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This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.The strangest motive I'm aware of in a murder case (a quadruple homicide, in fact) was really no motive at all in my opinion. In 1983 a north Texas family man with no criminal history and a dream of flying purportedly murdered 4 men to steal an ultralight aircraft.I find the motive strange for a few reasons: 1) Since the ultralight would be linked to a quadruple homicide, it would most likely never be usable 2) The man convicted of the murder had made phone calls using his employer’s long distance calling card, speaking with the victim and his wife to arrange to see or purchase the aircraft…(all things which would easily be traced back to him)…hardly behavior of a man planning to steal, much less murder anyone 3) On the other hand, the details of the murders bear markings more akin to a professional hit, such as getting the drop on 4 men including 2 law enforcement 4) Lastly, I believe the actual motive provides a glimpse into a dark history of factions within Texas law enforcement and quite possibly, even the CIA. Lester Bower was convicted because Grayson County said he wanted an ultralight really, really badly and he snapped. After 33 years on death row, Mr. Bower was executed June 3rd, 2015. I believe he was innocent. I’ll go further…I believe he was framed.In October of 1983, 4 men were found shot to death from .22 caliber ammunition in a rural private airplane hangar in Sherman, TX. One victim was a known narcotics dealer. (This should have been exculpatory evidence, but the FBI/prosecution withheld it) Another was a former sheriff deputy. One was a newly hired deputy. Another was apparently a friend of at least one of the men.Understanding the rumors circulating at that time is critical to forming an educated opinion about the case. It was rumored in north Texas that corrupt law enforcement and government agencies were profiting from the narcotics trade by selling drugs obtained from seizures, working with cartels or even growing/manufacturing themselves. In many cases these rumors involved rural sheriff departments. It was a different time. Policies/procedures were looser. Technology was limited. Evidence in rooms could much more easily go missing and drug bust caches more easily re-distributed. There was no GPS tracking…no body cameras and no cell phones. The FBI, DEA and Texas Rangers had investigated sheriffs in North Texas with no success. The problem is various people within these investigating agencies were also in on it. Good, honest cops in the know from that era will tell you these corruption rumors were not rumors…the corruption was rampant, the body counts were significant, and the guilty parties had moles and tentacles within various organizations so that it was virtually impossible to catch them.During the 70s/80s small planes in Texas could easily make direct flights to Mexico from rural landing strips, load up with drugs and return undetected. Many people observed these low flying planes over the years, often at night and some task forces tried to catch these corrupt law enforcement in the act with virtually no success. Occasionally these planes were intercepted by DEA. Most often they were not.It's also been established that the CIA or at the very least CIA assets were involved in large scale narcotics trafficking (think large cargo planes) on an enormous scale out of Mena, AK.There is also a high probability the CIA was using sheriff departments to distribute the drugs from their central hubs. In some cases perhaps it was just about protecting shipments, but sometimes it was likely more hands on. Even the beloved Texas Rangers had questionable relationships with drug smugglers. A North Texas drug smuggler, Rex Cauble and ring leader of the Cowboy Mafia - Wikipedia , was an honorary Texas Ranger. In 1982 he would be convicted under RICO and much of his assets seized. Cauble would likely have been caught earlier had the Texas Ranger building the case against him, not been suspiciously killed in an impromptu botched drug raid next to Cauble’s ranch. The details of Ranger Bob Doherty’s murder during the raid will likely never be fully understood, Death of a Ranger but a fellow Ranger was there that day… a Ranger with a checkered history who’d long been extremely cozy with Rex Cauble. The story may seem tangential, but is noteworthy because this same Ranger, Weldon Lucas, was the investigator in the quadruple homicide in Sherman, TX who helped send Les Bower to the grave. He would go on to have a long run as sheriff of Denton County.The media's coverage of the quadruple homicide initially hinted at a drug deal gone bad which meant corrupt law enforcement were in danger of being exposed, but Les Bower proved a scapegoat. He had been to the hangar to purchase an ultralight aircraft, had met with 3 of the 4 murdered men that afternoon and paid cash for the ultralight one of the men was selling. (Evidence of this cash transaction in the form of a business card with writing on it disappeared from sheriff evidence, but had been mentioned in a coroner’s report.) Lester Bower lied to investigators initially about his whereabouts/actions that day saying he’d never been to the hangar. but he never got to tell the jury his version of the events because his lawyer made a deal with the prosecution to not put Les on the stand (without consulting his client of the arrangement until the trial was under