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

A Cautionary Note
on Agent Z.21
H
ere is Pham Xuan An now,” Time’s last reporter in Vietnam
cabled the magazine’s New York headquarters on April 30,
1975. “All American correspondents evacuated because of
emergency. The office of Time is now manned by Pham Xuan
An.” An filed three more reports from Saigon as the North
Vietnamese army closed in on the city. Then the line went
dead. During the following year, with An serving as Time’s sole
correspondent in postwar Vietnam, the magazine ran articles on
“The Last Grim Goodbye,” “Winners: The Men Who Made the
Victory,” and “A Calm Week Under Communism.” An was one
of thirty-nine foreign correspondents working for Time when
the Saigon bureau was closed and his name disappeared from the
masthead on May 10, 1976.
Recognized as a brilliant political analyst, beginning with his
work in the 1960s for Reuters and then for the New York Herald
Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor, and, finally, as
a Time correspondent for eleven years, Pham Xuan An seemed
to do his best work swapping stories with colleagues in Givral,
a café on the old rue Catinat. Here he presided every afternoon
1