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thanks for the A2A . from natural peaks to skycrapers , canada has it all! montreal and toronto are two large cities that offers about everything students could possibly ask for.not as an ethically diverse city toronto is major center of higher learning and research with many well known institutions such as the university of torontothe united nations consistently ranks canada as one of the best places in the world to live ,given its low crime rate .there are also walksafe programmes , where volunteers assist people in getting in public transportation during at nightthere are three academic intakes at the institutions in canada : fall , winter and summer . fall lasts from september to december , winter lasts from january to april and summer intakes hold for may to august .though fall is the primary intake in most colleges , some colleges do offer a winter intake .international students are advised to apply at the earliest , as scholarships and admission get more and more competitive closer to deadline . A general application deadline would be 6 to 9 months before your session starts , and it can vary depending on each department and choice of the subject . stay commited to your deadline as it ain`t flexible except for diploma programmes.you can choose from the number of study programmes -. certificate or diploma ( one or two years ). advanced diploma ( two or three years ). undergraduate (three or four years ). postgraduate ( two years ). phd ( for or five years dissertation)as all above blinked thousand ideas in your mind but all you need to do is to rectify your goal . if you are good at taking money responsibility better than the other stuffs than finance is a right stage to fire up and if you have a unbeatable potential to organizing or handling your peers than welcome to HRM .what is your reason to study in canada ? is it the anticipation to visit the country ? or it is the dream to study in that country . inbox me whats yours ???regardsRagini.

How would you feel if your son or daughter wanted nothing more to do with you?I’m gonna take on this question from a different angle.In September 2005, I found my Daddy deceased. I’m still a big Daddy’s girl and his death was devastating to me. I had just turned 26.About a month, actually, it was the very day that Hurricane Katrina was destroying Louisiana, my Mother came clean with my Daddy about her involvement with another man. They decided to divorce and they had signed papers just two days before my Daddy passed away. The papers they had signed were to be finalized at the end of a 30 day period thus dissolving their marriage.My Daddy was the Assistant Chief Sheriff in our county and as soon as I found him, I made a 911 call, told them I needed emergency assistance and within minutes, the yard was full of both city and county patrol cars, paramedics from the local volunteer fire department and state troopers.The way I had found him was odd and there was a great deal of concern due to his involvement in law enforcement and the divorce. Since he worked with the county, the state took over his death investigation. However, the concern for me and the rest of my family was solely with my Mother’s possible involvement.To fully grasp everything, I feel I should first explain that I never have had a great relationship with my Mother. I wanted one but she and I were always at odds. I am the oldest of three girls and for the most part, I was a guinea pig whose sole purpose was to be a role model for my sisters.I seriously wanted my parents to be proud of me. I followed the rules, made decent grades, had a job, kept good friends, went to church and generally kept myself out of trouble but my parents were SUPER STRICT.As a teenager, I made a few mistakes. I snuck out of my house a total of four times. My Mother called me names, shamed me, slapped me, bitched about my friends, blamed me and my bad example when my sisters got in trouble, knowing and purposely embarrassed me in public, had me do crazy things like sit across from a female friend’s home to see if my boyfriend was going to cheat on me by dropping off and spend time with the other girl and would tell me that she had seen my fiance riding around with another girl. This was a constant thing and I absolutely, positively could not talk to her about anything.Growing up in church I participated in our choir and I ended up getting a vocal scholarship to attend college. I didn’t learn about it until the last day of my senior year of high school but rather than be excited, my Mother acted like she couldn’t believe I’d received it and further went on to say that it was going to be a shame that I couldn’t use it since we didn’t have the money to pay for the costs not covered by the scholarship.This was a vast difference to the relationship I had with my Daddy. He was my hero anyway but even more so when it came to me needing to have my Mother back off. He was the diffuser but she would often try to take an issue she was having with me to my Daddy in, what can only be described as, an attempt to change his opinion of me. It rarely worked and would only make her more mad with me. It was almost like she was jealous. The only problem with it was that during my teenage years, my Daddy was only a Deputy Sergeant, worked graveyard shift and I didn’t get to see him as much as I would’ve liked. We just never had any problems and I could talk to him. He made me feel much more loved and accepted.The only times when I felt like my Mother and I could finally have the relationship I’d always wanted was while I was planning my wedding, and while I was pregnant with my sons. It was very much confined to these time frames. After my wedding, she would fuss about my husband and how I should be “handling” him and after I had my sons, it was a fuss about my parenting skills, my husband’s parenting skill and whether or not I had learned anything from her example.Even with the insecurities she’d help me develop, the times she had embarrassed me and the hurt she had caused me, I still loved her and had always hoped our relationship could be better. She was my Mother. Why would I not want that?When she came to my home to tell me that she had cheated on my Daddy, I was initially shocked but then I started to get angry. I went down and spoke to my Daddy and I had never seen him more hurt. I don’t know how other people in law enforcement behave but my Daddy was a pillar of strength. He rarely showed his emotions. It was always a side effect from his job. He had to be tough and in control of himself. When I saw him like this, it broke my heart and once again, just made me more angry.His behavior changed in that last month of his life. He was paranoid. I’m not exactly sure why. I went down to check in on him one evening and the house door was locked. That was odd but it was concerning when he answered the door with his gun. I sit down and spoke with him about my concerns and he told me the only reason he was answering the door that way was because he wasn’t going to let my Mother’s new romantic interest show up and start acting a fool. He also started drinking more.My Mother had come to see him the night before he died. I still don’t exactly know why. The following morning my sister picked up one of my boys and took him and her own daughter to school. I got a call from her shortly after telling me she couldn’t find my Daddy. So, I went to his house to help her look for him.He drove a county car and that was why my sister had stopped by his house. She’d seen the car and he should’ve already been on his way to work. She met me outside the house and told me she just couldn’t find him. So we went in and I began hollering for him.In the bedroom, things were out of place. There were pillows on the floor, the fan was knocked over and his shotgun was out. When I went to the bathroom, the door was locked. The light switch was outside the bathroom door but it was off, so I switched it on, got on the floor, looked under the door and only saw towels. It was a push lock and I figured it might have been pressed and locked on accident. It made me feel a bit uneasy but I’d not searched the rest of the house so I told my sister we would search everywhere else before trying to get into the bathroom.After searching upstairs and in the basement he used as a mancave, we were left with the bathroom. We went back to the door and when I got it open, I found my Daddy. He’d fallen over into the shower doors, which lifted his feet off the ground and out of sight.As I touched him, my sister began shouting, “He’s dead! Oh, My God! He’s Dead!” She dropped the phone, turned around and ran out of the room. Upon touching him, I knew he was gone. There was no coming back. So, I picked up the phone, dialed 911 and stayed there with my Daddy. I wanted so badly to move him but he was a big man and that just wasn’t going to happen. He was also nude and I wanted to cover him in an attempt to maintain his dignity as his coworkers started running in to help but I knew that I shouldn’t disturb anything since I didn’t know what had actually happened.As folks began pouring into the house, I stepped out onto the porch and sit in a rocking chair. When I saw my grandmother pull up, jump out and start heading towards the house, I hopped up and went out to her. My grandmother had already lost a child. My aunt died at the age of 19 in 1984. I wasn’t going to let her in the house. So, I walked up to her and grabbed her and did the hardest thing I’ve ever done by telling her that her baby was gone. She and I just stood there, holding each other as we sobbed.It was the worst day of my life and while I sit here relaying the story, in this very moment, I’ve got tears slowly streaming down my face.There was an investigation that drug out for about 8 months. My mother didn’t cooperate. She also took control of my Daddy’s estate because the 30 days that would’ve declared my parents divorced, had not run its course, meaning she would still be recognized as his wife. That made me livid. She had signed that paper and so had my Daddy. They had divided their assets but upon his death, everything reverted back to her.I didn’t know if my Mother had anything to do with his death. His autopsy revealed he died from an accidental overdose of benadryl. I’m not sure that I’ve yet mentioned it but my Mother was a nurse and while I’m not sure why she was there the night before he died, I’ve been told it was because she was bringing him medication. It is just an uncomfortable situation. However, no charges were brought and I trust the judgement of the men that investigated. Even those who were still suspicious came to say there just wasn’t enough there. I may never know what actually happened but life has to go on regardless.With my Daddy gone, he was no longer around to be the in-between with me and my Mother. I cut my Mother off. I didn’t want her to continue to be toxic to me. I was never ugly aside from a confrontation while she was destroying the front yard of my Daddy’s house when I asked her what the F*** she was doing and her telling me that I’d never get the house while we were in the courthouse where I told her she needed to get away from me. I wasn’t willing to tolerate her anymore.While this may sound strange, I did continue to let her see my boys. I knew she wouldn’t hurt them and I also knew that she was very aware that if she stepped out of line with them, I would not let her see them again. I wanted my boys to have as many people in their lives to love them as possible and I knew that despite my feelings and whatever was going on between she and I, she did love them.For the next 11 years, I had very limited contact with my Mother.I was angry for all the hurt she put me through as a teen and a young mother.I was angry that she had called me a whore and a slut but she cheated on my Daddy.She bitched at me because my husband, not me, my husband has a tattoo and therefore I married trash yet she now has a huge tattoo on her back.I was angry because she’d:Slapped me.Beat me.Talked down to me.Talked about me.Embarrassed me.Blamed me.Denied that anything I said ever happened.