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The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game

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Americans can be, it seems, simplistic saps in both love and war. This is the message of THE SPY WHO LOVED US, a new book by Thomas Bass, which describes the amazing career of Pham Xuan An, a man who served as both a senior reporter for Time Magazine in Saigon, and one of North Vietnam's top spies.

An's saga is a cautionary tale, however, that raises serious questions about the American press during the Vietnam War. More on that later, but this review should note from the beginning that this book describes the life of an incredible man who successfully bridged the gap between Vietnam and America during one of our most contentious wars.

An was a man of conflicting loyalties. He was, most of all, a Vietnamese nationalist. But he was also a communist whose mission was to love America - in order to destroy its military adventure in South Vietnam. Because he became immersed in the American way of life (on orders from Hanoi, An spent two years at a California college in the late 1950's), he was able to provide valuable guidance to the North Vietnamese hierarchy in Hanoi (and elsewhere) as they fought to defeat America in Vietnam.

The author, Thomas Bass, a journalist and college professor, gives An full credit for the American defeat in Vietnam. An not only gave Ho Chi Minh valuable insights into the American psyche, the North Vietnamese agent also provided tactical and strategic planning for the battle of Ap Bac in 1963 (where the Viet Cong first defeated the South Vietnamese army that were equipped for the first time with U.S. helicopters) and the 1968 Tet offensive (An actually played a key role in identifying the targets in the communist attacks). In addition, An's analysis of American bargaining strategy at the Paris peace talks laid the basis for the eventual North Vietnam takeover of South Vietnam. That he did this while working full time for Time Magazine only enhances the legend that An, who died in 2006, left behind. Certainly Time Magazine founder Henry Luce must be spinning in his grave. One also has to wonder about Henry Kissinger's opinion of An's role in the war.

An got away with his secret role because he established himself as a savvy, bon vivant reporter working for foreign news organizations in the war-time Saigon. He had high-level contacts within both the South Vietnam and American communities (including a close relationship with American counter insurgency expert Edward Lansdale). He held court daily at such hangouts as the Continental Palace shelf bar and the Givral Café where key players from the government, diplomatic and press communities hung out to exchange gossip. And, of course, he provided valuable reporting of the war and Saigon politics for Time Magazine (An worked for Reuters before moving to Time).

But that was his daytime job. At night, An wrote lengthy reports (in invisible ink) analyzing events in Saigon for the Hanoi leadership who eagerly looked forward to his voluminous reports. A courier, and sometimes An himself delivered the reports to the Viet underground base at Cu Chi, which neighbored the massive U.S. airbase at Long Bien, 25 miles outside Saigon. An was extremely disciplined and smart enough to realize that he could not compromise himself by fiddling with the truth - in either of his jobs as a reporter or a spy. He constantly worried about getting trapped by a misstep, in either his reports or his activities.

One decisive intelligence report that originated at a Saigon dinner party alerted the North Vietnamese to the overthrow of Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnamese forces. The North Vietnamese evacuated their strongholds inside Cambodia so that the SVN invasion went for naught.

So how was it that Pham Xuan An was able to establish his dual role of a Time Magazine correspondent and his spying for North Vietnam? In the aftermath of the North Vietnamese victory, many have said that the American press in Saigon was both naïve and gullible, or both, to allow one of the highest ranking North Vietnamese agents to establish himself among their ranks.

If truth be known, however, An was an excellent reporter, for both Time Magazine and Hanoi, and his success in both journalism and espionage was due to the fact that he reported the truth. One has to wonder about the moral implications of deceiving the Americans in such a role, given that tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans were killed due to his undercover work. But one also has to remember that An was a dedicated Vietnamese nationalist who believed that communism offered the best avenue towards independence, even if it was dominated by the North Vietnamese.

Bass reports that some American reporters were suspicious of An (Ray Herndon of UPI, for one); others were disappointed, once they discovered the truth. Peter Arnett told Bass, "Even though I understand him as a Vietnamese patriot, I still feel journalistically betrayed. There were accusations all throughout the war that we had been infiltrated by the Communists. What he did allowed the right-wingers to come up and slug us in the eye. For a year or so, I took it personally. Then I decided it was his business.'

But there were several prominent Americans journalists who counted An as among their most important Vietnamese contacts. Bob Shaplen of the New Yorker was one of the most influential correspondents covering Vietnam who spent inordinate amounts of time with An when Shaplen was in Saigon. David Halberstam of the New York Times was another who was close to An, as was Neil Sheehan of UPI. These journalists were the most prominent critics of the American conduct of the war in Vietnam. Did An turn them against the war effort as part of his Hanoi portfolio? That's a subjective question, and we'll probably never know the true extent of his influence on the American journalists.

But the real failure by the Americans was not inside the media. One has to ask what happened to the American CIA that played a dominant role in the Vietnam War? How is it that the best and the brightest American spies failed to undercover a top agent who was operating right under their noses? Indeed Bass quotes American CIA agent Frank Snepp as saying that the U.S. intelligence service used An to feed information to American journalists. As such, An was the beneficiary of invaluable intelligence from the CIA itself -- which he, of course, passed onto Hanoi.

In his introduction to the book, trying to explain the man he has chosen to write about, Bass makes the following analysis that pretty well sums up An's role in the war:

"During the twenty years it fought the Vietnamese, the United States never understood the people or the culture of Vietnam...America's disregard for its enemy cost it dearly. It lost the war with fifty-eight thousand soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, and it lost its naiveté about its invincible military might. America's enemy did not make the same mistakes. The Vietnamese studied their adversary. They cultivated an agent who could think like an American, who could get inside the American mind to learn the country's values and believes...They needed a strategic spy, a poetic spy, a spy who loved Americans and was loved by them in return."

Bass's new book is not the only study of An's role in the Vietnam War. In 2007, Larry Berman wrote THE PERFECT SPY: THE INDREDIBLE DOUBLE LIFE OF PHAM XUAN AN, which gives perhaps a more strategic view of An's career as a double agent. Both Berman and Bass had direct access to An in the 1990's and early 2000's, so there are plenty of valuable insights in both books from the man himself.

Before I read this book I had great animosity for Pham Xuan An. But, after reading this well written account of his life, I've reconsidered. Now I think I better understand him and have a good bit of respect for him. This was such a great read. I finished it in just two days. It was that engrossing. The only question left unanswered is if Pham truly ended up regretting the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Did he expect more than his communist victory delivered? Other than that, a thoroughly researched, fascinating tale.

He passed information about American troop movements and strategy which he gathered while posing as a journalist for Time and other US media to the VC and NVA, enabling them to win several major engagements and kill thousands of US troops. The American journalists he worked with think there was nothing wrong with this and started a scholarship fund to benefit his son and enable him to study in America. This book inadvertently tells you an awful lot about the bias of the media in Vietnam which was a major contributing cause to the abandonment of South Vietnam and the ensuing misery suffered by millions of Cambodians. Laotians and Vietnamese which followed 1975. Don't forget them or the troops killed by Pham Xuan An's treachery when you read this book, as it is very one-sided. Ask yourself as you read through it what the author would have said about an ethnic German working for the US press in 1939-45 who passed valuable military intelligence on to Hitler.