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

142 THOMAS A. BASS
I ask him why he needed to see his commanding officers in the
jungle. “I believed I knew better than they did what was going
on,” he tells me. “They knew how to fight, but that was all. So
their orders didn’t mean that much to me. Sometimes they
needed me to analyze with them. So I would help them.”
With Reuters drying up as a source of news, An was not
only disappearing from the office but was also freelancing for
other journalists. Even when he was in the office he was often
distracted by guests. “A string of visiting correspondents beat a
path to our door to pick An’s brain,” Turner says. The parade included
correspondents such as David Halberstam of the New
York Times, which was permissible, since his paper was a Reuters
client. But the situation got dicier when An spent time chatting
with Reuters’ competitors. “An was a huge reservoir of nuanced
information, much of which Reuters had little use for, but it
would have been great for thoughtful pieces in papers like the
Herald Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor.” As Turner
later learned, this was exactly where An’s ideas were appearing.
Turner and An reached the breaking point in their relationship
when Turner discovered that An, who had been absent
from the office for several days, was helping a stringer for
Newsweek named Beverly Ann Deepe write one of the background
stories that she hoped would establish her as a serious
journalist. Eventually An worked for Deepe as her legman before
moving to his staff position at Time. Deepe was one of
An’s déesses, the female protective spirits who knowingly or
unknowingly covered for him while he did his real work as a spy.
On learning what An had been doing, Turner exploded.
“That’s not on,” he yelled. “I’m sorry. If you’re working for
other people, you can’t be working for Reuters.” Actually, it was
all right to work for the Communists but not for Newsweek. One
was the enemy. The other was the competition.
Compared to the paucity of news in the small Reuters operation,
Time was a gold mine for An and the Communists.