& most of all, that the last days of my Daddy’s life were full of hurt due to her selfishness.My Daddy will have been gone 14 years this coming September but in the past 3 years, I have started to be a bit more receptive to my Mother. I still have her at a distance but I’ve tried to forgive her. It is something I have to make a choice to do on a daily basis. Some days the choice to forgive is a bit tougher than others but I do try daily.I’m not perfect. I don’t expect her to be. The thing that changed things for me was when she started going to therapy. She decided to write me and tell me that she finally understood that even if she didn’t think that our relationship had been that bad, that my perspective was my reality. What I saw, felt and heard was my reality just as much as what she saw, felt and heard was hers. It was finally not just something I had been saying. It was something I lived and she was more willing to understand that it was real for me and that meant my feelings were justified.I don’t know if I will ever have the Mother-daughter relationship I always wanted. At this point, I probably won’t but she is still my Mother. She was with me when I graduated, when I got married and she was in the delivery room when I brought my sons into this world. She is a big part of my life and even though I’ve been the one to keep the distance in place, there have been times where I’ve cried for my Mother and wished things were different.If you have a child that has become estranged to you, there is a reason why. It may be a reason that you think is crazy. Maybe you shouldn’t think it is crazy. If your child has feelings about your relationship, you should listen to what they have to say. When they speak, don’t tell them that they don’t understand what happened or that things didn’t happen the way they are saying it did.What they tell you is their reality. It is what they lived and right or wrong in YOUR eyes, you cannot tell them how to feel about it. You need to take what they say to heart and realize that your starting point to heal your relationship is found in those feelings. If you do not except their feelings, you will not move forward with your child.If they were hurt by words or actions, you need to not only acknowledge it, you need to take active steps to insure you do not repeat those words or actions.I’m a Mother. I have two sons that I love more than anything else in this world and I’ve tried to be a good Mother to them. I’ve not always got it right and it would kill me to have them not in my life. I’ve always told them to talk to me. I listen to what they have to say. If I’ve hurt them, I try not to do it again by trying to find other ways to compromise.The biggest mistake parents make is not realizing that they are not raising kids. You are raising adults.You may have the power while they are little but they will not stay little. They will form their own opinions from their life. As parents, we should be mindful of that. I do not hit my kids because when I am frustrated or an adult does something I told them not to do, I can’t go out and hit that person. Adults do not do that. They talk it out. Raise your children to talk it out and think because it is what is expected from adults.If I should ever have a major falling out with my boys, it will hurt. The first thing I will do is listen. The second thing is acknowledge. The third thing will be to try to start again with an understanding of what they want and expect from me and the role they want me to play in their life. I will be happy to be what they need me to be for them because they will be happy that I am respecting their wishes.If you are in an estranged relationship, I wish you a lot of luck. It is hard but with time and effort, it can change. No matter the amount of time or effort, in my eyes, it will have been worth it to be part of my children’s lives.

Q. Can a famous person also be a spy?A. Phạm Xuân Ẩn was one of many North Vietnamese spies at all levels of South Vietnamese society. He was a correspondent for Time, Reuters and New York Herald Tribune. His long embedment and access to state security and military plans had disastrous consequences. He helped plan the Tet Offensive attack strategy for Saigon. As a testament to his high rank, he successfully demanded an end to the indiscriminate shelling of Saigon civilian targets for fear of alienating the populace during mini-Tet. His duplicty only came to light after the war.Phạm Xuân Ẩn - Article, Biography and ObituariesGeneral Department of Military Intelligence (Vietnam)New Vietnam Spy Tale Sheds Light on How the U.S. Lost the WarPhạm Ngọc ThảoPhạm Xuân Ẩn from Wikipedia (September 12, 1927 – September 20, 2006) was a Vietnamese journalist and correspondent for Time (magazine), Reuters and the New York Herald Tribune, stationed in Saigon during the war in Vietnam. He was also simultaneously spying for North Vietnam. He was made a general after the war. His nicknames were "Hai Trung" and "Tran Van Trung." He was awarded the "People's Army Force Hero" by the Vietnamese government on January 15, 1976.Cordial with Legendary General Võ Nguyên GiápHe was also put in a "softer" version of a reeducation camp for a year after the war for being considered too close to the Americans.MACV Press CardEarly life and educationHe was born in Binh Truoc, Biên Hòa, Đồng Nai Province, but his parents were originally from Hải Dương Province. His grandfather was the headmaster of a school in Huế and was awarded the king of Vietnam's gold ring. Ẩn's father was a high-level engineer of the Public Administration Department. His family's service to France did not earn them French citizenship. Phạm was born in Biên Hòa Hospital with the help of French doctors.When Ẩn was a child, he lived in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). He had joined the Viet Minh in 1944 at the age of 16 to fight against the Japanese during World War II and afterward against the French.[3]When the August Revolution began against the French government, Ẩn left school and joined the Volunteer Youth Organisation. Later, he took classes offered by the Viet Minh. He then moved to Cần Thơ and studied at the College of Cần Thơ.After the partition of Vietnam in 1954, Ẩn served in the Saigon government army and was later awarded a scholarship to a college in California.[3]In the late 1950s, Ẩn attended Orange Coast College (OCC) and earned an Associate of Arts degree. He wrote for the campus newspaper, then called The Barnacle.Pham Xuan An [lower left] and American correspondents at a Saigon military briefing. Photo by Horst Faas, AP.CareerAccording to The Fall of Saigon by David Butler and Flashbacks by Morley Safer, Ẩn helped Tran Kim Tuyen, a South Vietnamese intelligence commander and CIA asset, escape Saigon on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975.[4]During the fall of Saigon evacuations, Ẩn obtained transport for his wife and four children to the United States provided by Time magazine. Shortly after the fall of Saigon, he was interrogated by the communists and put under house arrest to ensure he had no further contact with Westerners, and he was suspected of being "corrupted" by capitalism after decades of living in South Vietnam as a spy.He brought his family back to Saigon, "It was the stupidest thing I ever did."[3]He was paid the pension of a retired brigadier general, about $US 30 a month. He told his friend Stanley Karnow, as recounted in Karnow's book Vietnam: A History, that his love for Vietnam has not diminished his love for America, as in the French song "J'ai Deux Amours". Referring to his years in the United States, he told Karnow "Those were the best years of my life." Ẩn admired the communists as nationalists, "but their ignorance and arrogance have only given us misery."[3]Ẩn died in Ho Chi Minh City in a military hospital from complications of emphysema.In February 2009, The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game by Thomas A. Bass was published.[5]Safer interview of 1989In 1989, Ẩn did an interview with Morley Safer, described in Safer's book Flashbacks. Ẩn told Safer he had joined the Viet Minh in 1944 to fight the Japanese during World War II and the French later on. The book says he got a scholarship to the US in the late 1950s and worked at a newspaper in Orange County, California, before returning to Vietnam. Ẩn said that in 1960, he joined Reuters and later Time, when he was made a colonel in the Viet Cong. He claimed to have passed information periodically through secret meetings in the Ho Bo Woods near Saigon during the Vietnam War and that only a handful of Viet Cong knew about his identity as a spy. Safer also writes that Ẩn was close with Charlie Mohr, Frank McCulloch, David Greenway, Richard Clurman, Bob Shaplen, Nguyen Hung Vuong, and other noted journalists.Larry BermanSafer called Ẩn a "dignified and decent man" but also noted the "enigma" and "layers" of the man. Safer also mentions Arnaud de Borchgrave's 1981 testimony before Senator Jeremiah Denton's subcommittee that Ẩn had a "mission" to "disinform the Western press". Ẩn denied the disinformation charge, claiming his superiors felt such tactics would have given him away. Safer and Ẩn also discuss Ẩn's year-long imprisonment in a reeducation/lecture camp near Hanoi by the Viet Cong after the end of the war because of his connection with Americans. Ẩn also described his opinion of the "paternalism and a discredited economy theory" being used by the Vietnamese leadership that had led to the failure of the revolution to help "the people."