Pham Ngoc Dinh
Memories of Saigon
Monday 14 June 2010
I was in Saigon off and on between 1962 and 1965, flying in from my Bangkok base to help Nick Turner in times of crisis and to stand in whenever he was off base. At the Reuter office in the Vietnam Press complex on Hong Thap Tu Street our Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An held court, chatting to a steady stream of visitors, many of them peasant women in conical hats. He introduced them to me as relatives, friends or friends of friends. Now that I know An was a Viet Cong intelligence colonel, I realise that many of these callers must have been Viet Cong couriers.
My last assignment to Saigon was in 1965, after Nick had resigned and An had left Reuters to join Time magazine. It was a hectic few months. The intensive US bombing of North Vietnam started and the first American, Australian and South Korean combat troops landed. There was talk of China entering the war. I was glad to hand over the bureau to the new Reuters Correspondent, Rennie Airth. In London I was asked by an editorial executive if the increased US and allied military commitment meant the war would end soon. It was budget time and Head Office planners were trying to decide how much to spend on Vietnam. Remembering what An had told me just before I left Saigon, I said that the Viet Cong would regard the heavier US involvement as a sign of growing US impatience and that if they persevered victory would be theirs. The Vietnam war lasted another 10 years and scores of Reuters journalists passed through the doors of the Saigon bureau, including two who did not return. Our Saigon office manager Pham Ngoc Dinh visited London years later. He told me An had helped him get an exit visa to emigrate to Australia.
Ernesto Mendoza
My last assignment to Saigon was in 1965, after Nick had resigned and An had left Reuters to join Time magazine. It was a hectic few months. The intensive US bombing of North Vietnam started and the first American, Australian and South Korean combat troops landed. There was talk of China entering the war. I was glad to hand over the bureau to the new Reuters Correspondent, Rennie Airth. In London I was asked by an editorial executive if the increased US and allied military commitment meant the war would end soon. It was budget time and Head Office planners were trying to decide how much to spend on Vietnam. Remembering what An had told me just before I left Saigon, I said that the Viet Cong would regard the heavier US involvement as a sign of growing US impatience and that if they persevered victory would be theirs. The Vietnam war lasted another 10 years and scores of Reuters journalists passed through the doors of the Saigon bureau, including two who did not return. Our Saigon office manager Pham Ngoc Dinh visited London years later. He told me An had helped him get an exit visa to emigrate to Australia.
Ernesto Mendoza
Memories of Saigon
Saturday 05 June 2010
I was interested in Jim Pringle's surmise that as bureau chief in Saigon 1962-64 I had probably made the inspired decision to move the Reuters' office to 15 Han Thuyen, from where it had a ringside view of the Tet offensive attack on the US embassy and, later, the North Vietnamese tank entry into the presidential palace in 1975. Steve Somerville has since set the record straight – it was not my decision, as I was no longer bureau chief. Coverage of the Vietnam war will long continue to be a topic of research, so even such apparently mundane details can be of interest.
When I arrived in Saigon in May 1962 and took over the bureau from Peter Smark, the Reuters office was a partitioned-off section of an old French villa on Hong Thap Tu (Red Cross) Street, one of two adjacent villas serving as the HQ of the national news agency Vietnam Press, just across the road from the presidential palace. Reuters had a contract with VNP and part of the deal was our occupancy of a small area of their premises. But in 1963 that arrangement had to end.
When the battle of Ap Bac occurred in January 1963, the first major military setback of the war for government forces, I reported things the presidential palace did not like. I had driven in Reuters’ Hillman Minx to the scene of the battle while it was taking place 30 miles south of Saigon, then driven back to Saigon late in the evening and filed, and then returned to the scene next morning and helped load dozens of Vietnamese army dead from the paddy fields onto armoured personnel carriers. It was the beginning of real tensions between the regime and the major news wires including Reuters.
