Pham Xuan An

Vietnam War journalist and spy

Pham Xuan An, journalist and spy: born Bien Hoa, Cochin China 12 September 1927; married (three sons, one daughter); died Ho Chi Minh City 20 September 2006.

Pham Xuan An was the most senior Vietnamese journalist to cover the war in South Vietnam. He was working as a staff correspondent for Time magazine when Saigon finally fell to North Vietnamese tanks in April 1975. Although he only managed to file three stories after the victory (the victors were clumsy censors), he remained on the masthead of Time for a further year as the Saigon bureau chief. Shortly afterwards, his true role was revealed - Pham Xuan An had been an undercover spy for the Communist Party of Vietnam since 1952.

Tricky while it is to attempt to quantify the impact of secret intelligence on the outcome of a prolonged war, Pham Xuan An deserves to be considered one of the greatest spies of the 20th century.

There were two turning points in the war in Indochina - the battle of Ap Bac in 1963 and the Tet Offensive of 1968 - and in both An's role was crucial. Three Vietcong (South Vietnamese Communist forces) companies managed to defeat the South Vietnamese Seventh Division, American-trained and supported by American advisers, helicopters and artillery. It was the largest set-piece battle between the two forces and the result stunned the American military. It later emerged that the two people who were awarded North Vietnam's highest military award were the commander at the battle and Pham Xuan An.

An spent two years assisting Vietcong scouts to target key sites to attack during the surprise 1968 Tet Offensive. He advised the Communists to ignore the Treasury, where only salaries were dispersed, but to focus on the Court House, which is where gold bars were stored during the numerous trials for smugglers. The Renault car they used to criss-cross Saigon is now on display in the Museum of Military Intelligence in Hanoi.

Pham Xuan An was born in 1927 just north-east of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) - then in French Indochina. He was given a French colonial birth certificate because his father was an engineer responsible for mapping and laying out roads along the frontier with Cambodia. As a teenager, he dropped out of school in 1945 to join the Communist Party and participated in several battles before training as a French customs inspector.

In 1952 he was told to become a secret agent for the Communists, so he began working as a censor for the colonial government. One of his first tasks was to black out Graham Greene's journalistic dispatches: the French authorities were convinced that Greene worked for British intelligence - which, indeed, he sometimes did.

Although An was doing minor work for French intelligence, he contacted a cousin who was in charge of psychological warfare for the French Army General Staff and ended up as an adjutant. Later he worked with Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous American counter-insurgency officer who was crucial in propping up the South Vietnamese dictatorship of President Ngo Dinh Diem.

In 1957, the Communists decided secretly to pay An's passage to California to study in Orange County and train in journalism for future cover. He adored the United States and almost didn't return to Vietnam, especially after his case officer was arrested and tortured. Once he had returned he contacted another family friend, Tran Kin Tuyen, who was the intelligence chief of President Diem. He was then in charge of Vietnamese intelligence officers who were working for a government news agency but quickly moved on to Reuters, The Christian Science Monitor and then, in the mid-Sixties, Time magazine.

He sent his dispatches to the Communists through an ingenious series of dead-letter drops, frequently disguising his film canisters as pork rolls placed inside rotting fish to avoid detection. Of the 45 couriers and agents responsible for getting his intelligence to the Communists, 27 were captured and killed.

He was certainly known as the best-informed Vietnamese journalist when I covered the end of the Indochina war in the mid-Seventies. On the couple of occasions we met at Givral's, his favourite haunt in Rue Catinat, he came across as a proud nationalist, but to me that could simply have been an indication that he disliked the Americans, which in fact was not the case.

David Greenway, who worked for Time during this period, was a close friend and would regularly bring him exotic songbirds from Hong Kong and Bangkok markets for his large collection. He recalled him as a shy, affectionate and kind man who was very smart. With hindsight, the only occasion that puzzled him was during the disastrous battle of Lam Son 719, when South Vietnamese troops were crushed by North Vietnamese forces in southern Laos. Greenway remembered An's correcting his copy, in which he said the troops he saw staggering back had been repulsed in the initial battle. An said, rather, that they were the defeated remnants of a rescue battalion. How was he so immediately sure?

Other colleagues, like Dan Southerland of The Christian Science Monitor, reflected that An never actually gave any leads that resulted directly in a story, so he was careful to maintain his cover. Even at the very end of the war, when he sent his family out to the US but was refused permission to go himself, he never revealed his intelligence role, even to the North Vietnamese colonel who took the surrender in Saigon.

After the war, he was treated with some suspicion by members of the Politburo, although the intelligence services regretted that he had not gone to the US, where it was thought he could have alerted the new government to any counter-revolutionary moves by America.

His family returned to live with him in Vietnam in the late Seventies, although his daughter now lives in the US. He was certainly loyal to many non-Communist friends - Robert Sam Anson, a former Time journalist and now a writer, discovered that it was through An's anonymous intervention that he was released from captivity after being taken by the North Vietnamese during the 1970 Cambodian invasion. Even more remarkable was his role in expediting his former South Vietnamese spy chief Tran Kin Tuyet out of Saigon on one of the last American helicopters to leave in April 1975.

Although he was given the rank of colonel when first revealed to the world as a spy, he was later promoted to brigadier general, and then major-general. He never lost his belief in the justice of the Communists' cause but was torn between his love of the US and the totalitarian nature of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

An was convinced he was only kept in service in 2002 so that Vietnamese intelligence could keep an eye on him. In the early Nineties, former American colleagues raised $30,000 to send his son to study in the US but An himself was denied a visa to attend a conference in 1997 in New York. Last year The New Yorker published a profile of him running to nearly 10,000 words, in which he remarked that he was not yet ready to die:

There's nowhere for me to go. Hell is reserved for crooks, but there are so many of them in Vietnam, it's full.

Bruce Palling