The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game (review)

This book tells the story of the Vietnamese equivalent of Richard Sorge, the famous German-Soviet spy in the 1930s and 1940s. Pham Xuan An, Hanoi's most effective intelligence agent in the Vietnam War, emulated Sorge in obtaining classified information of the highest strategic and tactical importance under the cover of journalism. Both Sorge and An skillfully positioned themselves between their allied enemies—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on the one hand, and South Vietnam and the United States on the other. By having extensive personal contacts with both sides, they used their ties with one power not only to allay the other's suspicions but also to adopt the role of the indispensable expert. Although Sorge ultimately paid with his life for entering the tiger's den, An managed to escape detection until the end of the war and saw his dream fulfilled when the triumphant North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in April 1975.

The title of the book masterfully catches the paradox that enabled An to perform this extraordinary feat. If his intimate familiarity with the ways of his great opponent had not been propped up by a genuine fondness for the etiquette of U.S. journalism, he might have found it considerably more difficult to gain the trust of so many star reporters who became his friends and—unknowingly—also his informants. Having carefully interviewed not only An but also dozens of An's wartime Vietnamese and American acquaintances—including his fellow agents and fellow journalists—Thomas A. Bass draws a colorful, nuanced, and credible picture of An's complex personality.

Bass, a correspondent and professor of journalism, also proves capable of putting An's activities into a wider context by describing the Cold War–inspired liaisons between the U.S. media and the U.S. intelligence services. Quoting former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Frank Snepp on how Robert Shaplen had been given "unbelievable access to… high-level intelligence" (p. 155), he explains why U.S. policymakers, having assisted the media to play such a crucial role in their global crusade, felt unable to disregard press criticism when one famous journalist after another raised his or her voice against the Vietnam War.

Although obviously attracted to his talkative interviewee, Bass does not overlook the occasional omissions and distortions in An's self-portrait, pointing out that "An, while presenting himself as a strategic analyst, someone who merely observed the war from the sidelines, was actually a master tactician involved in many of the war's major battles" (p. 4). Bass is less interested in challenging the historical narrative presented by An and his Communist superiors, in which the Communist party is depicted as the only genuine vehicle of patriotic, anti-colonial struggle. Bass tacitly accepts this narrative instead of investigating which social and cultural peculiarities of the Vietnamese scene facilitated the growth of a powerful Communist movement. After all, anti-colonialist nationalism was by no means absent in Cambodia, Burma, or Indonesia, but in the latter countries non-Communist parties and politicians played a far more important role than in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, Bass's focus on An's love-hate relationship with the United States underemphasizes a factor in his phenomenal success as a spy that was even more important than his ability to understand and enchant Americans: the utter failure of the South Vietnamese counterintelligence system. The book reveals that An obtained the bulk of his classified information from South Vietnamese rather than U.S. sources. Ready as the CIA officers were to give Shaplen strategic briefings (which then often found their way to An), they did not go so far as to provide him with tactical intelligence, let alone raw intelligence data on military interrogations—the kind of super-sensitive information that An could routinely acquire from his contacts in the various South Vietnamese military and security organs.

This cavalier disregard for secrecy appears...