The Sympathizer’

The acclaimed novel, now a gripping HBO serial drama, tracks with some real and little known spy vs spy intrigue

Readers and critics the world over, but especially in America, have been dazzled by The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s deeply nuanced, Pulitzer Prize winning spy novel about a conflicted communist double agent ordered to accompany a South Vietnamese general fleeing Saigon at the war’s chaotic end. His mission: to keep an eye on anticommunist exiles in California. 

Now finding new admirers as a dramatic series on HBO, its dreamy and even hallucinogenic passages could well lead viewers to think Nguyen’s gripping story, narrated by its troubled hero, is mostly, if not entirely, made up. A key plot line in the novel, however, is drawn from true events that were described by a retired North Vietnamese spymaster in a memoir published in Hanoi several years ago—a  memoir I was lucky to obtain, and a general that I was privileged to meet, in his home in 2017.