Spy Games: Larry Berman

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HE ONCE LIVED in America, always professed to love America, was a star reporter for Time Magazine — and played a pivotal role in planning Viet Cong actions such as the Tet Offensive and the final subjugation of Saigon.

Larry Berman's "Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An" is the authorized biography of that man.

The Viet Cong showed characteristic foresight in 1957. In preparation for a looming conflict, Pham Xuan An was sent to California to study at a community college and absorb American culture. An studied journalism and, upon his return to Saigon, began an impressive career working for Western media outlets as the American military presence in Southeast Asia burgeoned.

According to "Perfect Spy," An eventually became one of America's preeminent Vietnamese journalists — and one of the Viet Cong's preeminent sources for high-level information and analysis.

After the 1975 fall of Saigon, An was awarded numerous medals and declared a hero and a general by the newly unified Vietnamese state. In victory, though, An became disillusioned with his country's dealings with Russia.

Berman answered some of our questions about An and Vietnam/Iraq analogies. He'll further discuss his work on Tuesday at Politics and Prose and on Thursday at the International Spy Museum.

» EXPRESS: What made you interested in An?
» BERMAN: I met him. I found him to be a great conversationalist, and he helped me and became a source for my book "No Peace, No Honor." He started to explain things about the Paris Accords that I had not heard, and the next day I met him at [a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City] and we kept those conversations up. I knew immediately that this was a guy I wanted to write a book about. I found him fascinating.

He was a hero for the Vietnamese; he was a general, and I was amazed at all these friendships he had with members of the international media .... [My book is] really about seeing the war through the eyes of a Vietnamese Communist agent, but also through the eyes of someone who was betrayed as much as anyone else and the contradictions and the tensions of the struggle for Vietnamese independence.

» EXPRESS: An's enthusiastic reaction after the U.S. won the Cold War is interesting.
» BERMAN: I think the key to understanding An's life is [knowing that] he told the truth to everybody, whenever anyone asked. He just didn't tell the truth about being a double agent. When someone asked him for information when he was working for Time or Reuters, he told the truth, and that's why he never got caught. When his bosses in Hanoi asked him for assessments of various things, he told them — even if they didn't like to hear what he said. After the war, when he asked about the revolution, he said, "This reliance on the Soviet model is a disaster." And if he had known he was just trading the Americans for the Soviets, he would have stayed with the Americans.

» EXPRESS: Do you think he meant that?
» BERMAN: I'm not the only person he said it to; I think he meant it.
When you see how he lived the rest of his life — what the hell is he doing on the USS Vandergrift as a VIP delegate with the U.S. consul general? How is it possible that the U.S. ambassador is coming to his house to say goodbye before he leaves?

I think he was very serious about the fact that he was also betrayed — by his own idealism — and that the Communist Party that emerged in Vietnam in 1975, and controls Vietnam today, was not this struggle for independence that he had joined as a young man. What else is new? Another young person finds out their government is full of [excrement]. My gosh.

I was in Washington, D.C. last week and I got a phone call. The president of Vietnam came and met with Bush in the White House. Well, I got a call at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and it's his kid, Young An. He goes, "I'm at the Willard Hotel. Can you come down and visit me?" I go, "What are you doing here?" He said, "Oh, I'll be in the Oval Office tomorrow — I'm the translator for Bush."

You couldn't make that up. Here's the first-born son of Vietnam's most heralded spy, and I'm getting through security at the Willard that no one else can get through because he wants me to sign copies of my book [laughs].

» EXPRESS: I was struck by the passage where you write, "Hanoi's strategy was always to chip away at American public opinion."
» BERMAN: They were astute observers of American congressional and public opinion. This is one of the things that An was so valuable for. The last medal that he got, in 1975 — this has been verified by documents that Hanoi has released — Hanoi did not think that they were going to be able unify the country, because they paid such a heavy price in the Tet Offensive and in the Easter Offensive of '72. They did not think they would have the manpower to unify the country until '76, '77, or even '78. That's for sure.

An's report — based on everything he was hearing from the Americans and his understanding of American public opinion and the new Congress of 1974 — was absolutely instrumental in getting the politburo to decide to move the timetable up and begin the final assault of Saigon, which I have a whole chapter on in the book. And that was based on An's really astute assessment of American public opinion.

» EXPRESS: Your book portrays An as extremely important to the Viet Cong's success. Do you think it's possible that the U.S. might have won if it hadn't been for An?
» BERMAN: I'm gonna be on C-SPAN's "Book TV" and the Washington Post's associate editor, Bob Kaiser, interviewed me. He asked me that same question. I asked An this question, and he said, "If the U.S. continued to fight the war the way that it did, it could never have achieved its objectives." The reason is — and you could draw an analogy here to Iraq if you wanted to — we focused on the military side. We sent 550,000. Defoliation. Linebacker I. Linebacker II. But we backed the wrong leaders in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese leadership understood that all they had to do was tell the Americans what they wanted to hear. Pay lip-service and they would get money, schools, highways. And there was no effort to create a new leadership cadre that would have unified South Vietnam and which the people would have rallied to fight for.

There are a lot of comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq — stupid ones — but one that is true is that the goal in Vietnam and Iraq is really the same: We're trying to create a government. We tried to do it in Vietnam and we failed.

» EXPRESS: What are some comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam that you think are stupid?
» BERMAN: Here's an example: There's no draft. There is no antiwar movement in America today, because there is no draft. So with the antiwar movement, there's no comparison at all. A comparison that always works is that as things go south, the administration blames the media, the liberals, the college professors, the antiwar protestors — anyone but ourselves. The comparison that works the best is the Gulf of Tonkin and the weapons of mass destruction. We now know that in the Gulf of Tonkin, the second attack never occurred. Clearly, the charade of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the link betweenSaddam and al-Qaeda are two lies that allowed extraordinary public approval to go to war. I think that's a comparison that people will be looking at for a long time.

» EXPRESS: What aspects of An's lift strike you the most after writing the book?
» BERMAN: I'm still pondering, How did An manage to retain his friendships [with Americans] even after he was outed as a spy? To me, that's a really important question. Almost no one felt anything except, "Well, I still love An, even though he was a spy."

The other thing is — and this is, I think the most interesting part of the book — his day-to-day life for 20 years. He lived a lie, and he never got caught. All these other Vietnamese spies got caught. Every day, this guy went to Time Magazine and served as a correspondent. He had all these friends in the intelligence agencies and the news media, and then at night he would do these reports. He would disappear for a few days, he would have secret drops, he would have reports stuffed in egg rolls — and he never got caught! Imagine the pressure inside of him.

An always described that to me — the pressure, the feeling that he could be killed at any minute. He lived in this constant fear for 20 years. I don't even think there's a way to capture that verbally.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Tue., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)
» International Spy Museum, 800 F St. NW; Thu., noon, free; 202-393-7789. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photos courtesy Larry Berman