way). Frankly, based on courtroom proceedings/transcripts you'd think his defense attorney was working for the prosecution. Les was convicted and received the death penalty. The purported motive of the quadruple homicide: To steal an ultralight aircraft.Les received a glimmer of hope a few years into his conviction. His appeal was being handled pro bono by a highly experienced law firm when a woman reached out with new information. After seeing a story about Les in the Star Telegram, she came forward claiming the real murderers included her former Oklahoma boyfriend and his 3 cronies, people who had gone to the hangar that day to steal drugs. Apparently, the victims surprised her boyfriend’s group while searching their hangar for drugs and were killed. Many things lent credibility to this witness’s story, including testimony from a former Narcotics Anonymous member she’d confided murder details to years earlier when she learned he was friends with one of the homicide victims. Furthermore, family members and friends/coworkers of the actual alleged 4 Oklahoma men testified post trial they had overheard discussion or had outright heard confessions of the other 4’s involvement in the murders.To add mystery to the case, this woman who came forward…her husband was run over in Arlington, TX while awaiting to give her testimony in a post trial hearing in Grayson county. He died after removal from life support. Another expert witness on ultralight aircraft claimed the then Grayson county sheriff came to his property, flashed a gun and threatened his life if he didn't step away from the post conviction case. He was later found dead from a shotgun blast to his head which was ruled suicide. And finally, a news team trying to get to the bottom of the case surprised some of the alleged Oklahoma murderers with an impromptu interview. That footage was seemingly suppressed and never aired.So I would say I find a family man with no criminal history going Jason Bourne and murdering 4 men, including getting the drop on two cops/former cops all to steal an ultralight he would never be able to use because it was key missing evidence in a murder investigation to be the strangest murder motive I know of.Rest in peace, Lester Bower. There will be justice, perhaps not in this life, but it will come.

US election 2020 polls: Who is ahead - Trump or Biden?Voters in America will decide on 3 November whether Donald Trump remains in the White House for another four years.The Republican president is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who is best known as Barack Obama's vice-president but has been in US politics since the 1970s.As election day approaches, polling companies will be trying to gauge the mood of the nation by asking voters which candidate they prefer.We'll be keeping track of those polls here and trying to work out what they can and can't tell us about who will win the election.Biden leading national presidential pollsNational polls are a good guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, but they're not necessarily a good way to predict the result of the election.In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton led in the polls and won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost - that's because the US uses an electoral college system , so winning the most votes doesn't always win you the election.With that caveat aside, Joe Biden has been ahead of Donald Trump in most national polls since the start of the year. He has hovered around 50% in recent months and has had a 10-point lead on occasions.By contrast, in 2016 the polls were far less clear and just a couple of percentage points separated Mr Trump and his then-rival Hillary Clinton at several points as election day neared.Which states will decide this election?As Mrs Clinton discovered in 2016, the number of votes you win is less important than where you win them.Most states nearly always vote the same way, meaning that in reality there are just a handful of states where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states.In the electoral college system the US uses to elect its president, each state is given a number of votes based on how many members it sends to Congress - House and Senate. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.As the map above shows, some battleground states have a lot more electoral college votes on offer than others so candidates often spend a lot more time campaigning in them.Who's leading in the battleground states?At the moment, polls in the battleground states look good for Joe Biden, but there's a long way to go and things can change very quickly, especially when Donald Trump's involved.The polls suggest Mr Biden is ahead in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - three industrial states his Republican rival won by margins of less than 1% to clinch victory in 2016.But it's the battleground states where Mr Trump won big in 2016 that his campaign team will be most worried about. His winning margin in Iowa, Ohio and Texas was between 8-10% back then but it's looking much closer in all three at the moment.Betting markets, however, are certainly not writing Mr Trump off just yet. The latest odds give him just less than a 50% chance of winning on 3 November, which suggests some people expect the outlook to change a lot over the next few weeks.But political analysts are less convinced about his chances of re-election. FiveThirtyEight , a political analysis website, says Mr Biden is "favoured" to win the election, while The Economist says he is "likely" to beat Mr Trump.Has coronavirus affected Trump's numbers?The coronavirus pandemic has dominated headlines in the US since the start of the year and the response to President Trump's actions has been split predictably along party lines.Support for his approach peaked in mid-March after he declared a national emergency and made $50 billion available to states to stop the spread of the virus. At this point, 55% of Americans approved of his actions, according to data from Ipsos , a leading polling company.But any support he had from Democrats disappeared after that, while Republicans continued to back their president.By July, the data suggests his own supporters had begun to question his response - but there was a slight uptick at the end of August.The virus is likely to be at the forefront of voters' minds and one leading model produced by experts at the University of Washington predicts the death toll will have risen to about 260,000 people by election day.Mr Trump may be hoping Operation Warp Speed, his administration's vaccine initiative, can produce an "October surprise" - a last-minute event that turns the election upside down.The chief scientific adviser to the initiative has said it's "extremely unlikely but not impossible" that a vaccine could be ready to distribute before 3 November.Can we trust the polls?It's easy to dismiss the polls by saying they got it wrong in 2016 and President Trump frequently does exactly that. But it's not entirely true.Most national polls did have Hillary Clinton ahead by a few percentage points, but that doesn't mean they were wrong, since she won three million more votes than her rival.Pollsters did have some problems in 2016 - notably a failure to properly represent voters without a college degree - meaning Mr Trump's advantage in some key battleground states wasn't spotted until late in the race, if at all. Most polling companies have corrected this now.But this year there's even more uncertainty than normal due to the coronavirus pandemic and the effect it's having on both the economy and how people will vote in November, so all polls should be read with some scepticism, especially this far out from election day.02Trump rallies 2.0: Behind the curtain at the president's campaign events in the COVID-19 eraFrom the opening chords of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" to the final beats of "Y.M.C.A." President Donald Trump's trademark rallies are back as he enters the final stretch of his reelection bid. But despite his campaign's desire to project a sense of normalcy during the coronavirus pandemic, the new rallies are undeniably different.Facing a narrow path to victory in November, the Trump campaign has been eager to put the president on stage – holding rallies in four battleground states since he was formally nominated for a second term at the GOP convention last month – and to draw a contrast with Democratic nominee Joe Biden's socially distant style of campaigning.Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.In addition to North Carolina, Trump has held rallies in Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire in recent weeks. He will campaign this weekend in Nevada and Arizona, holding "comeback events" near Carson City and Las Vegas.But COVID-19 has forced changes, many of which are imperceptible on television, and the events are renewing debate over the wisdom of gathering large groups during the pandemic, including from some of the administration's health advisers. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CNN this week he was "puzzled and rather disheartened" by the lack of face coverings at Trump events.© Chris Carlson, AP President Donald Trump reacts to supporters as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020, in Winston-Salem, N.C.Maskless: NIH director 'puzzled' by politicization of COVID protection efforts"Going to these rallies is an act of defiance. Holding them is an act of defiance," said Republican political strategist Doug Heye. "I think there's a very reasonable question of whether lives are being put in jeopardy just to do a political event."The new Trump rallies are almost always held outside and frequently at airports where the president can, as he explained during a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, last week, "get off the plane... make a speech" and "get the hell out of here." Masks are distributed, though rarely worn. Temperature checks are conducted, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others have questioned their effectiveness.By bringing the rallies back, Trump is hoping to send a signal that the nation is moving past the worst days of the virus, despite hundreds of deaths in the nation each day. Whether voters accept that message will be key to his chances in the Nov. 3 election.But while the new iteration of rallies is familiar, there are notable differences.At the Winston-Salem rally Tuesday, participants were required to pile into shuttle buses to move from Smith Reynolds Airport, where Trump spoke, to offsite parking lots. The more cumbersome process prompted some attendees to abandon a section of seats so they could beat exiting crowds ten minutes before Trump finished – leaving a rare section of seats empty that had been full when the program got under way.John Fritze, USA TODAY Some attendees at President Donald Trump's Sept. 8, 2020 rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, departed