[6]See alsoThe Sympathizer, a novel partly based on Phạm's lifeReferences^ Berman, Larry (2007). Perfect Spy. Smithsonian Books. ISBN 978-0-06-088839-8, pps 134-143^ Flashbacks, Morley Safer, St Martin's Press/Random House, 1991^ Vietnam: A History; Stanley Karnow; The Viking Press; 1983; Page 39-41^ Butler, David (1990). The fall of Saigon. Abacus. also Flashbacks, by Morley Safer, 1990, St Martins Press/Random House^ Bass, Thomas A. (2015-02-01). "Vietnam’s concerted effort to keep control of its past". Washington Post. Retrieved 2015-02-01.^ This entire paragraph is from Safer's book, Flashbacks, 1991 St Martin's Press paperback edition of the Random House original.External linksPham Xuan An Dies at 79; Reporter Spied for HanoiDeath of Vietnamese Super-SpyLarry Berman and the “Perfect Spy” (Part 1)Larry Berman and the “Perfect Spy” (Part 2)The Surprising Story of the Spy who Worked for TIMEState Funeral in 2006PROPAGANDA, SPIES AND SECRET PEACE TALKS DURING THE VIETNAM WARPham Xuan An: North Vietnam’s Double-Agent and U.S. Ace ReporterPham Xuan An was a remarkable man who led a double life as a communist spy and a respected reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War. According to Associated Press: "In the history of wartime espionage, few were as successful as An. He straddled two worlds for most of the 15-year war in Indochina as an undercover communist agent while also working as a journalist, first for Reuters news service and later for 10 years as Time magazine's chief Vietnamese reporter—a role that gave him access to military bases and background briefings. He was so well-known for his sources and insight that many Americans who knew him suspected he worked for the CIA. [Source: By Richard Pyle and Margie Mason, Associated Press, September 20, 2006]Thomas Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "Recognized as a brilliant political analyst, beginning with his work in the nineteen-sixties for Reuters and then for the New York Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, and, finally, as a Time correspondent for eleven years, Pham Xuan An seemed to do his best work swapping stories with colleagues in Givral’s café, on the old Rue Catinat. Here he presided every afternoon as the best news source in Saigon. He was called "Dean of the Vietnamese Press Corps" and "Voice of Radio Catinat"—the rumor mill. With self-deprecating humor, he preferred other titles for himself, such as "docteur de sexologie," "professeur coup d’état," "Commander of Military Dog Training" (a reference to the German shepherd that always accompanied him), "Ph.D. in revolutions," or, simply, General Givral. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"An’s story strikes me as something right out of Graham Greene," says David Halberstam, who was friends with An when he was a Times reporter in Vietnam. "It broaches all the fundamental questions: What is loyalty? What is patriotism? What is the truth? Who are you when you’re telling these truths?" He adds, "There was an ambivalence to An that’s almost impossible for us to imagine. In looking back, I see he was a man split right down the middle." In his 1965 book on Vietnam, "The Making of a Quagmire" Halberstam described An as the linchpin of "a small but first-rate intelligence network" of journalists and writers. An, he wrote, "had the best military contacts in the country." Now that Halberstam knows An’s story, does he bear him any grudges? "No," he says, echoing the opinion of almost all of An’s former colleagues. "It’s a story full of intrigue, smoke and mirrors, but I still think fondly of An. I never felt betrayed by An. He had to deal with being Vietnamese at a tragic time in their history, when there was nothing but betrayal in the air.""An was of paramount importance to the Communists, not only for getting information to the North but also for corroborating what they were receiving from other sources," says former C.I.A. interrogator Frank Snepp. Author of "Decent Interval," about the chaotic collapse of Saigon in 1975, Snepp now works as a television-news producer in Los Angeles. "An had access to strategic intelligence. That’s obvious," Snepp says. "But no one has ‘walked the cat backward,’ done a postmortem of the damage he did. The agency didn’t have the stomach for it." Snepp suggests that one source for An’s intelligence was Robert Shaplen, the New Yorker correspondent. Close friends and collaborators, An and Shaplen spent hours closeted in Shaplen’s room on the third floor of the Continental Palace Hotel, occasionally stepping out on the balcony to avoid being overheard. "Shaplen was one of our favorite journalists," Snepp says. "We had orders from the top to give him unbelievable access to the embassy and high-level intelligence.Pham Xuan An’s Espionage WorkThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker , "An sent the North Vietnamese a steady stream of secret military documents and messages written in invisible ink, but it was his typed dispatches, now locked in Vietnam’s intelligence archives and known to us only through secondhand reports, which will undoubtedly rank as his chef d’oeuvre. Using a Hermes typewriter bought specially for him by the North Vietnamese intelligence service, An wrote his dispatches, some as long as a hundred pages, at night. Photographed and transported as undeveloped rolls of film, An’s reports were run by courier out to the Củ Chi tunnel network that served as the Communists’ underground headquarters. Every few weeks, beginning in 1952, An himself would leave his Saigon office, drive twenty miles northwest to the Ho Bo woods, and descend into the tunnels to plan Communist strategy. From Cu Chi, An’s dispatches were hustled under armed guard to Mt. Ba Den, on the Cambodian border, driven to Phnom Penh, flown to Guangzhou (Canton), in southern China, and then rushed to the Politburo in North Vietnam. The writing was so lively and detailed that General Võ Nguyên Giáp and Ho Chi Minh are reported to have rubbed their hands with glee on getting these dispatches from Tran Van Trung—An’s code name. "We are now in the United States’ war room!" they exclaimed, according to members of the Vietnamese Politburo. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"From the Army, intelligence, secret police, I had all kinds of sources," An says. "The commanders of the military branches, officers of the Special Forces, the Navy, the Air Force—they all helped me." In exchange for this steady stream of information, An gave his South Vietnamese informants the same thing he gave his Communist employers. "We discussed these documents, as the South Vietnamese tried to figure out what they meant. They had a problem. How were they going to deal with the Americans?" An then turned around and advised the Americans on how to deal with the Vietnamese. It was a high-level confidence game, with death hovering over him should he be discovered photographing the strategic plans and intelligence reports slipped to him by his South Vietnamese and American sources."An worked through the night photographing these documents. Then his film cannisters were disguised to look like nem ninh hoa, grilled pork wrapped in rice paper, or hidden in the bellies of fish that had begun to rot. More fish or nem would be piled into baskets made to look like offerings being presented at a Buddhist funeral. In the morning, when An walked his German shepherd at the horse-racing track, he would deposit his nem cannisters in an empty bird’s nest high in a tree. For larger shipments, he hid his rolls of film under the stele of what he pretended was a family grave. An’s wife sometimes followed him at a distance. If he was arrested, she could alert his couriers.Nem Ninh Hoa"Using live drops, dead drops, couriers, and radio transmitters that linked him through C.O.S.V.N. to military headquarters in North Vietnam, An was supported by dozens of military intelligence agents who had been detailed to work on his behalf. Of the forty-five couriers devoted to getting his messages out of Saigon, twenty-seven were captured and killed. "There were times before my departure on a mission when my wife and I agreed, if I were arrested, it would be best if I were killed," An told Ngoc Hai. "It would be more horrible if they tortured me for information that put other people’s lives at risk. Sometimes it got so dangerous that, while my hands were steady, my legs were shaking uncontrollably. Despite my efforts to keep calm, the automatic reflexes of my body made me shiver with fear."Pham Xuan An and Ap Bac and the Tet OffensiveThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "But we know of several occasions when he reached behind the curtain to adjust the scene. One was the Battle of Ap Bac, in 1963, which marked a turning point in the expanding American war. For the first time, the Viet Cong fought at battalion strength and won a decisive victory against Vietnamese troops supported by American helicopters, armored vehicles, and artillery. Two Viet Cong soldiers received North Vietnam’s highest military-exploit medal for winning this battle. One was the commander of the Communist forces. The other was Phạm Xuân Ẩn, who devised the winning strategy. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"An comes into focus again at the Tet Offensive, the simultaneous attack on more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and other targets during the New Year’s ceasefire of 1968. Planning for the offensive had begun two years earlier, when the head of An’s intelligence network, a colonel known by his nom de guerre, Tu Cang, moved from the jungle into Saigon. Tu Cang was a famous cowboy, a hearty, affable man, who packed a pair of K-54 pistols and could plug a target at fifty meters with either his left or his right hand. A former honor student at the French lycée in Saigon, Tu Cang had lived underground in the Cu Chi tunnels for so many years that by the time he reëntered Saigon he had forgotten how to open a car door. An replaced Tu Cang’s jungle sandals with new shoes and bought him a suit of clothes. Soon the two men were driving around town in An’s little Renault 4CV like old friends.Tu Cang"Pretending to be chatting about dogs and cockfights, they were sighting targets for the Tet Offensive. Tu Cang proposed attacking the Treasury to get some money. An told him the Treasury was the wrong target—"They only hand out salaries there." An said a better target was the courthouse, where lots of gold was stored as evidence in the trials of South Vietnam’s legion of burglars and smugglers. He advised Tu Cang to bring an acetylene torch. Tu Cang isolated twenty targets in Saigon, including the Presidential Palace and the United States Embassy. He personally led the attack on the palace, where fifteen of the seventeen members in his team were killed outright. He himself barely escaped to a nearby safe house, and he hid with his two pistols held to his