The Magazine  The Quiet Vietnamese  Journalist and spy Pham Xuan
An led a life of ambiguity.  Oct 9, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 04 • By
DAVID DEVOSS Widget tooltip Single Page Print Larger Text
Smaller Text Alerts  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
obituaries were remarkably kind. 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.  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.  I
first met Pham Xuan An in 1972, when I arrived in Vietnam as a
24-year-old war correspondent for Time. By then, An was a
legend, a jovial boulevardier nicknamed "General Givral" after
the Tu Do Street coffee shop he frequente