before the president finished speaking, leaving a section partially empty. This photograph was taken at 8:02 p.m. ET, about eight minutes before Trump left the stage.Most attendees stuck it out, but the departures were nevertheless an unusual sight."I don't know how many people are here, but there's a lot," Trump told the crowd in North Carolina, where polls show Biden with a single-digit lead. "It's beyond what we had in terms of enthusiasm – beyond what we had four years ago."Trump's first return to the rally stage – his June 20 event in Tulsa, Oklahoma – drew fire after public health officials there said it "more than likely" contributed to a spike in coronavirus cases weeks later. The campaign has acknowledged at least eight advance team staff members involved with that event had tested positive for the virus.Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who attended the rally at Tulsa's BOK Center, tested positive for the virus nine days later. He died on July 30.Oklahoma: Trump slammed for using offensive, 'racist' remarks at Tulsa rallyMichigan: Trump claims 'globalist sellout' Biden will send American jobs overseasTrump backed off indoor, arena-style rallies in the weeks that followed. It wasn't until his Aug. 27 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which he delivered from the South Lawn of the White House, that he spoke at an event that had the feel of a rally. A day later, he traveled to New Hampshire for a "general admission" event that was largely indistinguishable from the airport rallies he held before the pandemic.Laura Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, said officials aren't aware of any coronavirus cases from the event.But that doesn't mean there haven't been concerns raised behind the scenes.Sean Rayford, Getty Images President Donald Trump addresses a crowd during a campaign rally at Smith Reynolds Airport on September 8, 2020 in Winston Salem, North Carolina.The Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority this week advised the Trump campaign that a rally planned for Saturday "may not proceed" because it would violate state and local COVID restrictions. Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh blamed the move on politics and aides announced a series of other events this weekend.Similar logistical considerations took place ahead of Trump's rally in Winston-Salem. The Trump campaign initially planned to hold the event in a hangar but as crowd estimates grew, it was moved to a fully outdoor space on the tarmac, an official with knowledge of the planning said on condition of anonymity to relay internal discussions.Trump joked Tuesday that aides tried to limit the crowd size but "they didn't do too good a job." He has described his rallies as a "peaceful protest," and the campaign distributed signs at the events printed with those words – a reference to Black Lives Matters demonstrations that took place in some cities this year.North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who has drawn Trump's ire in the past, signed an order in March capping outdoor gatherings to 50 people. An extension of that order, signed this month, exempts religious ceremonies, weddings and other activities "constituting the exercise" of First Amendment rights."We had those conversations," said Joshua Swift, Forsyth County's health director. "I would just say that obviously, outside, there's a low risk but there still is a risk.Within a camera frame, Trump's rallies don't look very different today than they did four years ago: Huge crowds roaring at the president's attacks on Democrats, a sea of red MAGA caps, signs distributed by aides waving overhead, large overflow crowds standing shoulder-to-shoulder and most people not wearing masks.But there are subtle differences: Trump's recent rallies are held outdoors, or in airport hangars with wide open doors. Most of the audience sits at ground level, which means that if the campaign wants to show people behind the president – as it did in Winston-Salem – a riser is placed behind the podium. The seated crowd appears to be smaller than when Trump filled indoor sports arenas but the outside venues mean overflow crowds can be positioned within view, blurring the distinction with ticketed supporters. MANDEL NGAN, AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump addresses supporters during a campaign rally at MBS International Airport in Freeland, Michigan on September 10, 2020.In other cases, Air Force One is parked behind the president.Campaign officials declined to answer whether they are limiting crowd sizes. An official at the Winston-Salem airport told the Winston-Salem Journal that his best guess on crowd size was between 7,000 to 9,000. The campaign distributed masks, conducted temperature checks and has warned supporters signing up for rallies that they assume a risk of getting sick."Events look different during a pandemic, but we have adapted to continue harnessing the unmatched organic enthusiasm of the president’s supporters and build on the momentum to carry him to victory in November," said Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager. "President Trump and his campaign have always valued connecting directly with the American people and we’ve been able to do so in a way that prioritizes the health and safety of every event attendee."Public health officials continue to caution that large gatherings of people – even those held outdoors – are a risk."Rallies and public gatherings of any kind increase risk of transmission," said Dr. Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. "The virus is quite apolitical in that regard. I still wouldn’t attend a rally on either side of the political spectrum."Several supporters said they were willing to take that risk."A little bit," Pat Nifong, 66, responded when asked if she was worried about being in such a large group. The Winston-Salem woman said she was "happy to be here" but that her concerns about the virus were why she was standing "six feet away from everybody."Carl Horstkamp, a 50-year-old Winston-Salem man who was attending his first rally, said he thought state government had reacted to the virus too aggressively and that he appreciated a chance to get outside and "see all these people – your fellow citizens.""I feel that outside is a safe place. We've got a nice breeze," Horstkamp said. "This is the best spot to hold it in this area." Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden meets with veterans and union leaders in the backyard of a supporter on Labor Day September 07, 2020 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Message for BidenBy holding the rallies at all, Trump is highlighting a contrast with Biden, who has run a campaign that relies far more on virtual and socially distanced events. Both Trump and his supporters have called attention to the differences frequently."What do you think Joe Biden is doing tonight?" North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest quizzed the crowd during his warm up remarks in Winston-Salem on Tuesday. "Probably doing a Zoom call."Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo responded by slamming what he described as Trump's "contempt for experts and willful disregard of science," and said the president was "continuing to put his own supporters in harm's way because it helps him politically."Seven in 10 Americans say they see Biden as caring to those affected by the coronavirus pandemic, while less than half say the same of Trump, according to a survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project.Poll: A majority of Americans see Biden as more empathetic to those with COVID-19Biden has, in fact, appeared in Michigan, Wisconsin and twice in Pennsylvania in the past 10 days, but his campaign has taken precautions, such as using a small, 16-seat aircraft, deploying hand sanitizers and maintaining social distancing. At times, that has created images Trump aides have used to suggest a lack of enthusiasm for Biden.During his Labor Day visit to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Biden met with four union members in the backyard of a supporter. The only "audience," besides the small group of reporters who traveled with him on a separate plane, were a few next-door neighbors peering into the yard as Secret Service agents in face masks guarded the perimeter.© Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images With his audience of union leadership and journalists socially distanced to reduce the risk posed by coronavirus, Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks in the parking lot outside the United Auto Workers Region 1 offices on September 09, 2020 in Warren, Michigan.Instead of marching in Philadelphia’s annual Labor Day parade as he has in years past, Biden participated in a virtual call with union members from the AFL-CIO state headquarters in Harrisburg. Rather than walking over to the more than 50 supporters who gathered across the street from the hall, he waved from an upper-story window."Every place I go I’ve got to set an example," Biden said during a virtual fundraiser Thursday. Reaching for a face mask, he added:"That’s why, everywhere I go, I wear this mask, and, everywhere I go, I keep my social distance." Sean Rayford, Getty Images President Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a campaign rally at Smith Reynolds Airport on September 8, 2020 in Winston Salem, North Carolina.That argument stands in sharp contrast to images from Trump's rallies. On the riser behind his podium in Winston-Salem, some supporters wore masks while others did not. Away from the risers, the share of people covering their faces was even smaller.Health experts say that is a troubling cue for the public.Collins, the NIH director, told CNN that aliens arriving on Earth from another planet would scratch their heads trying to figure out why some people used a face covering to slow the spread of a virus and other did not."You would scratch your head and think, 'This is just not a planet that has much promise for the future, if something that is so straightforward can somehow get twisted into decision-making that really makes no sense,'" Collins continued.Trump has been resistant to wearing a mask in public and endorsed the practice as "patriotic" in July only after he stressed repeatedly that masks were merely a recommendation. His campaign now sells Make America Great Again coverings."I’m very concerned about the mixed message that people are getting," said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston. "It is part of human nature that if we are hearing mixed messages, we will choose the one that fits into our belief system, or is more convenient."Contributing: Jeanine SantucciThis article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump rallies 2.0: Behind the curtain at the president's campaign events in the COVID-19 eraAsset or albatross? Some GOP candidates ponder whether to embrace or avoid Donald TrumpLt. Gov. Dan Patrick has a message for Republican candidates contemplating distancing themselves from Donald Trump: Stick with the president.