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

228 THOMAS A. BASS
“By not trying to show me how much he loved his country,”
McCulloch answers. “An didn’t demonstrate his deep love for
his land and people. He practiced it. He believed in it, and he
did it. I still have vast respect for him, as a human being and as
a Vietnamese citizen and patriot.”
McCulloch remembers the day he learned from Stanley
Karnow’s article that An was a spy. “It dismayed me, it distressed
me, and it certainly surprised me. But there are a lot of
hard-nosed journalists and U.S. government people who still
think a lot of An. People ask me if I personally feel betrayed, and
the answer is no, because as a journalist he functioned with total
honesty. He was guided by and stuck by the rules of journalism.
As for his other role, he did what he thought he had to do as a
citizen and patriot of Vietnam.”
The interviewer presses McCulloch. “So you weren’t betrayed
as a journalist, but you were betrayed as an American?
Are you a journalist first and an American second?”
“No, I don’t feel that,” says McCulloch. “I assume that
some of the intelligence An gathered in the bureau resulted in
American losses and American deaths, and I deeply regret that
and feel some personal responsibility for it. But I cannot criticize
or condemn An’s role as a Vietnamese citizen. That’s his right.”
As his story surfaced, An was hurt by the charge that he
killed American troops and was responsible, even if only inadvertently,
for the deaths of journalistic colleagues. “I saved
their lives,” he says emphatically, and it was true. He saved the
life of Mills Brandes when the CIA agent and his family were
touring the countryside and took a wrong turn, which resulted
in their being captured briefly by the Communists. He saved the
lives of Doug Ramsey, Bob Anson, and Tran Kim Tuyen. He
often intervened to keep peasants from being tortured or shot
by South Vietnamese troops. He helped South Vietnamese officials
flee the country in 1975 as defeated warriors and, later,
as refugees sailing across the South China Sea. An played the
game fairly, as a gentleman, but none of this counters the un-