The spy who loved both sides

A Vietcong agent who worked for 'Time' is still not resented by his colleagues, says David Usborne

Twenty-two years after the last US helicopter clattered skywards from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon - now Ho Chi Minh City - the healing process is doing well. It is chic for American students to travel to Vietnam these days; Hollywood has even stopped making those self-flagellating napalm epics.

For sheer symbolism it will be hard to beat two recent events. There was the appearance at the Vietnam Wall in Washington last November by Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Now a woman in early middle age, in 1972 she was the young girl who was caught in the lens of an AP photographer fleeing American bombs. The image - a naked child with arms outstretched in terror - remains one of the most wrenching of the war. Then last Friday, Pete Peterson arrived in Hanoi as America's first ambassador to Vietnam since the normalisation of relations between the countries in 1995. Mr Peterson was shot down over the Red River delta in 1966 and spent the next six-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton".

How frustrating that another opportunity recently for catharsis was lost. The occasion was a journalists' forum on the war's aftermath organised earlier this month by the Asia Society in New York. The star guest was to have been a wiry 69-year-old from Ho Chi Minh City named Pham Xuan An. He did not turn up, however, because the government of Vietnam refused him an exit visa.

Unquestionably, Mr An belonged at the forum. On the panel were some of the most distinguished US reporters in Vietnam, including Morley Safer, now of the CBS news magazine, 60 Minutes, Stanley Karnow who reported for the Washington Post and David Halberstam for The New York Times. Mr An is a member of the same club. First hired by Reuters early in the war, he went on to work in the Time magazine bureau for 10 years, where he earned the distinction of being the only local reporter ever put on staff by a US publication. In Saigon, he was the sage who knew better than anyone what was going on.

The larger truth about Mr An only emerged years later, notably in a book written by Mr Safer in 1990, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. It was a story of divided loyalties and of friendships forged between enemies worthy of Graham Greene. In short, Mr An was a double agent, filing reports not only to Reuters in London and Time in New York, but also to the Communist strategists of the Vietcong.

In 1944, a 16-year-old An found himself, along with almost all his student peers, joining the Communist national liberation front know as the Vietminh (later dubbed the Vietcong by South Vietnam) for reasons not so much of ideology than of patriotic nationalism. When first the Japanese and then the French had been driven out of Vietnam and the country became divided, Mr An in 1955 was drafted to join the South Vietnamese army. There he was assigned to Colonel Edward Lansdale, the principle operative of the CIA. "The real work began in 1960, when I was working for Reuters," he told Mr Safer. "I held the rank of regimental commander. I never wore a uniform of course. I never carried a weapon." He added: "During the years with Time I was made a colonel." Today, his rank in retirement is that of general.

Mr An's credentials as a friend of America seemed unimpeachable. In 1956 he won a US government scholarship to study in California; before returning home, he even had a spell working on the Sacramento Bee newspaper. When the Communists were on the verge of taking Saigon in April 1975, Mr An sent his whole family out on the helicopters to take refuge in America. He remained behind.

The American who helped Mr An arrange his family's flight was David Greenway, now an editor at the Boston Globe. The two had become friends as co-workers in the Time bureau in the late Sixties. Mr Greenway says that while he always was sure that Mr An had the benefit of sources on the other side, he never dreamed that he was actually working for it. In his discussion with Mr Safer, Mr An was adamant that he never once fed Time or any US correspondent disinformation. Had he done so, he said, he would have blown his cover. His masters in the North, he said, "wanted the same thing Time expected. I had access to all the Vietnamese bases and their commanders. My superiors wanted to know the strengths of various units ... estimates of the capabilities of the commanders, who was corrupt and who was corruptible. They wanted all the political stuff."

Even while Mr Greenway admits that Mr An's missives to the North may have led to the deaths of some American advisers to the South, neither he nor any of those who were on the New York panel can be tempted into expressing bitterness towards Mr An. Mr Greenway, who has also visited Mr An since the war says: "In a way that was how Vietnam was. It was not a black-and-white thing. You knew that the locals had friends or relatives on the other side." At the Asia Society, Mr Safer said: "I think that any American reporter in any country understands when he deals with someone who is indigenous that the levels of loyalty on the part of that person are often more complex. I think of him to this day not as a person who is treacherous. I think of him as a friend."

Mr Karnow, meanwhile, spotlighted the core of the story that makes it so compelling. There was no pretence, that he could see, in Mr An's loyalty either to his commanders in Hanoi or to his American employers and colleagues. "An used to sing a Josephine Baker song to me," he recalled. "Do you know 'I have Two Loves - J'ai Deux Amours?'. Do you remember her song, 'France and My Country'? Well that was what he would sing to me, you know, 'I have two loves - Vietnam and America'. He was torn."

In New York, we were denied the chance to hear Mr An first hand. Evidently, the warming of ties between Hanoi and Washington has gone only so far. Ambassador Peterson may want to make a trip to Ho Chi Minh City. Take a recorder with you, sir. The debriefing of General An will surely be worth sharing.