In my last two espionage blogs I wrote about Pham Xuan An (1927-2006), a Time correspondent and Viet Cong spy who befriended American and South Vietnamese military, government and journalist power brokers during the Vietnam War.
I thought that Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy was a fawning and uncritical look at An, but found Thomas A. Bass’ The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game to be a more balanced book.
Bass wrote that An’s intelligence reports were read by the top North Vietnamese leaders General Giap and Ho Chi Minh.
“We are now in the United States’ War Room!” Giap and Minh are reported to have said, rubbing their hands with glee.
That An was a good spy should not be surprising, as we helped train him. Prior to traveling to America to study journalism, An worked for the legendary General Edward Lansdale. Lansdale, an Air Force officer attached to the CIA, was an expert on counterinsurgency and was one of the most knowledgeable Americans about Vietnam. Lansdale and his crack team instructed An in psychological warfare and intelligence tradecraft.
An went on to betray Lansdale and many other American and Vietnamese friends. An also betrayed his journalist colleagues, yet many of them continue to admire him.
“I began to suspect that I had fallen into the same trap as An’s former colleagues,” Bass wrote in his book. “They had swapped ignorance for willful ignorance and remained charmed to the end by An’s smiling presence.”
Not all of his colleagues felt that way. Beverly Ann Deepe, a reporter with The New York Herald Tribune, was angered at An’s betrayal and Murray Cant, the chief of correspondents for Time, called him an SOB and said he’d like to kill him.
Zalin Grant, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, journalist and author of Over the Beach: The Air War in Vietnam and Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam, wrote that he thought An was a communist hero, but not an American hero.
When an excerpt from Bass’s book appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 and quoted journalists singing An’s praises, Grant wrote a letter to the magazine editor.
“It was one thing to have been against the Vietnam War – many of us were,” Grant wrote. “But quite another to express unconditional admiration for a man who spent a large part of his life pretending to be a journalist while helping to kill Americans.”
Joseph Goulden, in his Washington Times review of Berman’s book on An, wrote that a thought kept crossing his mind as he read the book.
“Would the journalists who now praise An as a patriot be equally forgiving of a colleague who turned out to be working for the CIA at the same time he was reporting on the war?” Goulden asked. “Think about it,” he added.
This is Part III of a three-part series. Read Part II and Part I.
Paul Davis also writes an American Crime blog for GreatHistory.com. His web site is http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/site/ and his e-mail address is daviswrite@aol.com.
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Larry Moore said:
It may surprise you, but many of us who fought the war thought many American Journalist were spies for the NVA. I recall an aerial photograph of my base camp in Tay Ninh Provence in Time Magazine. It seemed to many of us that the enemy didn’t need to use their agents. Why risk them when they had American Journalist doing the work for them. I will also never forget the greatest agent they had. Walter Cronkite did the NVA and the Viet Cong the best service possible. After Tet 68 when we had them on the ropes, he and Jane gave them the will to carry on by declaring the war unwinable by the U.S. Years later the North said that they thought they were beaten, untill Uncle Walter and Jane renewed thier hopes. Beware the Media.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am