In the fall of 1957 a young Vietnamese named Pham Xuan An entered Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, to study journalism. He soon became a successful and popular student at the small institution, editor of the college newspaper, frequently invited to parties and student outings, and a keen observer of all aspects of American life and customs. He served an internship at the Sacramento Bee and met California Governor Pat Brown. In an era when Americans were coming to believe that cross-cultural relationships and people-to-people informal diplomacy might prove to be important assets in waging the Cold War, the story of An, returning to his native country with a new personal understanding of, and admiration for, American democracy, freedom and opportunity, appeared to be a clear-cut example of the success of such down to earth personal relationships (see Christina Klein, Cold War orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945–61 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003)).

Those beliefs appeared to be borne out by An's subsequent career. Soon after returning to Vietnam he was hired by Reuters and subsequently worked for The New York Herald and for Time where he became a full-time correspondent in 1964. By the late 1960s he was widely known as ‘the dean of Vietnamese journalists’ in the words of Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker. Among his close friends, colleagues and admirers were Shaplen, Pulitzer Prize winners Stanley Karnow and David Halberstam and television correspondent Morley Safer. He continued to report for Time even after the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, filing his last story in April 1976.

Yet An had a second, even more successful career. He was for over 20 years a communist intelligence agent. His US education had in fact been planned and financed by the Vietnamese Party's intelligence service. From the 1950s to the final defeat of South Vietnam An dispatched about 500 intelligence reports to his handlers in South Vietnam, many of which were sent on to Hanoi (p. 2). Among the most important of these are said to be US Army field manuals and other information about American operational procedures and methods that aided an outnumbered and surrounded Viet Cong force to achieve a striking tactical success against the South Vietnamese and their US advisors at Ap Bac in January 1963. He cooperated closely with, and provided valuable information to, communist forces infiltrating Saigon in preparation for the 1968 Tet Offensive and is credited with providing Hanoi with advanced information on both the Cambodian incursion in 1970 and Lam Son 719, the US supported South Vietnamese offensive into Laos in 1971. For his work in South Vietnam An received more than a dozen medals, was named a Hero of the People's Armed Forces and promoted to the rank of colonel (later general).

The revelations about An's true status caused surprisingly little rancour among the many prominent journalists who had been his friends and close colleagues in Saigon. Most continued to refer to him with affection and respect. An himself always insisted that he was a friend and admirer of the United States but a Vietnamese patriot first.

Thomas A. Bass, a professor of English and Journalism at SUNY Albany published an article about An in The New Yorker in 2005 and conducted over 60 hours of interviews with him as well as with many of An's relatives, friends and associates. Bass is excellent at presenting the ambiguities and enigmas of An's double life. Like so many he was charmed and fascinated by An but never doubts that the old master spy has still not told his whole story. While a good read, Bass's book will be of limited use to serious students of the Vietnam War because of its scanty documentation. Despite the author's claim that following An's death in 2006, ‘Intelligence sources, both in North and South Vietnam, began revealing previously undisclosed information’, and that he had personally received ‘a steady stream of messages, notes, photos and other documents’ (p. 6) there are only two or three references to any Vietnamese materials in the notes and those refer to official biographies published before An's death.

Like An's other American biographer, Larry Berman, Bass sees no evidence that An ever took advantage of his work for the American media to act as propagandist for the communists (see Larry Berman, Perfect spy: The incredible double life of Pham Xuan An (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). As An himself pointed out, any suspicion of such activities would have seriously endangered his cover. If the American media helped lose the Vietnam War, as some Americans continue to believe, it was not through tolerating questionable reporting but by failing to spot An as a mole. But then An also managed to fool the CIA (which at one point tried to recruit him), the head of Vietnamese intelligence and a host of other officials. In the end, Pham Xuan An's extraordinary career was the product of the same habits, values and practices that helped ensure the defeat of the US and its South Vietnamese ally: the power of family loyalties and connections over all other considerations in South Vietnamese society, chronically loose security practices and the utter cultural and linguistic ignorance of the Americans that made a Vietnamese cultural guide like An who talked and seemingly thought like an American seem indispensible.