head, vowing to kill himself rather than be captured. The following day, he and An were driving around the city again, this time counting the bodies of the Viet Cong soldiers who had died in the attack."Later that spring, in what was called the mini-Tet offensive, the Viet Cong began shelling Saigon indiscriminately, blowing up buildings and killing scores of civilians. An sent a note into the field. "I told them to stop the shelling. It had no military objective and was alienating people." "What happened next?" I ask. "The shelling stopped."Pham Xuan An’s Early Life and familyThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "Pham Xuan An was born in the Vietnamese Year of the Cat, at the Hour of the Buffalo, on September 12, 1927, twenty miles northeast of Saigon, in the Bien Hoa psychiatric hospital. At the time, this was the only medical facility in Cochin China open to Vietnamese. As the firstborn son of a cadre supérieur, an educated member of the colonial administration, An had the rare honor of receiving a French colonial birth certificate. Originally from Hải Dương, the heart of North Vietnam, in the densely populated Red River Delta lying between Hanoi and the coast, An’s great-grandfather, a silver- and goldsmith, was recruited by the Nguyen dynasty to make medals for the royal court at Hue, in central Vietnam. An’s grandfather, who rose through the mandarinate to become a teacher and the director of a primary school for girls, [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"An’s father, trained as an engineer at the university in Hanoi, worked as a cadastral surveyor, establishing property lines and tax rolls in Vietnam’s southern frontier. He laid out roads in Saigon and canals through the U Minh Forest, along the Gulf of Siam. While surveying in Cambodia, he met An’s mother, another emigrant from the North. She was an industrious woman whose second-grade education allowed her to read and write. The work of a colonial surveyor in what was then the wilds of South Vietnam involved press-ganging peasants into carrying chains through the Mekong marshlands and building towers in the jungle to establish sight lines. "When you do land surveying and build canals and roads, you see the poor Vietnamese workers eking out their living," An says. "You see the French system of forced labor, beatings, and other abuses. The only way to oppose these abuses is to fight for independence." He adds, "The Americans did the same thing in 1776. My family was always patriotic in their desire to remove the French from Vietnam.""In his early childhood, An was living on a sampan in the cajeput forests at the southern tip of Vietnam when he was swept overboard during a typhoon and nearly drowned. He was sent to stay with his grandparents in Hue, returned to the South on the death of his grandmother, and sent north again when he flunked his exams in the third grade. His father separated him from his siblings and exiled him to Truoi, in the countryside, where life among the peasants was supposed to scare him into working harder in school. Instead, An delighted in playing hooky and larking around the countryside. When he flunked his exams again, he was caned by his father and moved back to Saigon for a stricter regimen.Pham Xuan An Recruited as a Spy in the Viet Minh in the 1950sThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "An was an eighteen-year-old high-school student at the Collège de Can Tho, in the Mekong Delta, when he dropped out of school, in 1945, to enlist in a Vietminh training course. For more than a hundred recruits there were only fifty weapons, some left over from the First World War. Trainees had to pick up spent cartridges to make new bullets. Though he was involved in fighting first the Japanese and then the French, An dismisses this experience as little more than running errands. But a government Web site, recounting his activities as a Hero of the People’s Armed Forces, describes An as "a national defense combatant who participated in all battles in the western region of South Vietnam."[Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"By 1947, An had left his position as a platoon leader, involved mainly in propaganda, and moved back to Saigon to care for his father, who would have a lung removed and spend the next two years in the hospital with tuberculosis. An organized student demonstrations in Saigon, initially against the French and then against the Americans. He worked as a secretary for the Caltex oil company until, in 1950, he passed the exam to become a French customs inspector."During the Tet New Year celebration in 1952, An was summoned into the jungle north of Saigon to meet the Communist officials who were setting up C.O.S.V.N.—Central Office for South Vietnam. C.O.S.V.N. would lead the war against the Americans, who, even before the end of the First Indochina War, in 1954, were beginning to replace the French as the primary enemy. An was excited about this call to the war zone, where he hoped to join his sister, who had moved to the jungle three years earlier to become "the Voice of Nam Bo," a radio broadcaster for the Communist network. An visited her sometimes, taking her food or medicine, and staying overnight in the Vietminh tunnel network, where the cooking fires were vented through termite mounds in order to evade the French spotter planes that flew overhead. (In 1955, An’s sister moved to North Vietnam to work for the state-run coal mines.)"An was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t be joining his sister in the jungle but, instead, was being recruited to work as a spy in Vietnam’s newly established military intelligence service. "I was the first recruit," he says. An found his new assignment ignoble. Spying is the work of hunting dogs and birds of prey, he says. "I had been beaten by the riot police during student demonstrations in Saigon, and I had no desire to be a stool pigeon or an informer." An was formally inducted into the Communist Party in 1953, at a ceremony in the U Minh Forest presided over by Lê Đức Thọ. Tho, who was in charge of the southern resistance against the French, would later spend four years negotiating with Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks. Tho’s younger brother, Mai Chi Tho, as the head of security for the Communist forces in the South, was An’s boss.Pham Xuan An’s Work with the CIA and the Quiet American in Saigon in the 1950sThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "The first problem An confronted on slipping back into Saigon as a newly recruited spy was how to avoid being drafted into the French colonial forces. To practice the English that he was learning at the United States Information Service, he volunteered his services as a press censor at the central post office. Here he was told to black out the dispatches written for British and French newspapers by Graham Greene, a "troublemaker" who the French assumed was working for British intelligence during his frequent visits to Vietnam. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"In spite of his freelance work for the French intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau, An was drafted in 1954. To avoid getting shot during the waning days of the French colonial war in Indochina, An played on the family connections by which business gets done in Vietnam. He asked a cousin, Captain Pham Xuan Giai, for help. Giai, who commanded G5, the psychological-warfare department of the Army general staff, made An an adjutant, the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer, and put him to work at Army headquarters on the Rue Gallieni, near Cholon."This is where Colonel Edward Lansdale found An when he came to offer his services—and money—to Captain Giai. Lansdale, a former advertising man and an expert in psychological warfare, had been sent to run the C.I.A.’s covert operations in Vietnam. Arriving in the country soon after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Lansdale found G5 and the rest of the old colonial military apparatus in a shambles. They were totally demoralized, with no idea what to do with themselves, until Lansdale and his innocuously titled Saigon Military Mission began turning South Vietnam into a country, complete with an army, a President, and a flag."Finding a promising student in the young Pham Xuan An, Lansdale and his colleagues began teaching him the tradecraft that he would employ in his next twenty years as a Communist spy. "I am a student of Sherman Kent," An says, referring to the Yale professor who helped found the C.I.A. Strategic intelligence, Kent wrote in his classic text,"Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy" (1949), is a "reportorial job" based on studying the "personalities" of world leaders. "It must know of their character and ambitions, their opinions, their weaknesses, the influences which they can exert, and the influences before which they are frail. It must know of their friends and relatives, and the political, economic, and social milieu in which they move.""Pham Xuan An, the psyops intelligence agent, was beginning to acquire the "reportorial" method that he would later employ so brilliantly as Pham Xuan An the Time correspondent. "People usually have one career, while I had two, the job of following the revolution and the job of being a journalist," An told the writer Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hai, who has published a Vietnamese monograph about him. "These two professions were very contradictory, but also very similar. The intelligence job involves collecting information, analyzing it, and jealously keeping it secret, like a cat covering its droppings. The journalist, on the other hand, collects information, analyzes it, and then publishes it to the world.""As a quadruple agent moonlighting for France’s Deuxième Bureau, working for his cousin’s indigenous Vietnamese intelligence organization and its C.I.A. sponsor, and reporting to his Communist handlers, An was beginning to live along the edge of his own personal nightmare. "I was never relaxed for a minute," he says. "Sooner or later as a spy, you’ll be captured, like a fish in a pond. I had to prepare myself to be tortured. That was my likely fate." It was scant solace that most of An’s colleagues in G5 were in a similar predicament. "When we weren’t spying on each other, we smoked opium and played together as friends," An says. "That was just the way things worked. I had to compartmentalize." He acknowledges that it was hard to do. "But you can’t kill all the time. When the war was over, these were the people I would have to live with.""After this Mai Chi Tho and Muoi Huong, An’s case officer, decided to send him to the United States to be trained as a journalist. Muoi Huong, in an interview with the Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien, said that he got the idea to make An a journalist from Ho Chi Minh, who himself had worked as a reporter. In the U.S. An studied at Orange Coast College in California and did internships at the Sacramento Bee and the United Nations. He traveled America financed by The Asia Foundation, which was later revealed to be a C.I.A. front.Orange Coast CollegePham Xuan Works for the South Vietnamese CIA SaigonThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "On returning to Saigon, An was so frightened that he hid in his house for a month. Then, in a bold stroke, he used family connections to call on Trần Kim Tuyến for help. A former military surgeon, Tuyen was the brilliant, diminutive figure who ran South Vietnam’s intelligence network for President Ngo Dinh Diem and his younger brother Ngô Đình Nhu. This vast C.I.A.