Spies, defectors and double agents

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Pham Xuan An

Pham 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.


Wikipedia, Google
NYT obituary
Washington Post obituary

From the NYT obit:

[Frank] McCulloch, the Saigon bureau chief for Time during the war, said:
“It tore him up.
If circumstances had been reversed,
if hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had occupied my land,
I probably would have done the same thing.”

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Pham Ngoc Thao

Wikipedia, Google

[Wikipedia’s lead paragraph, as of 2009-12-04:]

Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo,
known to friends as
Albert Thảo (1922–1965),
a major provincial leader in South Vietnam
and infiltrator of
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,
was a communist agent of the Vietminh
and later
the Vietnam People's Army
[i.e., the NVA].
As the overseer of Ngo Dinh Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program in the early 1960s,
he deliberately forced the program forward at unsustainable speeds,
constructing poorly-equipped and poorly-defended villages,
in order to foster resentment against
the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Nhu's elder brother.

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Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi

Wikipedia, Google