Vietnamese journalist and spy Pham Xuan An has died.
As a reporter for Reuters and then for Time magazine, Mr. An covered American and South Vietnamese military and diplomatic events and was one of a handful of reporters admitted to off-the-record briefings by American authorities. Time made him a full staff correspondent, the only Vietnamese to be given that distinction by a major American news organization.
At the same time, however, Mr. An was delivering a steady stream of military documents and reports to North Vietnamese authorities, writing in invisible ink and leaving the material in containers at designated spots around Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.
The responses from his American colleagues are interesting:
His former colleagues had conflicting reactions to his dual life.
“He felt it was doing his patriotic duty by being an agent,” Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a reporter for The Washington Post, said at the meeting, “but we were his friends, and he had great admiration for the United States.”
Mr. McCulloch, the Saigon bureau chief for Time during the war, said: “It tore him up. If circumstances had been reversed, if hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had occupied my land, I probably would have done the same thing.”
But Burton Yale Pines, a Time correspondent during the war, said he was shocked. “Worse,” he said, “I am embarrassed that I trusted Mr. An as enormously as I – and my fellow journalists – did.”
An’s take is also interesting:
“The truth? Which truth?” he said in his interview with Mr. Safer. “One truth is that for 10 years I was a staff correspondent for Time magazine, and before that Reuters. The other truth is that I joined the movement in 1944 and in one way or another have been part of it ever since. Two truths – both truths are true.”
I’m going to think about that for a bit.
Yeah Vietnam had so many citizens who chose to work against our aims, either for money or for conscience.
Many thought the racial slurs given to them were well deserved.
John, don’t be an ass. No one is or has questioned the right of the Vietnamese to choose sides. The question here is the US attitude about a specific person – and specifically, the US attitude about that person by people who he worked with.
A.L.
Here are some more true truths:
– Pham Xuan An was not an “agent” recruited out of patriotic or idealistic motives. He was a colonel in the North Vietnamese intelligence service and a lifelong professional spy. If McCulloch were to imagine himself as the same thing, McCulloch would be a career CIA officer posing as a journalist.
– An did not lead a double life; he led a single life devoted to deceiving the people he worked with. You can’t blame him, because that’s what a spy does, but the fact that some of these journalists still think he was somehow one of them shows what soft targets they were.
– An’s reward for his service was to be kept a prisoner in Vietnam for the rest of his life; albeit, a comfortable prisoner, which makes him one of the lucky ones.
– As for all the Vietnamese who weren’t so lucky, An’s journalistic “colleagues” couldn’t care less.
Glen is absolutely right. The rest of the story is that most American journalists can’t imagine reporting the news as American citizens first and journalists second, yet they think it is totally understandable for a North Vietnamese spy. Until American journalists accept the calling to be “good citizens first and journalists second”:http://wolfpangloss.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/seek-truth-and-report-it/ other American citizens will not trust journalism.
I don’t see a conflict here. They guy was a patriotic spy. He believed in the communist cause for Vietnam.
On the other hand he did a good job reporting the news and he admired America. He was educated in America. He worked hard at his profession as a journalist.
Why can’t these attributes coexist.
By any definition An was truly a journalist. Is he less of one because he spied? I think not.
Also, I can see how one could admire America, but at the same time believe that the communist movement and/or the associated nationalist movement was the best thing for Vietnam.
Finally, he could have very been friends with American journalists; both at the level of a colleague and at more personally. I mean An never killed – or caused the death of – one of his friends, did he?
The world isn’t ever all or nothing.
#5 from avedis at 10:19 pm on Oct 22, 2007
“On the other hand he did a good job reporting the news and he admired America. He was educated in America. He worked hard at his profession as a journalist.
Why can’t these attributes coexist.”
Ummm, because this puts his reporting in question. Did he just pass info back or did he also pass on propaganda… to us? Back to the example of his US equivalent being a CIA job. Do we want to read articles secretly written by the CIA and have them passed to us as News?
Joe Blow was a fundamentalist Christian who believed that many of the ills of the modern world resulted from a belief in evolution. He believed in the cause of replacing it with Creation Science.
On the other hand, he did a good job reporting science news and admired researchers. He had a science degree. He worked hard at his profession as a science journalist.
Why can’t these attributes coexist?
#6 from Sl0re
“Do we want to read articles secretly written by the CIA and have them passed to us as News?”
