‘Nam Man’s Land

The meeting, while not covert, played out much like a scene from the book it would later produce: a not-so-chance encounter in a seafood restaurant on a bustling street in Saigon.

Two men – one American, one Vietnamese – attending a dinner hosted by a mutual friend: then-Vietnam Center director James Reckner.  Wind up sitting across from each other. Both speak English. They hit it off. Talk politics. Talk America.

Author and University of California, Davis professor Larry Berman, who is accompanying Texas Tech University students on a trip through Vietnam, soon realizes he’s in the company of a notorious former North Vietnamese spy who worked as an American correspondent during the war.

Their conversation continues through a series of interviews over six years, prompting Berman into more than a dozen trips to Vietnam and eventually leading to a biography: “Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent.”

“This book never would have happened if it had not been for that trip,” Berman said while signing copies of his book during a November trip to Texas Tech.

Perfect Spy

“Perfect Spy” chronicles the life of An, a gregarious and complex man who used positions as a correspondent for Reuters and Time Magazine to gain access to classified information.

An’s information was pivotal for North Vietnamese guerillas, yet he developed such strong ties to America that he was confined to Vietnam by his superiors after the war. He was considered a hero in Vietnam yet remained highly regarded by his American contemporaries.

New Work

Berman visited Lubbock as he began researching his next work – an exploration into the life of the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.

“The next five years of my life will be spent primarily in two places: here and at the Naval Historical Center in Washington D.C.,” Berman quipped.

Lubbock is in fact familiar ground for Berman, despite his position as director of the U.C. Davis Washington Program.

As one of the largest collections of Vietnam-era related documents in the world, Texas Tech’s Vietnam Center & Archive provides a bounty of information for researchers: letters, photographs, official documents – all filed and carefully stored for retrieval.

“I think that this is the world’s preeminent location for research on the Vietnam War,” said Berman, qualifying the praise by adding that he serves on the National Advisory Council for the Vietnam Center.

Through the archive, Berman said he has access to such resources as memorabilia and photos related to Zumwalt, who was chief of naval operations from 1970-1974 and naval forces commander in Vietnam from 1968-1970. He also was the founding chairman of the Vietnam Center’s National Advisory Council, serving in that capacity from 1989 until his death in 2000, and a supporter of Texas Tech’s Institute of Environmental and Human Health.

Building Ties

Reckner, now executive director of the university’s Institute for Modern Conflict, Diplomacy and Reconciliation, points to the meeting between Berman and An as an example of the benefits created by Texas Tech’s archival and diplomatic efforts.

An was a friend of the Vietnam Center and even met with Texas Tech doctoral students visiting Ho Chi Minh City to regale them with his tales about spying during the war.

“That was a remarkable educational experience for our students, and one that only Texas Tech students could have, thanks to the Vietnam Center,” Reckner said.

Berman will donate his research notes and interviews for “Perfect Spy” to the Vietnam Archive, just as he did with his two other books: “No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam;” and “Lyndon Johnson's War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam.”