A little later, in May 1963, the "Buddhist crisis" broke out, and my reporting – with invaluable input from my Vietnamese assistant Pham Xuan An whom we now know to have been the intelligence chief for the Viet Cong – was necessarily unfavourable to the regime. I was soon told VNP could no longer house the Reuters bureau. (I should make clear that Pham Xuan An at no stage ever tried to give Reuters’ coverage a pro-communist bias. He was just so incredibly well informed that we knew when we were being lied to by the Saigon government and the Americans.)
Having become unwelcome in VNP's premises, I searched and found quarters in Rue Catinat (Tu Do), the most central and fashionable street in Saigon. It was an ideal location, with room for the NY Times and others also to set up desks, and I moved my personal living quarters in as well, to be on hand 24/7.
I resigned from Reuters in September 1964 after being refused a request not only for additional staff as the war was getting bigger but also for an RTT communications link to make me competitive with AP and UPI. On my resignation becoming effective in December 1964, I became a Saigon-based free-lancer, and discovered only later that the office had been moved to Han Thuyen by my successors.
There's a funny personal footnote to all this. I continued to use the services of Reuters' wonderful office manager, Pham Ngoc Dinh, to handle immigration and travel matters for me, so I occasionally had reason to visit the office on Han Thuyen. In January 1968, on the eve of the Tet offensive, I had to leave Saigon and return home to NZ for health reasons. When I called in to pick up my passport from Dinh, he gave me a tipoff that Tet was not going to be peaceful. I knew he could only have got that information from Pham Xuan An, who by that time had moved to Time Magazine, but was also the principal planner of the offensive for the communists. But that is by the bye.
During my absence from Saigon I continued writing about Vietnam, and wished I had kept personal copies of my dispatches during my time with Reuters as a resource for research and memoir-writing. When I returned to Saigon some months later, I planned to seek possession if possible of the office file copies of my old dispatches. I wandered up to the Reuters office on Han Thuyen on the morning after my arrival in Saigon and saw Dinh standing on the sidewalk with a pile of cartons. "Hi Dinh", I said, "what's all this?". "Oh sir", he replied, "it's all your old dispatches. No room for them in the office, so we're sending them to the tip". How's that for serendipity? I grabbed those boxes of files, had them shipped out courtesy of RNZAF, and treasure them to this day.
Nick Turner
London Central Desk 1958-61, Saigon bureau chief 1962-64
When I arrived in Saigon in May 1962 and took over the bureau from Peter Smark, the Reuters office was a partitioned-off section of an old French villa on Hong Thap Tu (Red Cross) Street, one of two adjacent villas serving as the HQ of the national news agency Vietnam Press, just across the road from the presidential palace. Reuters had a contract with VNP and part of the deal was our occupancy of a small area of their premises. But in 1963 that arrangement had to end.
When the battle of Ap Bac occurred in January 1963, the first major military setback of the war for government forces, I reported things the presidential palace did not like. I had driven in Reuters’ Hillman Minx to the scene of the battle while it was taking place 30 miles south of Saigon, then driven back to Saigon late in the evening and filed, and then returned to the scene next morning and helped load dozens of Vietnamese army dead from the paddy fields onto armoured personnel carriers. It was the beginning of real tensions between the regime and the major news wires including Reuters.
A little later, in May 1963, the "Buddhist crisis" broke out, and my reporting – with invaluable input from my Vietnamese assistant Pham Xuan An whom we now know to have been the intelligence chief for the Viet Cong – was necessarily unfavourable to the regime. I was soon told VNP could no longer house the Reuters bureau. (I should make clear that Pham Xuan An at no stage ever tried to give Reuters’ coverage a pro-communist bias. He was just so incredibly well informed that we knew when we were being lied to by the Saigon government and the Americans.)
Having become unwelcome in VNP's premises, I searched and found quarters in Rue Catinat (Tu Do), the most central and fashionable street in Saigon. It was an ideal location, with room for the NY Times and others also to set up desks, and I moved my personal living quarters in as well, to be on hand 24/7.
I resigned from Reuters in September 1964 after being refused a request not only for additional staff as the war was getting bigger but also for an RTT communications link to make me competitive with AP and UPI. On my resignation becoming effective in December 1964, I became a Saigon-based free-lancer, and discovered only later that the office had been moved to Han Thuyen by my successors.