-sponsored network of spies and clandestine military forces operated out of the President’s cabinet under the anodyne name of the Office of Political, Cultural, and Social Research. If Tuyen hired him, An figured he would be safe, at least for the moment, from arrest. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"Tuyen put An in charge of the foreign correspondents working for V.T.X., the Viet News Agency. Many of them, with no training in the profession, had never filed a story as a journalist. An ordered them to write a story a week. They complained to Tuyen, saying that doing journalism would get in the way of their work as spies—their real job. Supporting An, Tuyen instructed his foreign agents to get "serious in your work" and start filing stories like the "professional pressman" An."Tuyen fell out of power, after a failed coup, and An moved from V.T.X. to Reuters and from there to Time. Recognized as one of the most hardworking journalists in town, always ready to help his colleagues with informed opinions or telling anecdotes, An gave information in order to get it. Describing to Ngoc Hai the similarities between journalists and spies, An said, "Their food is information, documents. Just like birds, one has to keep feeding them so they’ll sing."Pham Xuan and the American PressAssociated Press reported: "An's political and military contacts made him an essential source for other Vietnamese reporters working for foreign news organizations. He was known as the soft-spoken, chain-smoking oracle of "Radio Catinat," as the Saigon rumor mill was called. But few, if any, suspected he was a communist spy. Former media colleagues expressed mixed feelings, from bemusement to a sense of betrayal, after An revealed in the 1980s that he had been a spy. Outside critics vilified An for his role in espionage activities that may have led to the deaths of many Americans and South Vietnamese. But most of An's ex-colleagues refrained from criticizing his deception. "If ever there was a man caught between two worlds, it was An. It is very hard for anyone who did not serve in Vietnam in those years to understand the complexity," said David Halberstam, who covered the early years of the war for The New York Times. [Source: By Richard Pyle and Margie Mason, Associated Press , September 20, 2006]Thomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "Far from planting stories, says Richard Pyle, the former A. P. Saigon bureau chief, "An saved Time from embarrassing itself by publishing stories that weren’t true. It was sleight of hand on his part. Without revealing how he knew what he knew, he’d let you know whether you were on the right track." An was also accused, according to former Time correspondent Zalin Grant, of being "the first known case of a Communist agent to appear on the masthead of a major American publication as a correspondent." Murray Gart, the chief of correspondents at Time during the war, is reported to have said, after he learned the news, "An, that son of a bitch. I’d like to kill him." [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"Another reporter who is critical of An, though for different reasons, is Peter Arnett. An rented a house from Arnett’s Vietnamese in-laws, and the two journalists would meet often at Givral’s to swap stories. "It’s still a raw point for me," Arnett says. "Even though I understand him as a Vietnamese patriot, I still feel journalistically betrayed. There were accusations all throughout the war that we had been infiltrated by the Communists. What he did allowed the right to come up and slug us in the eye. For a year or so, I took it personally. Then I decided it was his business.""With these few exceptions—and even Arnett ends our conversation by praising An as a "bold guy"—An’s colleagues are united in their support of him. "Was I angry when I learned about An?" says Frank McCulloch, who was the head of Time’s Asian bureaus when he hired An to work in the Saigon office for seventy-five dollars a week. "Absolutely not. It’s his land, I thought. If the situation were reversed, I would have done the same thing." "An was my colleague and star reporter," says McCulloch, who is now retired after a distinguished career as the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and other papers. "An had a very sophisticated understanding of Vietnamese politics, and he was remarkably accurate." McCulloch bursts into laughter. "Of course he was accurate, considering his sources!"Stanley Karnow, author of the seminal 1983 book, "Vietnam: A History," told Associated Press that despite his secret role, An was always reliable. "I was struck by how much he knew and was willing to share," Karnow said. "He said later that his function as a spy was not disinformation, it was to gather the best info he could for them (the Viet Cong)." [Source: By Richard Pyle and Margie Mason, Associated Press , September 20, 2006]When An’s former colleagues first learned his story—from rumors that began circulating in the eighties—they invariably recalled a scene, a revelatory moment, which was suddenly explained by the news. Nick Turner, An’s former boss at Reuters, confirmed his suspicions about An’s unannounced absences from the office. H. D. S. Greenway, known to his friends as David, suddenly understood why his former colleague at Time knew more than he did about Operation Lam Son 719, the disastrous attempt by the South Vietnamese Army to attack Laos in 1971. "I had been up on the border near Khe Sanh, watching badly mauled soldiers retreating from Laos," Greenway told me. "I described them as survivors from the original column leading the attack. ‘No,’ An said, without the slightest hesitation. ‘The original column was wiped out. What you saw was survivors from the attempt to rescue the column, which also failed.’ Later, when I thought back on it, he seemed remarkably well informed. It’s the kind of insight you’d have only from knowing what both sides in the battle were doing.""McCulloch remembers An with tremendous fondness and respect, and he says it was a "great pleasure," in 1990, to organize a subscription fund, which raised thirty-two thousand dollars, to send An’s eldest son, Pham Xuan Hoang An, known to everyone as Young An, to journalism school at the University of North Carolina. The list of subscribers to the fund reads like a Who’s Who of Vietnam War reporters.Pham Xuan An Saves American Journalist and South Vietnamese SpyAssociated Press reported: "Before Saigon fell to the communists, An worked to help friends escape, including South Vietnam's former security chief who feared death if he was found by northern forces. An later revealed his true identity as a Viet Cong commander, but said he never reported any false information or communist propaganda while in his role as a journalist. In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, An said he always had warm feelings for his press colleagues and for the United States, where he attended college at Fullerton, Calif. But deep down he remained a "true believer" in the communist cause as the best way to free Vietnam of foreign control. "I fought for two things - independence and social justice," he said. [Source: By Richard Pyle and Margie Mason, Associated Press , September 20, 2006]Thomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "In 1970, An’s fellow Time correspondent Robert Sam Anson was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where at least twenty-five other journalists were already dead or unaccounted for. After Anson’s wife pleaded with An to help her, he secretly arranged for Anson’s release. It would be another seventeen years before Anson learned the story of what An had done for him. When Anson saw An again in 1987, he asked him, "Why did you save me, if you were an enemy of my country?" An replied, "Yes, I was an enemy of your country, but you were my friend." To this day, Anson works with a photo of An on his desk. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"An won his final military-exploit medal for the role he played in the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Campaign, which ended with the Communists seizing Saigon on April 30, 1975. His last deed in the war was another act of friendship. Hours before the city fell, An arranged the escape of his old patron, the South Vietnamese spymaster Trần Kim Tuyến. In the famous photo showing the helicopter taking off from the roof of what is usually misidentified as the United States Embassy (it was actually a C.I.A. safe house two blocks away), the last person climbing the rickety ladder to get on board is Tran Kim Tuyen. Out of the frame, waving goodbye, stands Pham Xuan An.Pham Xuan An at the Fall of SaigonThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "Nayan Chanda, who was working for Reuters and the Far Eastern Economic Review, remembered seeing An standing in front of the Presidential Palace on the last day of the war, as Communist tank No. 843 smashed through the iron gate. "There was a strange, quizzical smile on his face. He seemed content and at peace with himself. I found it odd," Chanda says. "His wife and children had just been airlifted out of the country, and he didn’t seem to have a care in the world." Chanda later realized that An was celebrating the Communist victory, for which he had worked for thirty years. Aside from Chanda’s fleeting glimpse, An kept his cover in place after 1975. "It was a dangerous moment for me," he says. "It would have been easy for someone to put a bullet through my skull. All I could do was wait for someone from the jungle to come out and recognize me." [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"An and his mother moved into the Continental Palace Hotel. They lived first in Robert Shaplen’s old room. Then An moved into Time’s two-room office. He was repeatedly summoned for interrogations by the police, until intelligence officials intervened. People began to suspect that he was "a man of the revolution" when they saw him ride his bicycle to the military supply depot and leave with bags of rice and meat tied to the handlebars. They assumed that he