BOOK REVIEW A true espionage page-turner The spy who loved us by Thomas A Bass
Reviewed by Alexander Casella
On the morning of April 30, 1975, as hundreds of North Vietnamese tanks were
heading for the center of Saigon, Phan Xuan An, the last remaining Time
reporter in Vietnam, sent out a last report before the line went dead: "All
American correspondents evacuated."
In the days prior to the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, An had used his
many American contacts to airlift his wife and four children out of the city
and have them resettled in the US. He had also pulled strings to ensure the
evacuation of South Vietnam's former spymaster Tran Kim Tuyen who, many years
before, had
been one of his patrons. Why he himself had not left before the communist
onslaught caused some perplexity among his Vietnamese friends but most
attribute it to the confusion that prevailed at the time in Saigon.
So
An stayed behind and initially did not find the going easy. As a Vietnamese
journalist working for an American news media, he was bound to be looked on
with suspicion by the new authorities and was repeatedly called in by the
police for questioning. Then suddenly the harassment stopped and he was seen
pedaling his bicycle through Saigon with full shopping bags replete with goods
that could only be purchased at some of the special shops that the communists
had set up for their cadres.
The rumor now spread among his friends that An was a so-called "April 30
revolutionary", one of the many who had rallied for the revolution on the day
of victory. They were not wrong in assuming that he was a communist. All they
had gotten wrong was the date. He had joined the revolution in 1945 and, seven
years later had been infiltrated into Saigon as one of the first agents of the
newly created Communist Military Intelligence Service.
For the next 23 years An operated as perhaps the single most successful
communist intelligence agent in South Vietnam. And while he had made all the
necessary preparation to leave Saigon in April 1975, including first evacuating
his family, he stayed behind only because at the last minute the order had come
from Hanoi: do not leave.
With the ending of the war, An no longer needed his cover and yet the truth
that he had not been just a journalist took years to surface. The first inkling
came in December 1976 when he was spotted in Hanoi in a full North Vietnamese
army uniform with the four stars of a senior colonel on his lapels. As, little
by little, his true role during the war became known, a wave of disquiet swept
across the community of American correspondents who had covered the Vietnam
War. Most knew An.
Many, including the likes of Robert Shaplen and David Halberstram, had relied
on him not only as one of their primary news sources but even more so as an
analyst of Vietnamese affairs. All held him in high esteem for his
professionalism and his impartial insights into Vietnamese politics. And now
the man they had grown to respect as an impartial South Vietnamese journalist
and, they all felt, harbored a genuine liking for all things Americans, proved
to have been one of their deadliest enemies.
Some refused to believe the evidence. Others felt betrayed. Others set out to
decipher the enigma of a man who, for 23 long years, at great danger to
himself, had not so much played a double role but had been, for all practical
purposes, two persons in one.
As snippets of An's real role slowly emerged one American journalist set out to
map the long road treaded by An and bring to life the man behind the myth. It
proved a long arduous task and while the many hours and days that Thomas Bass
spent interviewing An fail to cast a full light on Vietnam's master spy the
image they convey is that of a man who proved to be a masterpiece of deception.
Vietnam's communists knew the value of intelligence and in the early 1950s the
young An, who had joined the Viet Minh five years previously, was instructed to
move to Saigon and find for himself a nook from where he could report on
whatever came his way. The son of a fonctionnaire who had worked for the
French, An moved with ease in the Saigon establishment and soon found a job for
himself in the new South Vietnamese army. His communist handlers, however,
assumed that he would never rise beyond the rank of colonel and could be better
used elsewhere. It is also probable that they already had enough spies in the
army so they could spare An for other tasks.
With the Americans taking on an increasingly important role in the south, and
based on the principal that the first step in defeating your enemy is to get to
know him, the decision was taken ay the highest level of the politburo to send
An to the US to be trained as a journalist. It proved no easy task. An needed
an exit visa from Vietnam, a US sponsor and, last but no least, funds to pay
for his college fees.
The Asia Foundation, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cover organization
that encouraged young Asians to study in the US, provided the sponsorship. The
exit visa was obtained through family connections and the funds scraped
together by the Communist Party.
So in October 1957 a somewhat bemused An, funded by the Vietnamese Communist
Party and sponsored by the CIA, enrolled as a freshman at the local community
college in Costa Mesa, southern California.
The transformation of An over the following two years into some sort of
Americanized Vietnamese makes for some outstanding reading and, even more so,
how back in Vietnam he built on his newfound skills to create a unique niche
for himself.
Having first joined Reuters and then the team of Time magazine, he soon became
the one single superlative Vietnamese journalist whose judgment was never at
fault. As for the South Vietnamese military establishment, confronted with a
massive influx of Americans it could not relate to, it increasingly relied on
An to explain to them how to deal with these strange newcomers with alien
mannerisms and unpredictable reactions.
If a spy's net worth is only as good as his cover and his network, An was the
ultimate agent, were it only for the fact that he had no cover; he was a real
journalist and his writing never reflected any attempt to manipulate the news.
By the same token, the quality of his writing was lost on his employer, Time's
owner Henry Luce.
For the diehard anti-communist Luce, Time was not so much an information outlet
as a tool to combat communism. Bass explains in considerable detail how Luce
had actually put at the disposal of the CIA its network of offices and
correspondents, quite a few of whom were actually CIA agents operating under
Time cover.
It was the policy of Time not to carry any byline and all their articles were
drafted at their editorial office based on reports sent by their field staff.
The input from their Saigon office was massive and the reports they drafted -
and on which An had a considerable impact - were generally of the highest
caliber; unbiased and realistic albeit serving no useful purpose.
