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

The
Perfect Crime
I
n 1963 Henry Luce, owner and publisher of Time, phoned
Frank McCulloch, then managing editor of the Los Angeles
Times, and asked him to go to Vietnam “to sort out the mess
we’re in over there.” McCulloch thought Luce was talking
about the war, but he was actually talking about the Time-Life
bureau, where morale had plummeted after the bureau chief
had quit in protest. McCulloch met Pham Xuan An, then a
part-time stringer, on his first visit to Time’s Saigon office in
February 1964. A year later he hired An for seventy-five dollars
a week to work full-time as a local correspondent. “Two things
impressed me about An,” McCulloch told documentary film
maker David Felsen during an interview in 2006. “He understood
American journalism, and he was highly intelligent. Because
he was so well connected, he knew Vietnamese politics
intimately, and in 1964 when I first arrived in Vietnam politics,
unfortunately, was a bigger story than the war itself. The coups
d’état came and went so fast that if you were going to cover Vietnam
you had to have Vietnamese know-how, and that’s what An
provided.”
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