was an "April 30th revolutionary," someone who had jumped to the Communist side after the fall of Saigon."Not even military officials as highly placed as Bùi Tín knew An’s story. Tin was the North Vietnamese colonel who accepted the surrender of the South Vietnamese government. He was working as the deputy editor of Quân Đội Nhân Dân, the North Vietnamese Army newspaper, when he rode a tank up to the Presidential Palace on April 30th. Accidentally finding himself the highest-ranking officer there, Tin accepted the surrender of the South Vietnamese government and sat down at the President’s desk to file a dispatch for his newspaper. Like most journalists newly arrived in Saigon, the next thing he did was go looking for Pham Xuan An. "On the morning of May 1st, I went to meet An at his office in the Continental Palace Hotel. I had no idea at the time that he was a spy," Tin says. "All he told me was that he was a correspondent working for Time-Life. He introduced me to all the journalists in town, and I helped them send their articles abroad. Three months after the end of the war, I still didn’t know An was a spy."Foiled Plans to Send Pham Xuan An to the U.S. After the Vietnam WarThomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "As Saigon fell to the Communists, An, like his fellow-correspondents, was hoping to be evacuated to the United States. Vietnam’s military intelligence agency planned to continue his work in America. The Politburo knew there would be a war-after-the-war, a bitter period of political maneuvering in which the United States launched covert military operations and a trade embargo against Vietnam. Who better to report on America’s intentions than Pham Xuan An? In the last days of the war, An’s wife and their four children were airlifted out of Vietnam and resettled in Washington, D.C. An was anxiously awaiting instructions to follow them, when word came from the North Vietnamese Politburo that he would not be allowed to leave the country. [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]"Hints of the power struggle over An—pitting the military intelligence agents who wanted to send him to the United States against officials in the Politburo—were revealed to Bùi Tín only when the government moved to get An’s wife and children repatriated to Vietnam. Bucking the tide of refugees flooding out of the country, An’s family spent a year trying to get back into Vietnam by means of a circuitous route that passed through Paris, Moscow, and Hanoi. The first official announcement of An’s wartime allegiance came in December, 1976, when he flew to Hanoi as an Army delegate at the Fourth Party Congress. Friends who saw him walking around Hanoi in an Army uniform, which he was wearing for the first time in his life, were astounded by the transformation of the journalist into a beribboned hero."The problem with Pham Xuan An, from the perspective of the Vietnamese Communist Party, was that he loved America and Americans, democratic values, and objectivity in journalism. He considered America an accidental enemy who would return to being a friend once his people had gained their independence. An was the Quiet Vietnamese, the representative figure who was at once a lifelong revolutionary and an ardent admirer of the United States. He says he never lied to anyone, that he gave the same political analyses to Time that he gave to Ho Chi Minh. He was a divided man of utter integrity, someone who lived a lie and always told the truth.Pham Xuan An After the Vietnam WarInstead was sent to a reducation camp. Thomas A. Bass wrote in The New Yorker, "Always a bad student, An finished near the bottom of his class. "They didn’t like my jokes," he says of the dour Northerners who were trying to teach him to speak "new" Vietnamese, full of political terms borrowed from China. An suffered through the bone-chilling rains of a Hanoi winter, sleeping on a wooden bed with a cotton mattress. "I wore a Chinese cotton jacket that made me look like a mummy," he says. "I asked for a Russian jacket. But I was still cold, so I went back and asked for a ‘hundred-and-eleven-degree jacket’—three girls, one sleeping on my right, one on my left, and one on top of me." "They didn’t like me at all," An says of his political reëducators. "But I haven’t made a big enough mistake to be shot yet." [Source: Thomas A. Bass, The New Yorker, May 23, 2005]Later "An was named a Hero of the People's Armed Forces, awarded four military-exploit medals, and elevated to the rank of brigadier general. He was also sent to a reëducation camp and forbidden to meet Western visitors. His family were brought back to Vietnam, returning a year after they left. In 1990, Colonel An was elevated to the rank of general. At the time, Vietnam had begun to adopt Đổi mới, the "renovation policy" that opened the country to the West. Whether the Communists were recognizing An’s merits, ashamed of the threadbare penury in which he lived, or maneuvering to keep him on a tighter leash is open to interpretation. An, as usual, explains his promotion with a joke. As Western journalists began returning to Vietnam, people would ask to see "General Givral." To avoid embarrassment, the government decided to raise his rank to match his title."In 1997, the Vietnamese government denied An permission to visit the United States for a conference in New York to which he had been invited as a special guest, and it was not until March, 2002, that the seventy-four-year-old, emphysema-stricken general was allowed to retire. "They wanted to control me," he says. "That’s why they kept me in the military so long. I talk very wildly. They wanted to keep my mouth shut." This is one possible explanation, but, as always with An, there could be another figure in the carpet. All we know is that, for at least twenty-seven years after the end of the war, An was still an active member of Vietnam’s military intelligence service.Given his familiarity with the French,Viet Minh, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese and American armies, An said in the 2000 interview, "I told them they should make me a five-star general. I don't think they understood my sense of humor." An died in 2006 at the age of 79. An had lived inHo Chi Minh City (Saigon), since South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. "[Source: By Richard Pyle and Margie Mason, Associated Press , September 20, 2006]Obituary: Pham Xuan An, 79: Reporter for Time, Spy for Viet CongPham Xuan An shows off his 1965 press card at his home in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000. He spied for the communists for decades as a respected correspondent for Western news organizations while working in what was then Saigon. (By Charles Dharapak -- Associated Press)By Patricia SullivanWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, September 21, 2006Pham Xuan An, 79, the Viet Cong colonel who worked as a reporter for U.S. news organizations during the Vietnam War while also spying for the communists, died of emphysema Sept. 20 in a military hospital in the former Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City.The secret of Mr. Pham's double life was kept for almost 30 years, from 1959 until the 1980s. He was the first Vietnamese to be a full-time staff correspondent for a major U.S. publication, working primarily for Time magazine.Although his job as a spy was to uncover and report the plans of the South Vietnamese and U.S. military, he was so good at collecting and analyzing information that he was considered the best Vietnamese reporter in the press corps. He said he did not lie, tilt the news or spread disinformation in the stories he filed."It would have been stupid to do that. He would have been found out in an instant," said Frank McCullough, a retired newspaperman who was Time's bureau chief in Saigon and who hired Mr. Pham. "He used the bureau as a listening post. He was an extremely sophisticated understander of not only Vietnamese culture but its politics."By night, he photographed intelligence reports that then were smuggled out of Saigon through the Củ Chi tunnel network. He disguised the film canisters as grilled pork wrapped in rice paper, according to one account, or hid them in the bellies of rotting fish. Other times, he wrote his reports in primitive invisible ink made of starch, author Stanley Karnow wrote."The most remarkable thing was how he was able to pull it off for such a long time, to be such a successful spy and a good journalist," said Larry Berman, whose biography "Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter & Vietnamese Communist Agent" will be published in the spring."He never had to steal a document because he was such a professional journalist and professional spy. His closest mentors were [Col. Edward] Lansdale and [later CIA chief] William Colby. People were always showing him things to get his opinion and analysis because he was so smart."Mr. Pham was able to alert the communist troops to the impending buildup of U.S. troop strength in the mid-1960s, which the Pentagon denied when McCullough tried to report it in Time. Much of what the Viet Cong wanted was what the news media wanted, just in greater detail."It was not especially confidential stuff -- the government army's deployments and strength, which commanders were capable or incompetent or corrupt. And there was gossip -- who's sleeping with whose wife or girlfriend," Mr. Pham told Karnow in 1990.His intelligence was good enough that he was promoted to colonel while working as a reporter. He secretly arranged for the release of reporter Robert Sam Anson, who had been captured by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and he was responsible for getting South Vietnam's former security chief Tram Kim Tuyen on the last U.S. helicopter that left Saigon. His own wife and four children left Vietnam aboard a plane provided by Time. He stayed. "It was the stupidest thing I ever did," he said later.After the Americans left, Mr. Pham cabled Time's headquarters as its last staffer in Saigon and filed three more stories as the North Vietnamese took over the city. In 1976, the bureau closed and Mr. Pham endured a year of "reeducation" in Hanoi. He was suspected of becoming too close to Americans and was kept under house arrest, barred from seeing returning veterans or reporters. He was still nominally a military intelligence officer.By 1990, as Vietnam was reopening to Western visitors, Mr. Pham was promoted to major general and was named a Hero of the People's Armed Forces, with four military-exploit medals. Karnow, CBS reporter Morley Safer and others began to report on Mr. Pham's life as an undercover agent, and the New Yorker published a profile of him “The Spy Who Loved Us” in 2005.Pham Xuan An led an extraordinary double life as a trusted reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War while spying for North Vietnam.TIME