“If I were on the ticket, I would run as close to the president as I could,” Patrick said. “There are a few districts in Texas that are pretty moderate Republican, or you might say conservative Democrat districts where maybe … there’s a policy issue that a candidate might alter a little bit, but I still think they stand with the president on the issues.”Patrick’s comments, Texas Democrats say, are good news for their candidates who are hoping to make gains in the Lone Star State, perhaps even flipping it from red to blue.“His brand has turned off a lot of people that have historically voted Republican,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said of Trump. "He’s the reason that so many seats held by Republicans are now up for grabs.”The deep feelings about Trump — chances are you love him or hate him — are creating challenges for GOP candidates running in November in areas containing swing voters or soft Republicans who have soured on the president. For those candidates, trying to navigate the politics of running with Trump can be a no-win situation. There’s political fallout no matter what the candidate decides to do.Embracing Trump could turn off voters who live near the urban areas where he’s increasingly unpopular. But if GOP candidates try to distance themselves from Trump, they risk alienating his loyal voters whom they’ll need to beat Democrats.The recent rash of negative publicity about Trump isn’t helping his case with some voters. This week excerpts from an upcoming book by journalist Bob Woodward revealed that Trump had concerns in February that the coronavirus was a serious threat to the country, even as he later played down the pandemic to Americans. And earlier this month an article in The Atlantic alleged that Trump called Americans who died in war “losers and suckers.” Trump denies the allegations.But amid the storm of negative stories, Trump’s base appears to be sticking with him in his campaign against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.A passerby stops to take a selfie with foam sculpture depictions of President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden along Dixie Highway in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Sept. 3, 2020. (Joe Cavaretta)A new poll by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler found Trump with a two-point lead over Biden among likely Texas voters, erasing the five-point lead the former vice president enjoyed about two months ago.According to the poll, Trump is winning the Dallas-Fort Worth region among likely voters 50-44 on the strength of solid support in Collin and Denton counties. But Biden leads Trump 49-46 in the Houston area.In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, about 5% of likely voters are undecided, which could tilt the election in either direction.The question becomes, is Trump an asset or albatross?“He’s absolutely both,” said Republican political consultant Bill Miller. “He inspires such strong emotion. The people that like him would lay down their lives for him. The people that don’t will do anything to take him down. That’s why it’s a dance for some of these candidates.”President Donald Trump shakes hands with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as they and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick discuss hurricane response at Dalfort Fueling near Love Field in Dallas in 2017. (Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)Republican consultant Vinny Minchillo, who’s worked on the presidential campaigns of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, as well as numerous Texas Republicans, agreed that Trump offers a mixed bag for Republicans.“It depends on where you are,” Minchillo said. “In some places, candidates have to walk that fine line in keeping your distance from Trump, and that’s hard to do. In these swing districts, man, it’s tough.”In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Texas by 9 percentage points. But the former secretary of state defeated Trump in some suburban districts, including in North Texas.Republican Genevieve Collins, who’s challenging incumbent U.S. Rep. Colin Allred in the 32nd Congressional District, has acknowledged that running with Trump could require the channeling of her inner Ginger Rogers. Trump lost the district to Clinton in 2016.“It’s a tap dance with the president,” Collins told a group of voters during a video chat. “But, by and large, our community is thriving based on his policies.”Patrick, who last week led a Trump campaign bus tour that stopped in Bedford, acknowledged that Trump is a flashpoint for many voters, but said November’s election is bigger than one candidate — even the presidential contenders.