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

The Spy Who Loved Us 143
“They had lots of inside dope,” Turner says. “They wrote long
reports, naming their sources. An would get an incredible depth
of information just from reading these reports. They were
full of news from journalists in the countryside, interviews with
monks and other opposition figures, conversations with high
government officials. They probably provided the finest
overview you could get on the situation in Vietnam. These were
the best files in the country. They were incredibly valuable.”
“I always presumed that the CIA was reading Time’s cable
traffic and appreciating the quality of their reporting,” says
Turner, who later worked for Time as a freelancer. “I sometimes
wondered if the CIA wasn’t the real audience for these reports.
I mean no one back in New York seemed to be reading
them. Correspondents would file fifteen thousand word stories
from the field, which got homogenized into a seven hundred
and fifty word article that said exactly the opposite of what had
been reported from the field. It seemed to me that the CIA was
the only reader who might appreciate the value of what Time
was sending over their wires. I always assumed the CIA had a
backdoor deal with Time. This is why people sweated their
guts to get good information that was then ignored.”
When I ask Turner if he ever ran a security check on An or
discussed his suspicions with intelligence agents, he admits,
“No one seemed to believe that An was a security risk, and I
wasn’t going to mention it to British or American intelligence.
I was afraid they would clam up and not talk to me anymore.”
Turner himself was already a marginal figure in Saigon. “They
regarded me as representing a British outfit, and I wasn’t treated
as well as if I had been in American news.” In order to keep his
own nose clean, Turner stifled his suspicions. The one person
capable of blowing An’s cover did his best to keep it in place.
“An has himself to blame,” says Turner about An’s departure
from Reuters. “He schooled me in how to read the minds of
Vietnamese. ‘Don’t believe what you’re told. There is always