MAN-IN-SAIGON SPYHe made secret trips to confer with Viet Cong leaders and knew in advance of major Communist initiatives, including the 1968 Tet Offensive and North Vietnam's 1972 invasion of the south.Obituary: Pham Xuan An: Vietnamese Journalist and SpyInternational Herald Tribune, Sep 21, 2006Pham Xuan An, a Vietnamese man who led a perilous double life as communist spy and respected reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War, has died, according to his son, Pham Xuan Hoang An. He was 79. An suffered from emphysema, and died at a military hospital Wednesday in Ho Chi Minh City, his son said. He had lived in the city, formerly known as Saigon, since South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.In the history of wartime espionage, few have been as successful as An. He straddled two worlds for most of the 15- year war in Indochina as an undercover communist agent while also working as a journalist: first for Reuters news service and then for 10 years as Time magazine's chief Vietnamese reporter - a role that gave him access to military bases and background briefings. He was so well known for his sources and insight that many Americans who knew him suspected he worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Before Saigon fell to the communists, An risked his own life to help friends escape, including a former South Vietnamese security chief who feared death at the hands of northern forces. An later revealed his true identity as a Viet Cong commander, but said he had never reported any false information or communist propaganda as a journalist.He had been in and out of consciousness since being hospitalized in July and had fallen into a coma days before his death, a doctor at the hospital said. An's wife and four children were at his bedside when he died, his son said. In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, An said he always had warm feelings for his press colleagues and for the United States, where he attended college at Fullerton, California. But deep down he remained a "true believer" in the communist cause as the best way to free Vietnam of foreign control. "I fought for two things - independence and social justice," he said.An's political and military contacts made him an essential source for other Vietnamese reporters working for foreign news organizations. He was known for his role as the soft-spoken, chain-smoking oracle of "Radio Catinat," as the Saigon rumor mill was called. But few, if any, ever suspected he was a communist spy. He was, in fact, an officer for the Viet Cong, the insurgency that sought to topple the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. While outside critics vilified An for his role in espionage activities that may have led to the deaths of many Americans and South Vietnamese, former media colleagues expressed mixed feelings, from bemusement to a sense of betrayal, after An revealed in the 1980s that he had been a spy. "If ever there was a man caught between two worlds, it was An. It is very hard for anyone who did not serve in Vietnam in those years to understand the complexity," said David Halberstam, who covered the early years of the war for The New York Times.Following Vietnamese independence in 1954, he served as an aide to Colonel Edward Lansdale, the legendary U.S. intelligence officer who played an instrumental role in early U.S. support for the fledgling anti-communist regime in Saigon in the late 1950s. Lansdale is believed to have inspired Graham Greene's novel, "The Quiet American." An told ex-colleagues in later years that he made secret trips to the jungle to confer with Viet Cong leaders. He said he knew in advance of major communist initiatives including the 1968 Tet Offensive and the 1972 Easter Offensive aimed at destroying the regime in Saigon. An insisted that he remained true as a journalist - never planting false or misleading information, for he realized this could reveal his clandestine role. "The truth was that I knew many things that I never told anyone," he said.General Department of Military Intelligence (Vietnam) from WikipediaTổng cục Tình báo, other names: Tổng cục 2, TC2 (translated variously as General Department of Military Intelligence or Second General Department) is an intelligence agency of Vietnam.During Vietnam War a significant number of spies were sent by North Vietnam and Vietcong into government of South Vietnam and Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Some notable spies were Pham Ngoc Thao, Pham Xuan An, Vu Ngoc Nha etc. Some famous operations by North Vietnamese and Vietcong spies were:Case of Phạm Ngọc Thảo (1965): Phạm Ngọc Thảo was a communist spy who infiltrated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and served as a colonel. He was appointed by Ngô Đình Nhu as a director for the Strategic Hamlet Program which aimed to eliminate communist agents in South Vietnam. He deliberately destabilize the Program, causing protests against South Vietnam government and America among villagers. He also deliberately initiated and participated in a coup d'état in 1963 that removed and killed Ngô Đình Diệm - the first president of South Vietnam. Thảo was later suspected and killed by South Vietnamese government in 1965.Case of A.22 (1969): a team of 42 communist spies who infiltrated as officers in South Vietnamese government and even as an assistant of the President of South Vietnam were discovered by CIA. The team was later sentenced to jail by the government of South Vietnam.Theft of UH-1 helicopter (1973): Hồ Duy Hùng, a dismissed pilot of Republic of Vietnam Air Force who actually was a communist spy, stole a UH-1 helicopter in Da Lat City and flew to the area controlled by Vietcong in Tay Ninh.Ho Duy Hung, second from RightBombing of Independence Palace (1975): Nguyễn Thành Trung, a pilot of Republic of Vietnam Air Force who actually was a communist spy, flew an F5-E fighter and bombed the Independence Palace on 8/4/1975. After the mission he landed at fallen Phan Rang Air Base.Northrop F5-E flown by Nguyen Thanh Trung.Congratulated by General Vo Nguyen GiapIndependence PalaceNguyen Thanh Trung, far left also took part in bombing of Tan Son Nhut Air BaseActivities of Phạm Xuân Ẩn: Phạm Xuân Ẩn was probably the most notable communist spy of Vietnam War. He worked as a journalist for Time magazine, Reuters and New York Herald Tribune stationed in Saigon during Vietnam War. He had a wide network with many senior officers and commanders of South Vietnamese government and military. He also made friends with many senior American officers and commanders, hence allowing him to access top secret documents of South Vietnam and America. His spying activity was not discovered until the end of Vietnam War.New Vietnam Spy Tale Sheds Light on How the U.S. Lost the WarBY JEFF STEIN from NewsweekON 4/30/15 AT 10:51 AMA documentary about the fall of Saigon puts America's current wars in perspective. AFP/GETTYWORLDVietnam unfurled a massive celebration on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of its long war with the United States. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, police, firefighters and students marched through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, brandishing flags and flowers. On the steps of Reunification Palace, once the grandiose home of South Vietnam’s U.S.-backed president, honors were bestowed on aging “heroes of the revolution.”One of the missing heroes was Pham Chuyen, a little-known but key player in the “American war,” as the Vietnamese call it. The old Communist spy died peacefully in his bed last November at the age of 93. Pham’s death, in his ramshackle home southeast of Hanoi, passed without fanfare outside Vietnam, unlike those of some of his more illustrious comrades who managed to infiltrate the highest levels of the South Vietnamese government.Yet according to a four-part series published in an obscure Hanoi military journal in April, Pham was a key double agent in an operation that led to the capture or deaths of scores of CIA and U.S. military–controlled spies for nearly a decade during the war. A translation of the series was provided to Newsweek by Merle Pribbenow, a 27-year CIA veteran who has spent his post-agency years translating Vietnamese Communist materials for the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.Reported here for the first time outside of Vietnam, the series draws partially on two books by American experts published decades ago. But in declassifying some of its wartime documents, Hanoi sheds new light on how its intelligence service was able to neutralize virtually every spying operation mounted against it by the CIA and, later, a top-secret U.S. military outfit known by its acronym MACV-SOG, or Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group. “[From 1961 to 1970], our security forces used the spies that the CIA sent into North Vietnam to lure the CIA into sending equipment and many more commando teams into North Vietnam,” said the report in An Ninh The Gioi (World Security). “We killed or captured all of these spies and commandos.”Many were lured into traps by Pham, a North Vietnamese exile in Saigon. The CIA recruited him in 1961 to return north and spy on his homeland. Yet not long after landing by boat at the port of Hai Phong, he was quickly captured and turned into a double agent by North Vietnam’s People's Public Security Bureau, a powerful and fearsome intelligence service modeled on the Soviet KGB.Hai Phong War timeThe CIA and Pentagon have previously acknowledged that nearly all their operations inside North Vietnam in the 1960s were quickly compromised. One secret program run by the U.S. military’s Saigon-based Studies and Observations Group tried to capitalize on that, according to a 1999 book, The Secret War Against Hanoi, by national security historian Richard H. Shultz. The unit parachuted captured Communist troops back into North Vietnam with incriminating documents and maps sewn into their clothing, sometimes without their knowledge, counting on them to be caught. “The idea was to make the North Vietnamese think we had vast spy nets operating up there,” a former MACV-SOG operative, Wayne Tvrdik, tells Newsweek. Most of the men sent north were captured and executed.For years, the extent of Pham’s role and even his true allegiance remained a mystery, at least to one U.S. intelligence operative involved in the operation. “Sure, I knew him,” the late Sedgwick Tourison, a former U.S. military intelligence agent in Saigon, wrote in his 1995 book, Secret Army, Secret War. “We recruited him to send him back to North Vietnam in 1961. He was still in contact with us until at least 1969, and I was never sure if he was working for us or for North Vietnam.”But a senior former CIA operations officer in Saigon tells Newsweek that he had concluded early on that Pham—code-named “ARES”—had been turned into