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

226 THOMAS A. BASS
the little park in front of the cathedral is currently named
after the Paris Commune.
In 1981 former Newsweek correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave,
in congressional testimony before the U.S. Senate subcommittee
on security and terrorism, denounced Pham Xuan
An as a “disinformation agent.” The charge was overblown but
An’s old competitor was getting his revenge for having been
scooped by An during the Paris peace talks. The same year,
Stanley Karnow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, characterized
An—whom he was forbidden to meet during a visit to
Saigon—as “a senior official in the Vietnam government.” These
reports confirmed what others had known since An first donned
a military uniform and started riding his bicycle to monthly
Party meetings in 1976.
“We thought this was a joke,” David Greenway says when
I ask him about the charge that An was an “agent of influence”
whose job was to manipulate the news and plant stories in
Time. Greenway, who was injured covering the Têt Offensive
in Hué, left Time in 1972 and later became editorial page editor
of the Boston Globe. “The editors at Time weren’t listening
to us. None of Time’s reporters was manipulating the news. He
wouldn’t have had any better luck than the rest of us.”
Far from planting stories, says Richard Pyle, former bureau
chief in Saigon for the Associated Press, “An saved Time
from embarrassing itself by publishing stories that weren’t true.
It was sleight of hand on his part. Without revealing how he
knew what he knew, he’d let you know whether you were on the
right track.”
After learning the news about his former Saigon political
correspondent, Murray Gart, chief of correspondents at Time
during the war, is reported to have said, “An, that son of a bitch.
I’d like to kill him.” Peter Arnett was similarly critical of An. The
two journalists had often met at Givral’s to swap stories. “It’s still
a raw point for me,” Arnett says. “Even though I understand
him as a Vietnamese patriot, I still feel journalistically betrayed.