The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

128 THOMAS A. BASS
discovered photographing the strategic plans and intelligence
reports that were slipped to him by his South Vietnamese sources.
An was so well informed and well connected and so fluent
in explaining Vietnam’s political and military situation to visiting
Westerners that Peter Smark, the Reuters bureau chief in
Asia, hired him in 1960 as the agency’s local Vietnamese correspondent.
Founded in 1849 by German bank clerk Israel
Beer Josaphat, Reuters originally employed carrier pigeons to
deliver stock reports. The pigeons were soon carrying other
kinds of news, and after Josaphat moved to England—where he
christened himself Baron Paul Julius von Reuter—the Reuter
Telegraph Company began building a worldwide network of
news bureaus. Known for speed and brevity, Reuters employs
a buttoned-down British style bleached of emotion. Scoop the
competition and report the facts are its twin mantras. It was An’s
job to put his ear to the ground and work the back channels at
the palace to come up with early warnings on coups and countercoups,
palace intrigues, military campaigns, aerial bombardments,
troop deployments, battlefield losses, and everything
else that gets reported out of a war zone.
While working for Reuters in the 1960s Pham Xuan An
became the irrepressible man about town who knew everything
about everybody and was seen everywhere, in all the
city’s best restaurants and cafés, chatting and joking with everyone
from generals and ambassadors down to the local cyclo
drivers and dance hall girls. An established himself as the goto
man for newly arrived Americans who needed briefings and
old-timers who needed a tip. He was always generous with his
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.
On January 25, 1962, An married Hoang Thi Thu Nhan,
a young woman who sold embroidery and lacquer boxes in a
store on the rue Catinat. Ten years his junior, Thu Nhan was not
one of his deésses, the women who kept him out of harm’s way