There's a funny personal footnote to all this. I continued to use the services of Reuters' wonderful office manager, Pham Ngoc Dinh, to handle immigration and travel matters for me, so I occasionally had reason to visit the office on Han Thuyen. In January 1968, on the eve of the Tet offensive, I had to leave Saigon and return home to NZ for health reasons. When I called in to pick up my passport from Dinh, he gave me a tipoff that Tet was not going to be peaceful. I knew he could only have got that information from Pham Xuan An, who by that time had moved to Time Magazine, but was also the principal planner of the offensive for the communists. But that is by the bye.
During my absence from Saigon I continued writing about Vietnam, and wished I had kept personal copies of my dispatches during my time with Reuters as a resource for research and memoir-writing. When I returned to Saigon some months later, I planned to seek possession if possible of the office file copies of my old dispatches. I wandered up to the Reuters office on Han Thuyen on the morning after my arrival in Saigon and saw Dinh standing on the sidewalk with a pile of cartons. "Hi Dinh", I said, "what's all this?". "Oh sir", he replied, "it's all your old dispatches. No room for them in the office, so we're sending them to the tip". How's that for serendipity? I grabbed those boxes of files, had them shipped out courtesy of RNZAF, and treasure them to this day.
Nick Turner
London Central Desk 1958-61, Saigon bureau chief 1962-64
Memories of Saigon
Sunday 09 May 2010
When I first arrived in Saigon in 1972 a new office pastime had been added to the list of things to do on dull days outside 15 Han Thuyen. In addition to occasional cricket knockabouts in the park (bit tricky with the trees) and an overwhelming desire for a cigarette with office manager Pham Ngoc Dinh outside just at the time the girls floated past in their white ao-dai on their way home, we also had the serious task of palace-watching. Standing on the step with a pair of high-powered binoculars gave easy access to the comings and goings of official limos pulling in to President Thieu's palace. Is that Kissinger? Who is that with Bunker? What does Abrams want? Uh-oh, there's the French ambassador. Of course, Thieu himself fooled us all by using his American-supplied helicopter to come and go from a convenient roof-top helipad.
Oddly enough, I never made it into the palace until this year, as a tourist. The helicopter is still on the roof, the conference tables are still laid out, and most of the furniture is distinctly 1950s G-Plan. The basement has a display of memorabilia, including a rather basic-looking white Mercedes, and a pristine US Willys jeep. This, the sign next to it said, was an exact replica of the jeep Duong Van Minh, the last President of South Vietnam, had been driven in by his North Vietnamese captors to Saigon Radio a few blocks away to broadcast his surrender. Where, I asked a friendly Vietnamese Army veteran, was the original? Ah, he told my wife, when Big Minh and his escorts came out of the radio station after the surrender broadcast, they found someone had stolen the jeep. Some things never change.
Tragic to learn from Jimmy Pringle's piece [● of Viet Cong grand-daughters and lost colleagues] that they are pulling down Han Thuyen to make a shopping arcade and a block of luxury flats. I hope they're all haunted by mates and dear friends from the past.
Chris Peterson
Oddly enough, I never made it into the palace until this year, as a tourist. The helicopter is still on the roof, the conference tables are still laid out, and most of the furniture is distinctly 1950s G-Plan. The basement has a display of memorabilia, including a rather basic-looking white Mercedes, and a pristine US Willys jeep. This, the sign next to it said, was an exact replica of the jeep Duong Van Minh, the last President of South Vietnam, had been driven in by his North Vietnamese captors to Saigon Radio a few blocks away to broadcast his surrender. Where, I asked a friendly Vietnamese Army veteran, was the original? Ah, he told my wife, when Big Minh and his escorts came out of the radio station after the surrender broadcast, they found someone had stolen the jeep. Some things never change.
Tragic to learn from Jimmy Pringle's piece [● of Viet Cong grand-daughters and lost colleagues] that they are pulling down Han Thuyen to make a shopping arcade and a block of luxury flats. I hope they're all haunted by mates and dear friends from the past.
Chris Peterson
