The Quiet Vietnamese
DEVOSS, DAVID
The Quiet Vietnamese Journalist and spy Pham Xuan An led a life of ambiguity. by David DeVoss Pham Xuan An, the gifted Time magazine war correspondent who secretly served as a spy for Vietnamese...
...Time's publetter celebrated his decision to stay and published a picture of him standing on a now deserted street smoking a cigarette and looking pugnacious...
...An asked me to go to Singapore and seek out a mysterious man at a Chinese hotel who could arrange passage on a boat if paid the right sum of money...
...The first time the boat had had an engine problem...
...In the Gulf of Thailand, Vietnamese refugees fell prey to pirates...
...An stayed in Vietnam, waiting for better times...
...I cautioned against starting a chain of events over which Time had no control...
...I first met Pham Xuan An in 1972, when I arrived in Vietnam as a 24-year-old war correspondent for Time...
...An escape was even more critical now, he said, because his son soon would be sent away to school in Moscow...
...I returned to see him and his wife, Hoang Thi Thu Nhan, in the mid-1990s and found them both relatively optimistic...
...An had come with his German shepherd, and we passed each other with barely a nod...
...Thousands of Vietnamese denied employment because of their connections with the regime of Nguyen Van Thieu were fleeing the country in leaky fishing boats...
...It was a difficult decision to make, but neither I nor anyone else at Time had experience dealing with these sorts of people, and the odds of something going wrong seemed enormous...
...David DeVoss writes about Asia from his base in Los Angeles...
...When the war ended abruptly in April 1975, his family was evacuated with other Time employees who wished to flee, while An remained and continued to file for Time...
...Houses still had numbers, but they were not in sequence, making it nearly impossible to locate a home even if you had the address...
...I wrote a long memo to Time and sent copies to correspondents still with the magazine who had served in Vietnam...
...Although foreign law firms have offered jobs paying up to $4,000 a month, Pham Xuan Hoang An works for the Department of Foreign Relations in Ho Chi Minh City, where he earns $200 a month...
...The office of Time is now manned by Pham Xuan An...
...By then, An was a legend, a jovial boule-vardier nicknamed "General Givral" after the Tu Do Street coffee shop he frequented...
...They finally arrived in 1986 in the form of doi moi, Hanoi's attempt at perestroika...
...It was difficult for a foreign reporter to get to Ho Chi Minh City during that period, but I finally managed to do so in 1981...
...Last week, Pham Xuan An was laid to rest in Saigon's City Cemetery...
...Those who remained subsisted by selling family heirlooms...
...The hotels were full of East Germans, Bulgarians, and Soviets, whom the Vietnamese called "Americans without dollars...
...Secret police followed me everywhere...
...As An had feared, his son Pham Xuan Hoang An was sent to Moscow, but later he was allowed to travel to North Carolina, where eventually he received a law degree from Duke University...
...The Bird Market actually was a sidewalk both sides of which were stacked high with bamboo cages filled with twittering birds that could be taken home as pets or simply released to improve one's karma...
...Once inside the house, An expressed great sadness over what had become of his country...
...Despite serious misgivings, she did as instructed...
...What the obits failed to reveal is that An, whom Hanoi proclaimed a Hero of the People's Armed Forces following the fall of Saigon, came to loathe the political system he had helped bring to power...
...Despite the prevailing climate of suspicion, everybody trusted An...
...by David DeVoss Pham Xuan An, the gifted Time magazine war correspondent who secretly served as a spy for Vietnamese Communists in Hanoi during the war, died last week...
...The second time, the boat had appeared to be seaworthy but the captain had failed to show...
...I met his family at Camp Pendleton in California and helped send them to Arlington, Virginia, where they settled...
...His final request was not to be buried too close to Communists...
...Finally, after a year of silence, his wife received a cable telling her to return home...
...In 1979 I returned to Vietnam...
...The obituaries were remarkably kind...
...If a famous major general and his family were captured trying to escape, embarrassed Communist officials would execute them...
...An and I got into separate cyclos, each peddled by an impoverished veteran of the South's defeated army, and I followed him home...
...He confided that twice in the past he had tried unsuccessfully to smuggle his family out of the country...
...An said he was desperate...
...All but the major streets had new names...
...Old city maps had been confiscated and burned...
...An was remembered as an excellent journalist who by day filed dispatches for Time and at night sent microfilm and messages written in invisible ink to Viet Cong lurking in the jungles outside Saigon...
...My goal was to find An, but that was no easy task...
...All American correspondents evacuated because of emergency," he telexed New York...
...Finally, in desperation, I bribed a Hanoi official with baby vitamins and disposable diapers brought in from Bangkok and got An's phone number...
...Time decided not to get into the people-smuggling business, which was fraught with danger...
...I'll be walking my dogs," he said...
...Why did we fight a war just to replace Americans with Russians...
...Unlike his father, he is not a member of the Communist party...
...he sighed...
...Fishing trawlers rammed and sank their boats, saving only young women who were kept for amusement and then traded between trawler crews until they died or committed suicide...
...Apparently, not even a decorated hero now in charge of diplomatic intelligence for the government could escape surveillance...
...Bringing back his family established An's loyalty to the new Communist government, but it did not prevent him from receiving ten months of reeducation in Hanoi...
...I called and we arranged to meet at the Bird Market...
...It was the first of 24 trips I would make to the newly united country over the next five years...
...The plan was dangerous because of An's notoriety, I wrote...
...An warned me not to say or do anything when we saw each other because police would be watching...
...The place I'd known as Saigon was grim...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 4