a double agent. “ARES was a singleton agent infiltrated into North Vietnam by the agency,” says Walter McIntosh, a former chief of Vietnam operations for the CIA. “He was taken over by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SO), which failed to detect that [he] had fallen under North Vietnamese control.” McIntosh recalls that he was so certain Pham had been doubled that he refused to assist the military unit on any more resupply missions to him. “I wrote a 12-page dispatch citing the evidence of ARES being in NVN control and what special stuff had been compromised,” he says. His warnings evidently bounced off MACV-SOG operators, who continued to believe in Pham, McIntosh says. As a result, “12 men died while [delivering] him a resupply of agent material” in North Vietnam.RVN Navy Seals - Biet Hai and U.S. advisors after a successful mission - displaying a captured NLF flag.According to World Security’s account, Pham’s handlers in Hanoi concocted over 300 phony intelligence reports for him to send to Saigon, including misleading map coordinates for missile sites, bridges, rail lines, factories and other top targets of U.S. warplanes. They also devised clever radio methods to dampen any suspicion in Saigon that Pham was under Communist control and transmitted fake reports on how their supposed spy was narrowly avoiding capture. Meanwhile, Pham’s regular reports that his equipment had been captured prompted MACV-SOG to send more resupply missions north, which always ended in the death or capture of their men.RVN Navy Seals - Biet HaiARVN CommandosOne installment of Hanoi’s needling account is called “10 Years of Leading the CIA Around by the Nose,” implying that Pham was some kind of master spy. In reality, he was just a lump of clay, first in the hands of the Americans and then North Vietnam’s spy agency.His unlikely path to espionage stardom began with his disenchantment with North Vietnam’s brand of Communism in the late 1950s. He was a disgruntled newspaper reporter and folk singer, and his public grousing soon attracted the attention of security officials. After he also was discovered carrying on an extramarital affair, he was ousted from his local Communist Party chapter. “Because of his acts of opposition,” says the new account from Hanoi, according to Pribbenow’s translation, “we had planned to prosecute him, but Chuyen fled and disappeared in July or August 1959.”He arrived in Saigon in 1960, at a time when the CIA and U.S. military spy agencies, in concert with a top-secret intelligence unit in the South Vietnamese president’s office, were gearing up for ambitious sabotage and espionage operations against the north. Potential agents were in demand, so Pham’s arrival from North Vietnam quickly drew their attention. Facing few alternatives, he apparently couldn’t resist their recruitment pitch.In the first week of April 1961, Pham was dispatched north, landing in a fishing hamlet on the coast about 35 miles southeast of Hanoi. A villager quickly noticed the unfamiliar boat, according to the World Security account. “The residents also occasionally saw a stranger who looked like Pham Chuyen hiding in the forested hills of La Khe Hamlet. Then one of our secret informants…reported that he had gone to the home of Chuyen’s mother.”Engaged in conversation by the local spy, Pham dropped his guard, telling him “the truth, that he had returned to conduct operations” against North Vietnam. A few days later, the security forces rolled him up, along with his radio and other spy materials. Carefully handled by his captors, Pham was turned into a double agent.If there’s any master spy in the story, it’s Pham’s handler, Nguyen Tai, who was immortalized by former CIA analyst Frank Snepp in his unauthorized 1977 memoir, Decent Interval. Nguyen was a top Communist spy in the Saigon area from 1966 to 1970, when his South Vietnamese and CIA agents captured him and subjected him to relentless and often brutal interrogation. Over five years, he repeatedly frustrated his agents with a cascading series of cover stories that camouflaged his true identity and the names of his fellow spies. With Communist forces closing in on Saigon in the spring of 1975, Snepp speculated, his interrogators murdered him in his cell.Nguyen Tai - The Man in the Snow White CellBut “Snepp was wrong,” Pribbenow wrote on the CIA’s website in 2007. “The prisoner survived.” Liberated by his countrymen, he “went on to other important positions” after the war’s end, “including elected member of the reunified nation of Vietnam’s National Assembly,” Pribbenow wrote. And in 2002, the revolutionary government honored him with its highest title, “Hero of the People's Armed Forces.” Among his accolades: He had directed the brilliant Pham double agent operation during its first three years. Snepp says he updated his book to include Nguyen's survival in 2002.Pribbenow says the failed torture of Nguyen should serve as a warning to CIA interrogators tasked with breaking today’s committed Muslim radicals, among other fanatics. “I am not a moralist. War is a nasty business, and one cannot fight a war without getting one's hands dirty,” he wrote in 2007. “There are limits, however, beyond which we cannot and should not go if we are to continue to call ourselves Americans.”But Pham’s story should stand as an advisory opinion for those who say the CIA has little to show for its spying operations against the likes of China, Iran and ISIS, Pribbenow suggests. Like those “hard targets,” North Vietnam had vast internal security networks and informants on every block. It “was a nightmare for anyone trying to conduct clandestine operations of any kind,” Pribbenow says. Hanoi had “public security and ‘militia/self-defense’ organizations that extended down to the village and hamlet level.” Plus, “everyone knew everyone else, and when a stranger appeared, everyone quickly knew about it.” The same holds for China, Iran and territory held by ISIS.If Pham had any regrets about helping the Communists he once despised kill agents from the south, where he had hoped to live, he never showed it. In fact, no one except his brothers and sisters knew about his spying life until a few days before he died, according to the account in World Security.He died amazed that Tourison, one of the Americans he had been closest to in Saigon, still wasn’t sure which side he had been on. “That is truly incredible,” Pham wrote in a private memoir for his intelligence service. “This means that Tourison and the CIA in South Vietnam were defeated by North Vietnamese Public Security and that the United States was defeated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.”Newsweek national security correspondent Jeff Stein is the author of A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War (St. Martin’s Press, 1992).Decent Interval - Frank SneppVietnam, Colonel NGO THE LINH, Special Forces Commander, Director of Strategic Technical Directorate (STD) Viet Nam Cong HoaU.S. History in Context Special Forces, ARVNArmy of the Republic of Vietnam Special ForcesARVN and US Special ForcesPhạm Ngọc Thảo from WikipediaColonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo also known as Albert Thảo (1922–1965), was a communist sleeper agent of the Viet Minh (and, later, of the Vietnam People's Army) who infiltrated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and also became a major provincial leader in South Vietnam. In 1962, he was made overseer of Ngô Đình Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam and deliberately forced it forward at an unsustainable speed, causing the production of poorly equipped and poorly defended villages and the growth of rural resentment toward the regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm, Nhu's elder brother.Vietminh Communist leader in the Mekong Delta, second from leftDuring the First Indochina War, as a communist officer in the Vietminh and helped oversee various operations in the Mekong Delta in the far south, at one point commanding his future enemy Nguyễn Khánh, who briefly served the communist cause. After the French withdrawal and the partition of Vietnam, Thảo stayed in the south and made a show of renouncing communism.He became part of the military establishment in the anti-communist southern regime and quickly rose through the ranks. Nominally Catholic, Thảo befriended Diệm's elder brother, Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục—the devoutly Roman Catholic Ngô family strongly favored co-religionists and had great trust in Thảo, unaware that he was still loyal to the communists.He went on to serve as the chief of Bến Tre Province, and gained fame after the area—traditionally a communist stronghold—suddenly became peaceful and prosperous. Vietnamese and US officials, as well as journalists hostile to or supportive of Saigon, misinterpreted this as a testament to Thảo's great ability, and he was promoted to a more powerful position where he could further his sabotage. Thảo and the communists in the local area had simply stopped fighting, so that the communists could quietly recuperate, while Thảo would appear to be very skillful and be given a more important job where he could do more damage.Ben Tre 1961Through intrigue, Thảo also helped destabilize and ultimately unseat two South Vietnamese regimes—Diem's and the military junta of Khánh. As the Diệm regime began to unravel in 1963, Thảo was one of the officers planning a coup. His plot was ultimately integrated into the successful plot and his activities promoted infighting which weakened the government and distracted the military from fighting the Viet Cong insurgency.Throughout 1964 and 1965, as South Vietnam was struggling to establish a stable state after the ouster of Diệm, Thảo was involved in several intrigues and coup plots which diverted the government from implementing its programs. In 1965, he went into hiding after a failed attempt to seize power from Khánh and was sentenced to death in absentia. Although this coup also failed, the subsequent chaos forced Khánh's junta to collapse. A communist report written in March 1965, stated that "The balance of force ... has changed very rapidly in our favor. ... The bulk of the enemy's armed forces ... have disintegrated, and what is left continues to disintegrate".Tanks taking part of coup under Thao’s commandAir Force chief Nguyễn Cao Kỳ thwarted Thảo's attempted coup in 1965. Thảo was sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal under Ky.Thảo died the same year he was forced into hiding; it is believed that he was murdered after a bounty was placed on his head. After Vietnam was reunified at the end of the Vietnam War, the victorious communists claimed Thảo as one of their own, posthumously made him a one-star general and awarded him the title of Heroic war dead (Vietnamese: Liệt sĩ). 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