Sl0re, you don’t seem to have a firm grasp on just how amoral and relativistic your average leftist (Avedis, John Ryan, etc…) is on questions like this. In your hypothetical, the important questions to ask would include, is the President currently Hillary Clinton or is it still George W. Bush and what is the goal of the propaganda? If Bush, then that would be an evil, evil act by an evil, evil CIA agent, unermining everything good and noble about America and the profession of journalism. Three days after Hillary is sworn in, he’s just a patriotic American who is doing two admirable jobs at the same time…
Major bonus points if he’s pushing communist propaganda or bolstering an authoritarian ass like Chavez. Major demerits if he’s pushing “American” propaganda favoring democracy and traditional liberalism (ie voice of america).
bq Finally, he could have very been friends with American journalists; both at the level of a colleague and at more personally. I mean An never killed – or caused the death of – one of his friends, did he?
No, he only caused the deaths of American soldiers, who were, let’s face it, not of the same social stature as journalists.
The problem is not with An, a patriot to his own cause and country. The problem is our self-important journalists who reported a victory as a defeat (Tet Offensive), lobbied Congress to cut off funding to South Vietnam after we pulled out. They still basked in their glory for giving Uncle Sam a bloody nose. They stll believed themselves to be right when millions of IndoChinese were murdered, or took to the shark infested seas to escape the Communists. They enjoyed their power of distortions so much that they want to repeat that in Iraq.
An worked to defeat the United States in Vietnam.
This makes his journalistic credentials as valid as many other journalists of the time (for example, Walter Cronkite).
The two attributes can’t co-exist because his identity as a spy trumps everything else. That was the reason he was placed as an agent with the press: to influence them to adopt the views the North Vietnamese Communist Party wanted them to adopt. Even if he wasn’t at true believer (and it appears that he was) he’d have been executed if he failed to carry out his job.
Our hypothetical science correspondent isn’t going to be stood up against the wall if he fails to influence the paper to a pro-creationist viewpoint.
That his American press colleagues liked him just goes to show that he was a good spy, and that they were gullible fools.
One thing that journalists seem completely uninterested in evaluating was how their reporting on the Vietnam war was affected by An.
“The problem is not with An, a patriot to his own cause and country.”
It is, at least in part, if his cause was evil. Loyal service to a cause is not, after all, an independent virtue, it’s virtuous in direct proportion as the cause is virtuous.
And An’s was pretty nasty.
“Loyal service to a cause is not, after all, an independent virtue, it’s virtuous in direct proportion as the cause is virtuous.”
Wasn’t an elderly immigrant recently discovered to have hidden the fact that he was a Schutzstaffel guard and dog-handler at a concentration camp? I’m sure he treated the dogs very well, and had a fine service record. He may even have shown up for work early every day and got a gold star for it. But he’s still being deported.
Pham Xuan An worked for a bloodthirsy regime and supported a genocidal cause. Frankly I find the whole “idealism” defense pretty lame – if anything, An’s idealism magnified his crimes. Osama bin Ladin, Castro, Stalin, Hitler, Chavez, Mao and many others are/were idealists. Their idealism left no room for human decency or compassion. All that is left is The Cause.
“Loyal service to a cause is not, after all, an independent virtue, it’s virtuous in direct proportion as the cause is virtuous.”
Wasn’t an elderly immigrant recently discovered to have hidden the fact that he was a Schutzstaffel guard and dog-handler at a concentration camp? I’m sure he treated the dogs very well, and had a fine service record. He may even have shown up for work early every day and got a gold star for it. But he’s still being deported.
Another good Communist – dead.We need more good communists.
“…if hundreds of thousands of Veitnamese occupied my land…” Actually the did. The North Veitnamese invaded the South with hundred of thousands of soldiers. South Vietnam was not part of the communist regime of the North. The vile communists takeover of the North resulted in millions of Vietnamese fleeing to the South. South Vietnam was no the spy’s “land.”
How anyone can trust anything coming from the mouth of a “journalist” is beyond my comprehension. They’re called “talking heads” for a good reason. Walter Cronkite probably did more to bring on the defeat of the South than this spy.
Yep. The same thing that makes Karnow and so forth still praise An, after they find out he was shining them on all these years, drives today’s hotel-bound reporters, like Chandrasekaran, Filkins, etc., to use Baathist insurgents as their eyes outside the Green Zone.
Bilal Hussein anyone?
