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

166 THOMAS A. BASS
When McCulloch, a forty-three-year-old former Marine
Corps sergeant, first arrived in Saigon, the Time-Life office
had two demoralized employees who were still sore about
Charley Mohr, the bureau chief, being forced to quit in a feud
with the editors in New York. By the time McCulloch left Vietnam
four years later, the Saigon office had twenty-five employees,
including some of the war’s best reporters. They filed
fifty thousand words a month via a direct telex line to New
York, and they collected massive amounts of information on
every aspect of the conflict. “An spent a lot of time in the bureau,
and all he had to do was listen,” says McCulloch. “He had
access to everything the bureau filed as a source, and I can
think of lots of examples of hard, specific information that An
would have made use of and reported to his superiors.”
McCulloch cites as an example the fact that he was the
first journalist to learn, three months before it occurred, that
the United States would be sending ground forces to Vietnam.
A friend in the military had tipped him the news and even supplied
the precise numbers, revealing that the United States
planned to station five hundred and forty five thousand troops
in South Vietnam over the next year and a half. “I’m sure those
were valuable figures for the Communists to have,” McCulloch
says.
“I’m never going to do that,” President Lyndon Johnson
lied to Time’s editor, when asked to confirm McCulloch’s story;
the magazine then killed the story. This would not be the only
time that Pham Xuan An got a scoop from Time long before the
magazine’s readers back in the United States.
McCulloch was a hard-charging newsman who believed
that a journalist’s job is to “afflict the comforted and comfort the
afflicted.” The son of a Nevada cattle rancher, he had spent a
couple of years trying to become a professional baseball pitcher
before he began covering the police beat for the Reno Evening
Gazette. When he broke important stories on how the mafia