2005-03-11

Spies, defectors and double agents


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.”














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.








Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi


Wikipedia, Google

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