Re: Time Reporter during Vietnam was Double Agent - Duh!
Alvin E. Toda
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902279.html
>
> Agent Provocateur
> The charming man who explained Vietnam to Americans was working for
> the other side.
>
> By Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser
> Sunday, July 22, 2007; Page BW04
>
> PERFECT SPY
>
> The Incredible Double Life of The Incredible Double Life of
>
> Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter
>
> and Vietnamese Communist Agent
>
> All the American journalists in Saigon knew Pham Xuan An, a ubiquitous
> presence in our midst, a fixture at Givral's -- the café on Tu Do
> Street in the center of town where the gossip was thick enough to pick
> up with chopsticks -- and one of the best Vietnamese explainers of
> Vietnam to Americans. Soon after I arrived in Saigon in March 1969,
> Robert Shaplen, the New Yorker's Asian correspondent, advised me to
> get to know An because he knew everybody. I followed Shaplen's advice.
>
> Every American news organization with a Saigon bureau had one or more
> Vietnamese journalists on retainer to help us hapless correspondents,
> almost none of whom spoke any Vietnamese or knew the country's history
> and politics. Most of these people labored anonymously, but because he
> was so good and so useful, An's employer, Time magazine, put his name
> on its masthead and treated him as a full-fledged correspondent. But
> An, a garrulous charmer, was eager to help everyone, not just Time
> correspondents. He always seemed available for a conversation.
>
> One of his biggest assets was his excellent English. In the 1950s An
> had studied journalism and politics at Orange Coast College in Costa
> Mesa, Calif. Today Orange County is a center of Vietnamese-American
> life, with hundreds of thousands of residents who came from Vietnam or
> were born to those who did, but An used to joke that he had been the
> first Vietnamese to live in the county. There he mastered the English
> language and learned a lot about Americans, too.
>
> An's many successes in life grew from his ability to please people who
> could help him, including the South Vietnamese government officials
> who decided to send him to California. When I first knew him, he
> seemed like a classic example of a Vietnamese type: a resourceful
> entrepreneur who could make his way by making the right friends.
>
> But all of us who worked with him had to radically revise our
> impressions in the late 1970s, when it became obvious that the An we
> knew had been an invention. An, it turned out, had been working
> throughout the war, and back to the 1940s, for the communists. He was
> a spy -- the perfect spy, as Prof. Larry Berman of the University of
> California at Davis argues. After reading this book, it is difficult
> to dispute that characterization.
>
> An had many American friends who were or became famous writers, from
> Shaplen and David Halberstam to Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow, but
> for reasons he has taken to his grave, it was Berman in whom he
> confided the aspects of his secret life that none of us previously
> knew. The two met in Saigon -- now technically Ho Chi Minh City,
> though still Saigon to the natives -- in 2001. They became friends and
> then collaborators on this book.
>
> Berman is no literary stylist. John le Carré could have turned this
> story into something Smiley would have envied; Berman tells it in Joe
> Friday fashion. Nor did An ever relinquish control, and Berman readily
> acknowledges that An held back some of his secrets. An also put events
> in the best possible light. That said, this is an extraordinary story,
> one that offers new explanations of several key events of the war. In
> each case, we learn of a critical role played by Pham Xuan An.
>
> Because everyone believed that An was an anti-communist Time magazine
> correspondent, he had extraordinary access to information from both
> Americans and South Vietnamese. He used this access ingeniously. Three
> examples:
>
>
> Pham Xuan An's press card from 1965
> Pham Xuan An's press card from 1965 (Charles Dharapak / Associated
>
> Early in the war, before the arrival of U.S. combat forces, American
> advisers to the South Vietnamese helped the army of President Ngo Dinh
> Diem devise new tactics for fighting Vietcong guerrillas with the
> assistance of American helicopters, potentially a powerful weapon in a
> guerrilla war. An learned all about the new tactics from South
> Vietnamese and American sources and conveyed details to his masters in
> the North. The generals in Hanoi helped Vietcong commanders develop
> countertactics that were tested in one of the most important battles
> of the early war, at the village of Ap Bac just 30 miles south of
> Saigon. In January 1963, Vietcong forces clobbered the South
> Vietnamese in that engagement, shot down five U.S. helicopters, killed
> three American advisers and wounded five more. An's information had
> been critical.
>
> In late 1967, An's masters told him their secret plans to launch the
> Tet Offensive early in 1968. He thought this was a bad idea -- he
> doubted the South Vietnamese people would join the "general uprising"
> the communists hoped the Tet attacks would provoke. But his job was to
> help prepare for the attacks, so for days he scouted out potential
> targets in Saigon, looking for soft spots in the city's defenses. He
> boldly brought his commander into the city and showed him around,
> introducing him as a bird collector and dealer (An collected birds
> himself) from out of town. The intelligence they gathered helped the
> communists infiltrate forces into Saigon for the offensive.
