Newsman Who Spied for Viet Cong Unrepentant : Recollections: While a reporter for Time, Pham Xuan An passed intelligence to Communists.

By WILLIAM TUOHY

April 30, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Pham Xuan An was the consultant to a generation of journalists here in what was then Saigon during the long American involvement in Vietnam.

A man of forceful personality and intellectual gifts, An was immensely influential.

He worked full time for Time magazine’s large bureau, and American reporters valued his insights and opinions.

Vietnamese reporters working for Western news organizations often took his line on Saigon’s political developments. Every morning at Tu Do Street cafes like Givral and Brodard, they would have coffee with one another, murmuring, “An says . . .” or “An thinks . . . .”

What they did not know was that Pham Xuan An was a spy.

One of Saigon’s most respected newsmen was also a lieutenant colonel in the Communist-controlled, southern-based National Liberation Front--a man in a position to pass along political and military intelligence from the U.S. Saigon mission to the Viet Cong.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam, An says he has no regrets.

Now 67 and ailing, he spends most of his days sitting and smoking--his long, lined face often smiling--in a home filled with bird cages. His 90-year-old mother lives with him, as do his four children and his grandchildren.

“I always tried my best to write the truth about politics here,” he said over coffee at Givral Cafe. “I did not give my employers false information.”

An generally took an anti-government line on the various regimes that held power here in the 1960s and 1970s. But it has never been clear how much misinformation he may have passed along to his Western news agency colleagues.

Some British reporters see parallels to Kim Philby, the former British intelligence official who became a journalist for the Observer in Beirut and later fled to Moscow. There it became clear that he had been a Soviet agent throughout his career at senior posts in London and Washington.

“The difference,” said one supporter of An, “is that Philby was an Englishman who spied on his countrymen for an enemy superpower. An spied on Americans for his country, Vietnam.”

While his sympathies were with Hanoi, as a reporter An always produced for Time: Even as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace 20 years ago, he filed a report to New York.

After the war, An worked as a journalist for the new regime but was soon eased out of analytical writing assignments by northerners who came to Saigon and pushed aside those in the National Liberation Front.

An says that during the war he never gave secret military information to the Liberation Front.

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “The entire American civilian and Vietnamese military apparatus was full of Liberation Front sympathizers.”

And, he insists, “I could never participate in the killing of anyone.”

An says he even helped an endangered South Vietnamese official into the American Embassy on April 29 so he could be airlifted to safety because the man was a friend and the father of five.

An worries about the future of Vietnam--whether its socialist leaders will have the know-how and managerial skills to improve the economy.

As for the past, he says: “I have no regrets. I fought in my way for my country.”