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

168 THOMAS A. BASS
translators, and visiting editors from New York, who expected
to see action in the field before being wined and dined in
Saigon’s best restaurants. McCulloch moved the operation into
a villa at 7 Han Thuyen Street, facing the park in front of the
Presidential Palace. The American embassy was a short walk
down the street.
Under McCulloch, the bureau developed a particular
rhythm. Reporters gathered early Monday morning to pitch
story ideas and argue about what should be covered in the following
week’s magazine. Assignments came back from the editors
in New York by Tuesday, and everyone scattered into the
field. By late Thursday night or early Friday morning they gathered
again in the office, swapping notes and writing up their stories
for teletyping to New York, where the magazine closed
and went to press on Sunday. “We all gathered for the writing
Friday, Saturday, and into Sunday,” says McCulloch. These
weekend sessions were followed by “drinking a lot of beer and
eating good French dinners.”
“An wasn’t part of the buddy system in the bureau,” Mc-
Culloch told David Felsen. “He was more reserved, slightly
aloof. But he was there all day long. When a correspondent was
working on a political story, a coup or something like that, the
first thing he would do is ask An what the background was,
what had happened.”
“An served more as a source for other reporters than he did
as a reporter himself,” says McCulloch. “But there was a period
of time, in 1965 and early 1966, when the coups came—there
were twelve coups altogether—when you’ll find a lot of his reporting
in the Time Inc. files.” An did his best to keep his name
out of these files. Once, when he was too prescient in predicting
a forthcoming coup, the police called him in for an interrogation.
After that, he tried to slip into the background. He was
Time’s political analyst and cultural authority on Vietnam, but
he rarely exposed himself as someone writing and filing his
own stories. He talked. He consulted. He traveled throughout