In my last espionage blog I wrote about Pham Xuan An (1927-2006), a Time correspondent and “friend” to American and South Vietnamese military and government officials and journalists during the Vietnam War who was later revealed to have been a top Viet Cong spy.

I thought Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent (Smithsonian Books) was an uncritical and loving look at the spy. The book was biased, I believe, by Berman’s left-wing, anti-war views.

Thomas Bass’ The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game (Public Affairs) is a bit more balanced.

Like Berman, Bass interviewed An in Vietnam before the spy died. Bass writes that when An was working for Reuters in the 1960s: “He was the irrepressible man about town who knew everything about everybody and was seen everywhere, in all the city’s best restaurants and cafes, chatting and joking with everyone from generals and ambassadors down to the local cyclo drivers and dance hall girls. An established himself as the go-to man for newly arrived Americans who needed a tip. He was always generous with is advice and stories, always a good source of local color. The news reports filed out of Vietnam that started with an anecdote provided by An must number in the thousands.”

Bass notes that although An rarely claimed to have done anything more during the war than observe and analyze events, there were times that he “reached behind the curtain to adjust the scene.”

One example was the battle of Ap Bac in 1963, where the Viet Cong at battalion strength defeated the South Vietnamese, who were supported by American air and artillery. Bass writes that two Viet Cong soldiers received North Vietnamese military exploit medals for the victorious battle. One was the commander of the communist forces. The other was An, who devised the winning strategy.

An also helped plan the Tet Offensive in 1968, in which eighty thousand communists troops simultaneously attacked targets in South Vietnam. The communists briefly held the city of Hue, but the popular uprising the communists planned on didn’t happen and the overall attack was a military defeat.

Bass notes that the communists lost more than half of their troops in the south and perhaps a quarter of the North Vietnamese Army regular forces from the north.

“The offensive destroyed the Vietcong as a fighting force,” An admitted to Bass. “Then the United States introduced the Phoenix Program, which was extremely effective in assassinating thousands of Vietnamese communists and neutralizing the opposition in the south.”

But despite the military failure, Tet was considered to be a success for the communists as the fighting viewed on TV and the negative reports by anti-war journalists eroded the American public’s confidence in the war. Tet provided the communists with a major psychological victory.

More on An in my next blog.

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.

About the Author: Paul Davis has been a student of crime and espionage since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970 and served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. He performed security work as a young sailor and later as a Defense Department civilian employee. As a writer he has covered crime, espionage, terrorism and the military for newspapers, magazines and Internet publications.

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