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

220 THOMAS A. BASS
On May 12, 1975, Time’s corporate newsletter, F.Y.I., featured
a photo of Pham Xuan An on the first page. Moments before
the Communists rolled into Saigon, he is shown defiantly
smoking a cigar in front of Saigon’s city hall. His black hair is
slicked back from his forehead and he squints toward the horizon,
as if scouting out the rumble of tanks. “Reporter Pham
Xuan An put his wife and four children on the plane but decided
to remain in his homeland,” the article reports. The reason
he offers for remaining is deliciously cryptic. “I am a
Vietnamese and a journalist and evacuation is only one chapter
of the story.”
In the days before the nationalist government collapsed,
Time’s editors launched one abortive escape attempt after another.
Twice they flew chartered airplanes into Saigon that
were turned back at the airport. None of the usual bribes
worked for securing exit visas, and the U.S. government was
frozen in denial that the war’s end had arrived. Murray Gart,
Time’s chief of correspondents, flew to Hong Kong and rented
a hundred-passenger ferry boat to sail to Vietnam, but the boat
was captured by the South Vietnamese navy who used it for
their own escape. Gart flew to Washington and camped outside
the office of Henry Kissinger. At the end of the day, the secretary
of state finally appeared and promised to telex the ambassador
in Saigon for help. Within a week, every member of
Time’s staff, other than An, had been airlifted out of Vietnam.
“Five rolls by Mrs. An shipped this afternoon. Film will be
processed either at Clark or Guam laboratory,” read the coded
cable to Time headquarters, announcing that An’s wife and
four children had been airlifted to a U.S. base in the Pacific.
After passing through the Guam “laboratory” and Camp Pendleton
in California, An’s family was resettled in Washington,
where they stayed with An’s déesse Beverly Deepe. On April 30,
1975, the day Saigon fell to the Communists, An cabled headquarters
in New York that “the office of Time is now manned by