Luce was not the sort of man who would let facts stand in the way of his
ideology and the texts on Vietnam that appeared in the magazine bore no
relation to the reports sent in by the field. Bass surmises that the only ones
to read them were actually the CIA, and they were so professional that the
credibility of An could only benefit in the process.
As time went by An established such an extensive network of contacts in the
Saigon establishment that he was able to obtain almost on a regular basis the
transcripts of the interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres and thus was in a
position to inform the communists of any security leaks. Altogether over the
years, through a network of some 50 couriers, about half of whom were captured
and did not survive their interrogation, he provided his handlers with some 498
reports, some of which reportedly went as high as Ho Chi Minh, who delighted in
their content and the sharp analytical mind they reflected.
While Bass's book provides fascinating insight into the mind of an outstanding
man whom he interviewed at length, the real An, so he writes, emerged only
after his death in 2006 at the age of 79. An, as he had always explained, had
been honored for his accomplishments with four decorations. However, at his
funeral next to his coffin, no less than 16 military decorations were pinned on
a black cloth. Each medal had been awarded for outstanding service during a
specific battle or military campaign.
That An had played a role in the planning of the battle of Ap Bac where, for
the first time, the Vietcong held their ground and defeated a South Vietnamese
army unit was by now known. Likewise, the fact that he had helped in the choice
of targets for the 1968 Tet offensive was no longer a secret. But that he had
given the communists advance warning of the US invasion of Cambodia or of the
Lam Son operation in 1971, which had sought to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, was
revealed for the first time.
Clearly, An had not been just an agent but now emerged as a master tactician
who had closely participated in the planning of most of the major battles of
the war. But did this make An, who rubbed shoulders daily with Americans and
visibly established a genuine friendship with some, "anti American"?
The answer is probably as elusive as the subject of the book. Indeed, if being
opposed to the US intervention in Vietnam was no more an act of treason for a
US citizen than a reflection of a deep-rooted anti-Americanism by a foreigner
then An might well have "loved" America. Likewise, while An certainly brought
about the killing of Americans, his genuine liking for some things American was
undisputed.
In this sense, An did not have to have a split personality; and a genuine and
personal affinity for some Americans would in no way be incompatible with his
wish to rid his country of a destructive American presence.
To his credit, Bass, whose writing career was not exclusively focused on
Vietnam, does not digress from his subject leaving an astute reader with the
choice of reading between the lines or actually deriving from the book more
than meets the eye.
In 1966, US State Department official Doug Ramsey, while working in the
so-called Pacification program, was captured by the Vietcong. An knew and liked
Ramsey and not only ensured that the communists would not kill him but got them
to agree to exchange him for a Vietcong officer held by the Americans. But the
CIA blocked the exchange as it was currently interrogating that captive and did
not want to give him up. Ramsey ended up spending seven years in captivity.
Bass does not further dwell on the incident, leaving two questions unanswered.
Washington had the reputation of looking after its own but by sacrificing
Ramsey is this reputation not somewhat overdone? The second question has an
even more disturbing undertone; why did the CIA not agree to an exchange after
they had interrogated their prisoner? The answer is chilling but unequivocal.
Most Vietcong prisoners did not survive their interrogations; in other words,
they were tortured to death.
Another subject on which Bass does not digress is why An, in April 1975, was
ordered to stay in Vietnam rather than let himself be evacuated to the US where
he could continue to operate.
While the answers are peripheral to Bass' book, they are fundamental to what
Vietnam was all about. The Saigon regime had been thoroughly infiltrated by the
communists and it would have been inconceivable for them not to evacuate some
of their agents to the US at the time of the fall of Saigon and over the
subsequent years.
That some of the "boat people" were agents has not only never been
acknowledged, but is an issue that both the US authorities and the numerous
non-governmental organizations working with Vietnamese boat people have
studiously avoided even contemplating.
Granted, these would not be a threat to the US and their only function would be
to keep an eye on the various Vietnamese factions living in America, which, in
turn, would make them practically undetectable. But it would be in the order of
things that some of the most vocal exponents of the lunatic fringe of the
Vietnamese community in the US would be more than they appear to be.
Clearly this was not the mission foreseen for An, but then what was? During the
war years the communists, either relying on people like An who had been
"Americanized" or input by their non-communist third-force bourgeois allies,
had practically been able to read the mind of their adversary.
After their victory in April 1975, this was no longer a priority or even a
need. The revolution had won, the hardliners were in control, anything that did
not conform with the Stalinist ideological dogmas adopted by Hanoi was swept
away - and An with it. He might well have been a hero during the war, but he
had been tainted by decades of contact with the enemy and understood them too
well not to have become, in part, a part of them.
All his past services were not enough to cleanse him from the stain acquired by
association and he was, if not re-educated, at least sidetracked for a decade.
It was only with the coming of Renovation, Doi Moi, that his services to the
revolution were fully acknowledged and that he was recognized as the hero he
had been.
By then he was no longer of use to his communist handlers but he had earned for
himself a place in the pantheon of intelligence.
The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game by
Thomas A Bass. PublicAffairs; 1 edition (February 9, 2009). ISBN-10:
1586484095. Price US$26.95, 320 pages.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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So
An stayed behind and initially did not find the going easy. As a Vietnamese
journalist working for an American news media, he was bound to be looked on
with suspicion by the new authorities and was repeatedly called in by the
police for questioning. Then suddenly the harassment stopped and he was seen
pedaling his bicycle through Saigon with full shopping bags replete with goods
that could only be purchased at some of the special shops that the communists
had set up for their cadres.
