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BOOK REVIEW
Middle East A true espionage page-turner
Central Asia The spy who loved us by Thomas A Bass
World Economy
Asian Economy Reviewed by Alexander Casella
IT World
Book Reviews On the morning of April 30, 1975, as hundreds of North
Letters Vietnamese tanks were heading for the center of Saigon, Phan
Forum 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

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been one of his patrons. Why he himself had not left before the Bay,Phu
communist onslaught caused some perplexity among his Quoc,Mekong
Vietnamese friends but most attribute it to the confusion that Delta Land
prevailed at the time in Saigon. Tours,Trekking
Tours,Homestay
So An stayed behind and initially did not find www.vietnamtravel.ca
the going easy. As a Vietnamese journalist
working for an American news media, he was Vietnam Holiday
bound to be looked on with suspicion by the in Style?
new authorities and was repeatedly called in Local Full Travel
by the police for questioning. Then suddenly Services Agency
the harassment stopped and he was seen One Stop For
pedaling his bicycle through Saigon with full Vietnam Holiday,
shopping bags replete with goods that could
Book!
only be purchased at some of the special www.LUXURYTRAVELVIETNAM.Com
shops that the communists had set up for
their cadres.

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Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam 09-11-03 11:41 AM

Fly Cheap to
The rumor now spread among his friends that An was a so- Vietnam
called "April 30 revolutionary", one of the many who had rallied 70% off Vietnam
for the revolution on the day of victory. They were not wrong in
Airfare Compare
assuming that he was a communist. All they had gotten wrong
was the date. He had joined the revolution in 1945 and, seven
Vietnam Flights -
years later had been infiltrated into Saigon as one of the first Save
Vietnam.Flights.Asia.com
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.

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Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam 09-11-03 11:41 AM

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.

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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.

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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.

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