Pham Xuan An was a Vietnamese correspondent for Time Magazine, who helped the head of Vietnamese intelligence onto the last helicopter out of Saigon, stood just out of the frame to watch it leave, and then went to the Presidential Palace, as the North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gate, and the regime surrendered.

He was loved and respected by the press corps, a wonderful source of information, contacts and background.

He was also a crack Communist spy, who essentially supplied the same information to Time, and his masters in Hanoi.

‘In 1970, An’s fellow Time correspondent Robert Sam Anson was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where at least twenty-five other journalists were already dead or unaccounted for. After Anson’s wife pleaded with An to help her, he secretly arranged for Anson’s release. It would be another seventeen years before Anson learned the story of what An had done for him. When Anson saw An again in 1987, he asked him, “Why did you save me, if you were an enemy of my country?” An replied, “Yes, I was an enemy of your country, but you were my friend.” To this day, Anson works with a photo of An on his desk.”

In 1990, after Vietnam started to thaw out, a bunch of Vietnam war reporters got together and raised a hundred thousand dollars to send his son to journalism school at the University of North Carolina. He now works for the Vietnamese Minstry of Foreign Affairs.

Pham Xuan An died a few days ago.

The story is a doozy, in the New Yorker. Via Arts and Letters Daily.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 12:39 am and is filed under history, ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.