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

134 THOMAS A. BASS
activity removed from the dirty work of tactical intelligence.
What An said was literally true, but the impact of his affiliation
resonates clearly only when we understand the direct link between
the Office of Strategic Intelligence and the Vietnamese
Communist Party.
In May 1962, when New Zealander Nick Turner succeeded
Peter Smark as the Reuters man in Saigon, he arrived to
find the voluble Pham Xuan An holding court in the Reuters office,
which was installed in a corner of an old French villa near
the Presidential Palace. Reuters shared the space with its nominal
ally Vietnam Press (VTX). A year later, when the Buddhist
crisis erupted, Reuters was thrown out of the villa and cut its ties
to VTX. Reuters was running stories critical of “the arrogance
and incompetence of the Catholic Diem regime in handling the
Buddhists,” says Turner, which made relations dicey with this
“government-controlled propaganda agency.” Reuters moved its
office downtown to a second-floor walkup on rue Catinat, which
was good for An, since he was now a stone’s throw from café
Givral, the Continental terrace known as the “Shelf,” and his
other Saigon haunts.
Although they worked together productively in the office
and traveled together in the field, garnering more than their fair
share of scoops, Turner is one of the few people An does not remember
fondly. An also tells me that he advised Turner to trim
the emotion out of his prose, to make it more evenhanded and
less sympathetic to the Communists.
In 1962, NLF soldiers launched an attack on the military
outpost at An Lac village, thirty kilometers from Saigon on
Highway 4. When Turner and An arrived on the scene, they
found that local militiamen had been killed along with their family
members, including women and children. Turner thought
the local townspeople should be outraged by these “atrocities.”
Instead, they were happy with the gruesome outcome. “We
hated these people,” they told An. “The soldiers and their wives