“At the end of the day, this race goes far beyond Biden and Trump,” Patrick said.Trump has been an enigma for some Republicans since 2016, when he staged an effective, populist campaign that cemented him as the undisputed leader of the GOP.Trump’s Texas popularity was tested early.During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Sen. Ted Cruz, the runner-up in the GOP race for president, refused to endorse Trump during his prime time speech. Instead, he told delegates to vote their conscience and left the stage to a chorus of boos.Cruz ultimately backed Trump against Clinton, after the New York businessman developed a list of potential Supreme Court appointees. But it took Cruz months to restore his standing with Texas Republicans as they had fully accepted Trumpism as their new political doctrine.When Cruz ran for re-election against former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, he wrapped his arms around the president, even as he refused to answer questions on the campaign trail about Trump’s tweets or other controversies he generated. He beat O’Rourke by 2.6 percentage points on the strength of a united conservative front.In November, Sen. John Cornyn will have to figure out how to run with Trump. Democratic Senate nominee MJ Hegar — the former Air Force helicopter pilot — has already dubbed the senator as a “bootlicker” for Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.Cornyn, in office since 2002, is selling voters on his record.And despite withering criticism from Hegar, he has stuck with Trump, and the president is returning the favor.Trump recently retweeted a Cornyn video about his candidacy during the Republican National Convention with the comment: “Texas loves John!”In recent days, Cornyn has had to address Trump’s latest controversies, including the Woodward interview revelation that the president knew the coronavirus would be more dangerous than the flu. He stood by the president.“I understand the intention that he didn’t want to panic the American people [because], that’s not what leaders do,” Cornyn said of Trump’s actions. “In retrospect, I think he might have been able to handle that in a way that both didn’t panic the American people but also gave them accurate information.”When asked to comment on The Atlantic article that alleged Trump made disparaging remarks about the military, Cornyn’s statement to The News didn’t refer to Trump.“All men and women who wear the uniform are heroes,” Cornyn said.Because he’s running statewide, Cornyn can better afford to embrace Trump than in-district candidates. Though polls show a close race between Trump and Biden, a Democrat hasn’t won a Texas presidential contest since Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976.If Trump loses Texas, it likely would be curtains for Cornyn as well. If Trump wins the state by a similar margin to 2016, it’s likely that Cornyn will also be victorious.Some Republican congressional candidates have a tougher sell to voters.In 2018, Democrat Lizzie Fletcher beat John Culberson in a Houston-anchored congressional district, while former NFL player and civil rights lawyer Allred wrestled the 32nd District seat in eastern and northern Dallas County away from longtime incumbent Pete Sessions, whom Trump backed.Sessions is heavily favored to return to Congress in the Waco-area seat now held by retiring Republican Bill Flores.Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2018 but still impacted critical races across the country. Now that his name is on the ballot, the intensity of the pro-Trump and anti-Trump movements could propel or sink candidates.Such is the case where Collins is trying to unseat Allred. She’ll have to answer questions from suburban voters who are open to voting for a Republican, but wary of Trump.On a video conference with voters, Collins discussed the politics of running with Trump.“The reality is they loathe his behavior, they loathe his tweets,” she said. “But they actually really like his policies and they like what he represents and how he gets things done, despite all the acidity and acrimony he has to go through, or what’s happening in D.C.”Collins conceded that the 32nd District was not exactly Trump country.“Yeah, there’s actually a lot of people in District 32 that are still very Bush conservatives. You guys probably know a lot of them,” she said. “There’s not always the Trump conservatives, and having President [George W.] Bush to be my actual constituent, it makes me have to thread that needle very interestingly.”She said she hoped offer “business sense” and “common sense,” while “doing it all with grace.”Congressional candidates in other parts of the area face similar challenges, including Democratic targets Beth Van Duyne in the 24th District against Democrat Candace Valenzuela, Republican incumbent Van Taylor in the 3rd District against Lulu Seikaly, Republican incumbent Ron Wright in the 6th District against Democrat Stephen Daniel and Republican incumbent Roger Williams in the 25th District against Julie Oliver.In each district, there are pockets of Trump supporters and areas where he’s unpopular.“It’s a mixed bag, almost a precinct by precinct case,” said Republican consultant Matthew Langston, who’s working for Wright. “As a Republican you can’t run from Trump. Every candidate will have to pick and choose what policies on which they choose to get close to Trump.”Focusing on core conservative issues is how many Republicans blunt criticism from independent voters about supporting Trump.And they also create their own Frankenstein’s monster-type image—whether it’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to counter fears of another Trump term.Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick photographs Air Force One as it takes off from Dallas Love Field Airport after President Donald Trump participated in a roundtable conversation about race relations and policing and attended a fundraiser at a private residence on June 11, 2020, in Dallas.

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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