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

The Spy Who Loved Us 135
and children took advantage of us. They came to the market and
stole food without paying. If you didn’t bribe them, they would
open fire and kill you.”
An also learned that the militiamen stationed in the village
were refugees from the north. Their outpost had been attacked
from the outlying rice fields. The guerrillas had crawled through
the plants, ducking under water to avoid the searchlights which
raked the surface. This was their only possible approach, and the
soldiers’ family quarters happened to lie in the way. The women
and children had died accidentally in the crossfire.
“Nick Turner wanted to report these details. I advised him
to tone down the story. ‘If you write it this way, Reuters will get
in trouble with the government.’ A journalist faces this kind of
situation all the time. You don’t dare write the story the way
it happened.
“The same was true for the atrocities committed in Vietnam
by the South Koreans. In one operation, the Koreans rounded
up the women and children in a village and dropped them in a
dry well to kill them. Anyone who tried to save them was shot.
Fortunately an American soldier found them and intervened.
I was working for an American journalist at the time. She
wanted to write this story. I said, ‘Please, this is too awful. The
Koreans rely on the Americans, and you’re an American too.
Remember, an American saved the villagers, and no one was
killed.’” The reporter dropped the story.
This was one of numerous incidents when An steered his
fellow journalists away from stories about atrocities committed
by the Republican side in the war—stories that would have
made the Communists look good by comparison. To maintain
his cover, An shied away from reporting anti-American news.
The charge that he planted pro-Communist propaganda in the
publications for which he worked is off the mark. An did not
plant disinformation. At times, he even opposed planting information.
He wanted to avoid standing out as a critic of the
American war. “I was in a very bad position,” he says. “On one