Word: saigon
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...communists--a double life kept secret until the mid-'80s; in Ho Chi Minh City. The first Vietnamese to become a staff correspondent for a major U.S. news outlet, he said he served as an "honest reporter" who did not spread misinformation. From his unique perch at TIME's Saigon bureau, the popular, plugged-in An was able to achieve feats for both sides, including alerting the Viet Cong to the impending buildup of U.S. troops in the mid-'60s and secretly arranging for the release of American journalist Robert Sam Anson, who had been captured in Cambodia...
...Vietnam war produced astonishing stories and personalities. But nothing quite like TIME correspondent Pham Xuan An. An's secret life as a spy for Hanoi was not uncovered till long after the fall of Saigon. Until then, he was known simply as the brilliant contributor to TIME's coverage of the Vietnam war. An died Wednesday at the age of 78 in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City. Stanley Cloud, TIME's Washington Bureau Chief from 1989 to 1993, worked with An from 1970 through 1972, including a period as Saigon Bureau Chief from the summer...
...part Confucian scholar, part medieval monk. His little office in the TIME bureau on the second floor of the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon was piled almost to the ceiling with stacks upon stacks of dusty documents, reports and newspapers, any one of which he was magically able to locate at a moment's notice, although such notice was rarely necessary, because he seemed to have committed it all to memory. He smoked constantly, drank rarely, laughed easily, bred and raised German shepherds and drove a tiny, rattling Renault through whose floorboards you could see the road going...
...Just above my computer in my office at home hangs a photograph of An and me, taken in 1990 during our first postwar reunion. We are in his driveway in Saigon, he in the loose trousers and white shirt he always wore. His little Renault, which had long since given up the ghost, is lying in state behind us, covered in years of grime. We had just spent the afternoon talking about the past - his as well as mine - and the present. Ever the reporter, An was deeply concerned about Vietnam's economy and the corruption that was making...
...Japanese in World War II, against the French for a decade after that, and against U.S. - what? - "nation building," for lack of a better term, for two more decades. An grew to maturity in the immediate post-World War II years and eventually attracted the attention and sponsorship of Saigon spooks of all sorts - from the CIA's Edward Lansdale (who arranged for An to study journalism during the late 1950s at California's Orange Coast College) to the communists' Muoi Huong (who became his case officer after his return to Vietnam...