Pham Xuan An: The secret double life of Pham Xuan An, a renowned Time magazine journalist and valued wartime spy for Hanoi, could have come from Graham Greene's book about the Vietnam conflict, The Quiet American. But when An, who has died aged 79, reviewed the 1958 film of the novel, he said it should not be shown in his country.
Perhaps even then, as an apprentice reporter in California, he was disturbed by the ambiguities the story raised.
An was always torn between his affection for the US and love of his native land. When, after decades, his secret emerged, even the Americans called him, in a New Yorker profile, "The spy who loved us".
An, who has died of emphysema in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), never repudiated it. The friends he made as a correspondent for 10 years with Time in Saigon included CBS reporter Morley Safer, author David Halberstam and fellow Time colleague Robert Sam Anson, and they continued to admire him. "An's life broached fundamental questions," says Halberstam. "What is patriotism? What is the truth? Who are you when you tell these truths?" An kept silent about these questions, but he was otherwise gregarious and chatty. This made him popular among foreign correspondents with whom he mingled in Saigon cafes, smoking and swapping gossip. At night he photographed secret documents and typed information gained from off-the-record US army briefings, passing it all to the Viet Cong.
As a teenager from a prosperous South Vietnamese family, An abandoned high school to become a nationalist guerrilla in 1945. He joined the Viet Minh force opposing the French and experienced jungle skirmishes. Later, he held various posts in Saigon while still an activist, until the French were defeated in 1954.
The previous year, the Viet Minh had found him a job as a post office censor and via this he worked with Col Edward Lansdale, then with Saigon's US "military mission", but really a CIA adviser to South Vietnam. With Lansdale as mentor, An studied Sherman Kent, author of a book describing espionage as a "reportorial" task. An's spy schooling had begun.
Next he moved to southern California and enrolled at a junior college where he contributed to its student newspaper, the Barnacle. It was here that he reviewed the Greene film. Then he went to the state capital and, now in his early 30s, became a trainee on the Sacramento Bee newspaper. There, he recalled later, for the only time in his life he felt carefree.
His two years in the US were partly financed by the Asia Foundation, later revealed as a CIA front. In 1959 An returned to Saigon fluent in English and trained in journalism - and espionage - by the Americans. The Viet Cong were replacing his old guerrilla comrades and he needed a job. He joined the Vietnamese news agency, which was riddled with spies, but An insisted they write proper articles, and they did. He moved to Reuters in 1960 and did such fine work that five years later the Time bureau chief, Frank McCulloch, hired him. An stayed with the magazine until the last Americans evacuated Saigon in 1975. Even then he kept filing reports until the North Vietnamese military seized the capital.
McCulloch was another journalist who maintained his admiration for An. His information from US and South Vietnamese military sources provided Time with material similar to that which he gave his communist employers. He never invented anything and always insisted that nobody was killed as a direct result of his activities.
But at the war's end, An's friendliness towards the Americans caused his communist masters to enforce his "re-education", although they eventually promoted him to army general. However, he was not permitted to visit America after his secret came out in the late 1980s.
An is survived by his wife and four children.
Pham Xuan An, born September 12th, 1927; died September 20th, 2006