The Karnows and Chandrasekarans of the journalism racket don’t mind a bit being used as a conduit for propaganda, as long as the propaganda conforms to their pre-selected meta-narrative.
Pretty sad when they can’t even fake their own stories any more. They have to get third parties to fake the stories for them. At least Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass made up their own bull$#!+. Their successors are too enervated to do even that.
“Ummm, because this puts his reporting in question. Did he just pass info back or did he also pass on propaganda…”
And you think that US reporters and military PR coming out of VN was “honest” journalism.
Do you think MoveON, Ledeen and Kristol and giving you the straight facts?
An versus McNammara….I’d say it’s a toss up.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
As for a mean nasty cause, we supported a feable yet brutal dictator that was a vestige of colonialism. An worked for a brutal communist regime. Again, I’d sat it’s a wash.
And again I’d say the world is never neither all black nor all white.
I have very little use for Mr. An. He served a brutal regime willingly and damaged my country. But he is infinitely superior to his apologists. Those Americans who to this day make excuses deserve to live in some communist “paradise” and see what An and his associates think of dissent. Even those fools are far more admirable than the press corps that continues to admire An. Those reporters who still excuse An and claim his reports were anything except propaganda are worthless. It is hardly surprising that the media gather no respect. They deserve none.
The world isn’t ever all or nothing.
The statement itself is an all or nothing statement – and absolutism that the statement itself denies. Therefore it’s false. There are indeed somethings which are all or nothing. Take gravity. Step off a ten story building and you going ALL the way down.
It’s like someone saying there are no absolutes. A totaly ridiculous and fallacious argument on its face (if it can even be called an argument).
I find it so hypocritical for liberals/progressives/socialists/communists/leftists to claim there are not universal truths but to have ranted the last six years that whatever they say about conservatives/Republicans/President Bush is TRUTH that has come down from on high as if from the Oracle of Delphi itself. You can’t find any more congitive dissonance than that which is found on the left side of the aisle.
And to defend Pham An as a “journalist” has to be the biggest piece of bovine scatology that has come down the pike since the first used car lot went into operation. An was a Commie, a deceiver and a spy. If you’re a closet Commie, of course you would see a certain nobility in his actions, but if you love freedom and the unalienable rights of man, An was little more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing betraying the very principles free people hold dear.
I see nothing noble or admirable about this man since he lived to service an ideology which enslaved a people to a lifetime of misery. The fact he moved with relative ease within the journalist community and then still receive praise from those he snookered speaks eloquently of the naivete and general soft-headedness within the lamestream American media culture. Actually, I bet he felt right at home among the generally liberal American journalists!
Well big whoopty doo. So what if he got a few American men killed? So what if there were a few weepy eyed mothers with flags on their mantles? So what if there were kids that grew up and never knew their father? SO WHAT?
The important thing to be treasured above all ideology is the ideology of the “journalist.” They help us ordinary folk understand the true reality, as in “Four legs good, two legs bad.” The people of VN owe An such a debt of gratitude for their fantabulous standard of living since the ’70s.
As far as I’m concerned though, there ain’t a hell hot enough for a piece of crap like An, or his comrade enablers.
I see references to An being a “patriot” and “his country.” He lived in South Vietnam which was under attack from North Vietnam – two separate and very distinct “countries” whatever the geographic situation _in the past_ might have been.
His actions for the North were not patriotism in the South which was not his country.
Blogdog:
Good point. An was not a patriot in any sense of the word – patriotism is not a Communist virtue – and technically he was a traitor to the Republic of Vietnam.
One of the lies that An’s good friends in the media promulgated, perhaps with his help, was that all Vietnamese regarded North and South as one country, and only the imperialists and their stooges pretended otherwise.
Which goes to show again what a lucky man An was. The North Vietnamese communists made definite distinctions between North and South. The Southerners saw their political influence evaporate after their military power was destroyed in Tet, and after the war many of their leaders ended up in prison or as refugees.
He was a spy. He spied on the US for his masters. What do you think the first thing his commie masters would do when they took down a country? They killed in no particular order:
Lawyers
Spies (yes, the ones that spied FOR them – they could not be trusted)
Government representatives
Judges
Educators
and probably a few others they did not like.
An spied on South Vietnam and the US for his commie masters. On our land. There is ONE and ONLY ONE sentence for that in a time of war. Anything else are specious arguments and time wasting navel gazing.
Good riddance to that dirtbag.
Actually, I think a lot of people here are too wrapper up in foam at the mouth rabid anti-communism to appreciate AL’s quetion(s).
