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

The Spy Who Loved Us 185
firsthand accounts. They interviewed all the top officials and
gathered all the best documents. Their raw data were gold.
The published magazine was lead. An was happy to keep himself
removed from the editorial turf wars in New York and glad
that his name rarely appeared in the magazine, except on the
masthead. No one could trace stories back to him. No one
could ferret out what he knew or when he knew it. The higher
he rose in the company ranks the less he wrote. He was the
background source, the adviser, leaker, tipster, legman, and
translator—but not the author—of Time’s cable traffic from
Vietnam. An was the confidence man in everyone’s confidence.
He was committing the perfect crime, with no evidence of
breaking and entering, no fingerprints at the scene. There was
just Pham Xuan An, smiling and joking as always, while peering
out from behind the stack of papers piled on his desk.
Expecting that a famous journalist would have produced at
least one noteworthy article, many people claim that An wrote
Time’s obituary for Ho Chi Minh in 1969, but An denies authorship.
“For a big story like this, correspondents from all
over the world would contribute, along with freelancers and
other people. Then the rewriters in New York would do a very
heavy job on this material. They would sift through it and produce
an article on deadline.”
Time’s articles were anonymous, with no bylines, and it was
not until 1970 that Murray Gart, chief of correspondents, put
An’s name on the masthead. The Saigon bureau chief at the
time was Jonathan Larsen, son of one of the magazine’s founding
editors. An runs through the list of eight bureau chiefs
under whom he served—Frank McCulloch, Simmons Fentress,
William Rademaekers, Marsh Clark, Jonathan Larsen,
Stanley Cloud, Gavin Scott, Peter Ross Range—uttering their
names with such formulaic stiffness that he could be listing
Vietnamese dynasties.
An developed the same kind of joking camaraderie with
some of these men that he maintained with Edward Lansdale.