>
> A third key moment came in 1975, when the North Vietnamese doubted
> they could march to Saigon uncontested. They thought it would take
> several years longer to lay the groundwork. An helped persuade them
> that the situation was ripe to take the initiative; of course, he was
> proved right.
>
> The conquering North Vietnamese marched into Saigon
> and won a hard-fought victory, but they never really
> trusted Pham Xuan An. He was "re-educated," used as a
> consultant to explain American actions, but never
> entrusted with a serious job. The North Vietnamese
> must have suspected his revolutionary credentials.
> They were right to do so. An liked Americans and
> American ways too much to ever be a loyal
> Marxist-Leninist.
>
> I returned to Vietnam in 1994 and had two long
> conversations with An, then frail but still alive to
> the world around him. He said he was happy to talk
> but asked me not to quote him by name. I wanted him
> to discuss the American war and its consequences for
> Vietnam and for us, but An was bored by those topics.
> "You won World War III," he said a little
> impatiently, obviously referring to the Cold War. "So
> you lost a skirmish here -- so what?"
>
> Was he sad about that outcome? I thought not. An's
> cause was the unification and independence of
> Vietnam, not Marxism-Leninism. He had been frustrated
> by his own fate in the unified Vietnam, but the
> outcome of "World War III" seemed to suit him fine.
> An died in September 2006, of emphysema. Nearly 80,
> he'd been a chain smoker for half a century.
>
> Berman's book appears 32 years after the war, yet,
> amazingly, adds significantly to our understanding of
> what happened. Students of American failures -- who
> have had so much new material to ponder -- will be
> richly rewarded by reading this book. So will le
> Carré fans -- not for its style but for its
> remarkable substance. ·
>
> Robert Kaiser, an associate editor of The Post, was a
> reporter in its Saigon bureau, 1969-70.
Great book review. We are reminded once again that in
the long run, our support of repressive and
undemocratic govts-- such as was the govt of S.
Vietnam-- can backfire. The situation in Taiwan and S.
Korea is so much different today-- now that the old
dictators have been overthrown.
Alvin E. Toda
> We?? Got a gerbil up your butt? I was not reminded
> of any such thing as that bullshit assumption is as
> far away from the book or review as one could get.
> You can leap from the topic of Vietnam to your old
> songs I suppose but then eating dim sum could lead
> one to consider the Cultural Revolution too. Duh.
>
> The left wing media was infiltrated and this spy was
> a real key player and was later promoted to General
> by the North Vietnamese for his work to erode the US
> and kill Americans.
>
> Post your own article that directly leads to your
> assumption if that is where you just need to go.
Not necessary... I quote from yours:
>> Was he sad about that outcome? I thought not. An's
>> cause was the unification and independence of
>> Vietnam, not Marxism-Leninism. He had been
>> frustrated by his own fate in the unified Vietnam,
>> but the outcome of "World War III" seemed to suit
>> him fine.
The WWIII part refers to the Cold War that compeled us
to support the S. Vietnam dictatorship for fear the
Communists would win in not just Vietnam but all SE
Asia. An was a nationalist who want a Vietname free of
the undemocratic S. Vietnamese govt and the American
occupation.
The above quote from your article says it quite
clearly. No need to do research. We wouldn't have to
worry so much about spies like An if we had not decided
to oppose popular nationalistic movements and
governments because we were afraid that they were
Communist, or sympathetic to Communists, and had
decided to support and ally with repressive
undemocratic govts.
George Z. Bush
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see that our involvement with
South Viet Nam was based on the flawed John Foster Dulles Domino Theory,
i.e. - if one nation in Southeastern Asia acquired a Communist government,
all the rest would necessarily and inevitably follow. It took us 58,000+
dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of wounded ones for us to learn,
after we departed South Viet Nam and after its subsequent collapse,
surrender to North Viet Nam, and absorption into the Communist state, the
rest of Southeast Asia did NOT collapse and convert into Communist states.
Our involvement with the corrupt South Vietnamese government had little if
anything to do with our desire that the people of Southeast Asia enjoy the
blessings and pleasures of democratic life. Instead, it was merely a tool
to permit us to attempt to impose our version of what was best for the
people of Southeastern Asia on them whether they liked it or not and to
serve our own concept of how that part of the world should look.
No need to belabor the striking parallel between that fiasco and our current
one. The outcomes are likely to be identical, which is a sad commentary
because the driving forces in energizing our current effort pointedly
avoided the opportunity to learn the lessons of the Viet Nam War from
personal involvement.
George Z.
Alvin E. Toda
Well stated George. But in Hawaii, almost all SE Asian
scholars at East-West Center at the University of
Hawaii panned the domino theory. The strongest
proponent here was the military itself. Rather than
looking for reasonable alternative theories, the
military fell in line for the domino theory.
In fact, any person who believed in an alternate theory
was labeled to be disloyal. The press itself could
easily have found many flaws in the domino theory as
when IIRC one of the professors appeared on TV in
Honolulu-- but I guess most experts on the mainland get
honorariums for supporting the administration policy
rather than opposing the policy.