“An spied on South Vietnam and the US for his commie masters. On our land. There is ONE and ONLY ONE sentence for that in a time of war. Anything else are specious arguments and time wasting navel gazing.
Good riddance to that dirtbag.”
This is interesting, albeit typical, thinking.
Robert E. Lee engaged in armed insurection against the United States and was responsible for countless American deaths. Yet many US citizens respected the man – if not his ideologies – after the war; even to this day. Technically, the penalty for Lee’s actions also is death.
Another thought; if I was a spy like An, I would work even harder to make my reporting very accurate – maybe even give it a pro-US slant at certain junctures – so as to maintain my cover and gain more trust and access. Therefore, I reiterate that An could have been a very fine journalist.
Finally, I don’t see how An’s support of a cause that was as much nationalistic as it was communist makes him less of a patriot.
Do we condemn the defenders of Stalingrad (WW2) because they were communists? Is it a lie that they fought for “Mother Russia because – as someone here strangely proposed – communists cannot be patriots?
A communist spy is the only native reporter the Times recognised during the Vietnam conflict. This is surprising how?
Of course the only native the Times would use would be one of HoChiMinn’s faithful minions. The fact he was working for North Vietnamese Intelligence was probably highlighted on his aplication.
From my experience with the Times they have always been a communist bilge pump of propaganda, dredging up socialist effluence to poison the American discourse.
They served America just like John Kerry.
re: avedis’ avventures in imaginary historical parallels…
“Robert E. Lee engaged in armed insurection” Rob’t E. Lee wore a uniform, not a newsie hat. He resigned his US Army commission and took up his Confederate commission, full disclosure. He was not a spy working incognito.
He also spent all of the war, except for a brief detour in South-central PA and Western Maryland, fighting on Southern Soil, not disguised as a newsie undermining the North’s war effort (the Copperhead Democrats made a college try of *that*).
I could be merciful and stop here, but I won’t…
“Therefore, I reiterate that An could have been a very fine journalist.” I *could* reiterate the same thing about Dan Rather, but then like you I’d just be making facile, unsupported assumptions.
“any less of a patriot” Admit it, avvy, you have a Che’ t-shirt and Mao bag to go with your Uncle Ho sandals.
What does Stalingrad have to do with anything? The Russians fought in uniform, in their own country, defending from invaders occupying Russian soil. Mr. An committed espionage in another country not his, abetting his own country’s invasion and conquest of the South. Other than those discontinuities, the comparison is entirely apt.
Thus endeth the lesson…furious
Furious, the bulk of your rant is irrelevant to the point of AL’s post and to my comment concerning Robert E. Lee.
Let’s try again.
I brought in the R.E.L. reference in response to comments like Arlo’s sarcastic, “Well big whoopty doo. So what if he got a few American men killed? So what if there were a few weepy eyed mothers with flags on their mantles? So what if there were kids that grew up and never knew their father? SO WHAT?”
I was pointing out that R.E.L. was a citizen of the US, a soldier of the US, trained at the US Military Academy, who turned on his country, committed armed insurection against it, caused many mothers to be “weepy eyed” and posed an infinitely greater existential threat to our country than An ever did or could. Yet, people then and now – US citizens that is – still respect and admire R.E.L. Thus, it is possible to have positive feelings towards terrible enemies. Therefore, it is possible, at a human level, that An’s US colleagues could still feel some sort of friendship with the man.
It has always struck me as very weird and potentially dangerous that, generally, Americans do not allow themselves to attribute positive qualities to foreigners who are enemies – hardly even to foreigners who are friendly.
The demonization comes rapidly and is total.
There is this almost complete lack of ability to see the world through their enemies eyes. Again, a foolish state of mind for a warrior to permit himself to indulge in.
Has it occurred to you that An may have not perceived his side (the NVA) as “invading” another country because it would be impossible for a Vietnamese to invade Vietnam; that the North/South divide was artificial and imposed by foreign invaders like the French and the US?
Now you -and the US gov’t and its proxy in Saigon – may disagree with An’s position, but that doesn’t mean that An is wrong and you are right in some ultimate objective kind of way. It just means that there is a disagreement and that the disagreement is of sufficient scope and magnitude that it will be settled through bloodshed.
Yes, the communists, after their victory over the US and the Saigon govt, committed murderous purges. These are indefensible from a moral standpoint. Do you know whether or not An was aware that the new regime would undertake such actions? Perhaps if he had been he would have crossed over to the US/S. Vietnamese side.
