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

140 THOMAS A. BASS
days. We assumed everyone was an agent of someone and that
everything we said was reported somewhere. People worked as
double agents and triple agents. This could be a lucrative business,
but it might also have been a political requirement for staying
alive.”
An would tell Turner what the Communists were going to
do, and “invariably that’s what they did. His perception of
events was uncannily well-informed,” Turner says. Oddly,
Reuters had no use for this information. The agency avoided analytical
articles and think pieces, sticking to hard news, short and
terse, to keep the cable costs down.
As far as Turner was concerned, An could be both a Communist
and a good reporter so long as he did the job he was
paid for, but his capitalist employer was getting short shrift
compared to his Communist bosses. “An would disappear
from the office for several days at a time. He wouldn’t tell me
where he was going, and when he returned he wouldn’t tell
me where he had been or what he had done. He just disappeared.
People speculated he had a girlfriend, but I didn’t believe
it. I knew he was very fond of his wife, and I didn’t think
he was involved with anyone else. I suspected he was going off
to talk to the Vietcong.”
“‘Look, An,’ I told him, ‘for all I know, you may be working
for the Vietcong. That’s fine, so long as you do your job for
me.’” Actually, though, it wasn’t fine, since Turner’s sources, particularly
his sources in the intelligence community, would have
disappeared if they had known he had a Communist sympathizer
in his office. “When I went to talk to intelligence sources,
I used to tell An about it,” Turner says. “Then I stopped doing
this. He sensed I was withholding information from him. As his
sources dried up, this made him less useful to the Communists.
He began scouting his options.”
United Press International (UPI) reporter Ray Herndon,
who lived in Vietnam from 1962 to 1967, also suspected that An
had divided loyalties. When he accompanied An to the bird