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

The Spy Who Loved Us 147
were meant to improve U.S. strategy, in other words, to “win”
the war. Deepe was brave and adventuresome, but she never
got around to confronting the big questions that seven years in
a war zone might have provoked in a more inquisitive mind. Her
reporting on the battle at Khe Sanh brought her a nomination
for a Pulitzer Prize. By the end of her lengthy tour of duty,
she had acquired a military husband, Colonel Charles “Chuck”
Keever, who ran the press center in Danang, and twenty-nine
volumes of correspondence and articles, which are now stored
in her office at the University of Hawaii–Manoa, where she
teaches journalism.
Rather than remarking on her naïveté, An employed Deepe
as the perfect foil for his own activities. Deepe lived in a fourthfloor
apartment above a garage in the heart of Saigon. The
apartment, consisting of one large room with a kitchen and a
refrigerator cooled by a block of ice, faced the Rex Hotel,
where civilian and military officials gave their daily press briefings.
An explains the mutually beneficial arrangement he developed
with Deepe: “I would stop by to see the colonel who
commanded South Vietnam’s office of central intelligence. He
was a friend of mine. Every day, I picked up intelligence information,
which I gave to Beverly Ann Deepe to write stories
for the New York Herald Tribune. We were happy. We had all
the information we needed. We just ‘cooked’ the story from the
ingredients we were given. It was very simple.”
On July 5, 1965, special correspondent Pham Xuan An
published his own article in the New York Herald Tribune, entitled
“Red Program for South Vietnam: One Bite at a Time.”
When I brought a copy of this article to An during one of our
visits, he elaborated on its origins. “The article explains the
Communist strategy, the program. Before the Americans sent
in combat troops, they should know what the reaction of the
Communists would be. That’s why I wrote the story.”
The article says that the Communists, at that point in the
war, had sixty-five thousand troops in the south, supported by