You condemn the man totally – demonize him – for things done by a political body over which he had no control after he had performed his duty as a soldier…yes a soldier who operated – as intelligence sometimes does – covertly.
“Admit it, avvy, you have a Che’ t-shirt and Mao bag to go with your Uncle Ho sandals.”
I’m going to take that as I am sure it was intended; as a joke (I’m chuckling over as I write, really) You know nothing about me other than my views on a single topic are quite different from yours.
avedis:
Completely false, avedis. It is false as a generalization, and it is false when specifically applied to Vietnam.
Replace “Americans” with “leftists” and “foreigners” with “Americans” and you’d almost be on to something.
Hmmmmm, Glen, “Freedom Fries” anyone? Oh those faggoty frenchies……
………I recall a few media types being severely chastized for suggesting that the 9/11 attackers were courageous and dedicated individuals………that Bin Laden is intelligent, capable, courageous and a man of his word…….then there is Amahdinejad is deranged incendiary, Saddam = Hitler……these things were/are heard every day…. but anyhow can you actually supply any evidence other than that of proving my point with innaneness like, “Replace “Americans” with “leftists” and “foreigners” with “Americans” and you’d almost be on to something”.
avedis,
You’re absolutely right that the world is never all black or all white.
But that doesn’t mean that everything is a wash. Apartheid or Mandela?
Yes, the 9/11 murderers showed courage. So did Robert E. Lee. They all were tragically wrong.
Roger, I agree, Too often we are presented with bi-polar choices; more black/white thinking (no pun intended).
And, just to be clear, walking a mile in our enemies moccasins doesn’t mean that we don’t kill them at the end of the walk.
Rather, it means that we are more efficient at killing them and maybe – just maybe – we are able to solve some potential conflicts through more civil means; before they reach the stage where killing is necessary.
_The demonization comes rapidly and is total._
_There is this almost complete lack of ability to see the world through their enemies eyes. Again, a foolish state of mind for a warrior to permit himself to indulge in._
And yet to call them on this, you assume that they might actually look at the evidence and reform?
How many times have you gone through this? “We do better to look at things from the other guy’s point of view, maybe we can work things out, and if not we’ll know better how to beat him.” “You’re a goddam commie sympathiser!” Over and over. Don’t you get tired of it? What’s that they say about doing the same thing and expecting a different result?
And yet, people do change their minds. If you don’t _expect_ a different result but accept it if it happens, that doesn’t seem so crazy.
What I take from this story is that south vietnam was riddled with northern sympathisers. Our cause was probably hopeless. In retrospect it’s easy to see why — the french were literally colonialists and the viet minh had a lot of support against them. The same people who worked against the japanese occupation. “Get the foreign occupiers out” is a pretty compelling slogan.
We supported the french-influenced catholics who wanted to stay in control. The buddhists and others didn’t believe the communists would be that much worse. And they probably haven’t been, for most people. It’s always the opponents of the new regime who suffer. In the USA, surviving tories had their property taken and most of them were allowed to flee the country. In france after WWII collaborationists suffered a bit. There’s always a lot of that. Likely most vietnamese aren’t much worse off under vietnamese rule than they were before, though I don’t know how we could test that unless they got free speech. (Which they didn’t have under the french and had only in theory later.)
Could we have somehow gotten a real democracy in south vietnam that the south vietnamese would support to the death? I’d like to think so. But the french left them with a bunch of vietnamese aristocrats, who pretty much owned everything. That makes things a lot harder. Like, “Who died and appointed you Baron?” “My daddy.” The USA at least had a frontier, so anybody who didn’t like the way things were going in the cities could be free. The communists wanted to take everything from the aristocrats, and we opposed that, and there we were. I’m not clear what we could have done different, and yet we were backing losers.
It would have been a lot better if we could have been pr-freedom instead of just anti-communist. A real democracy. Let them debate union with the north, debate land reform, debate going communist themselves. Get a consensus. It’s harder to justify terrorism when there’s no oppressor to commit terrorist attacks agains, when all you have to do is persuade the public and things will go your way. But it’s very hard to impose democracy on other people. The place was run by frenchified vietnamese catholics who grew up under colonialism, and we weren’t ready to take south vietnam away from them. If they’d had a Washington like we did in 1776, it might have worked. They probably would have renamed Saigon after him.