Stephen Somerville
The spy in Reuters' Saigon bureau
Sunday 04 September 2011
Nick’s dilemma is the stuff of a Graham Greene novel. Should he have denounced Pham Xuan An [pictured], a distinguished Vietnamese journalist who worked with him in Saigon, as a Viet Cong agent? An was Reuters’ senior local reporter when Nick was bureau chief in South Vietnam in 1962-64. Later they were colleagues in the Saigon bureau of Time magazine. Nick says he was convinced from early on that An was working for the communists. He had no proof, though, so he did not alert his employers, either Reuters or Time Inc. Without the certainty of proof, he says, he could not justify denouncing An, which could have had dangerous or damaging consequences for him. And if An was in fact a VC agent, what about Nick’s own safety? An “would have had a variety of means at his disposal for ensuring that I met a sticky end,” Nick reflects. So he kept his own counsel.
After the war, An emerged as a senior communist agent, decorated by the government in Hanoi for his valuable intelligence work for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. Western correspondents who had known An personally during the war were left to wonder whether they had suspected that he was a VC agent. Personally I didn’t; he was always extremely well informed, but he seemed too “westernised” to be a dedicated communist. Like other later Reuters bureau chiefs in Saigon, I was lucky not to have Nick’s moral dilemma: An no longer worked for Reuters so we did not have to worry about his reliability as a journalist or employee. He was just one of many sources around town.
Nick’s concern now is a newspaper report that he did in fact alert Time magazine about An – “but to no avail”. The report was published in New Zealand, his home country. It was written by a colleague who accompanied him on a recent trip to Vietnam. Nick is keen to set the record straight. The report was based on a “misunderstanding”. Nick is adamant that he did not, in his own word, “finger” An. He does not want anyone researching the subject on Google to believe he did.
But why is Nick so exercised by this ancient history? Is there more to it than meets the eye? Graham Greene would certainly have made a sub-plot of it, if not a whole novel.
Years after the American war, on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City in the 1990s, I invited An to lunch and asked him about his undercover mission for the communists. He said he had worked for them because he was a nationalist, a Vietnamese patriot, but strongly denied that he had ever been a communist. When I asked him to confirm that he had actually been a spy, whatever the cause, he hesitated and said he preferred to call himself “an analyst”. He said he just gave the Viet Cong his analysis and interpretation of events, like a journalist. “I never gave Reuters a wrong report,” he said. “I never gave any information that did any harm. I never put you or any of my colleagues in danger.”
Steve Somerville
● Nick Turner’s piece was written for Vietnam Old Hacks, a Google group for journalists who covered the war, following a recent visit to Vietnam by a group of old Asia hands from New Zealand. “Discussion inevitably arose during the visit about Pham Xuan An, who was for two and a half years my right-hand man and assistant journalist when I was Reuters bureau chief in Saigon in 1962-64, before he moved to the Time magazine bureau. Naturally there was curiosity among our travelling group about this man now famous as the ‘perfect spy’ and ‘the spy who loved us’.”
Turner said he suspected very strongly – “in fact I had no doubt whatever” – that An’s underlying sympathies were largely with the VC, although he clearly had issues with the policies, doctrines and methodologies of the NLF and their masters in Hanoi, and he could not have been a committed communist in the ideological sense. “I also guessed, correctly as it later turned out, that his unexplained absences from the Reuters office from time to time were to perform some mission for the VC. The question I am often asked is, did I warn people, including my colleagues in the media contingent in Saigon and in particular the staff of Time magazine, about my suspicions? ... the answer is No.
“During the time he was with Reuters, I found his analysis of events and of NLF-Hanoi policy very even-handed and reliable, and it included valuable critical assessment of the political, military and strategic problems faced by the communist side. He was the best in Saigon, and invaluable to Time, as he had been to Reuters. So I am sceptical about the assertions by some that An’s role included misleading the foreign media.”
Pham Xuan An died in 2006 aged 79. - Editor
● Stephen Somerville’s Analysis of a Spy is part of ● Frontlines: snapshots of history published by Reuters in 2001. See also ● Vietnam War haunts are now for dong millionaires.
vbnbnbn
Gilbert Sedbon
Sunday 26 June 2011
Gilbert Sedbon embodied the essential qualities of a great reporter: curiosity, energy and tenacity. He also had great charm, making friends and contacts easily at every level of society. Throughout his long career with Reuters, he was relentless in his pursuit of the latest news story. Born in Alexandria in 1917, he was a product of the eastern Mediterranean, cosmopolitan and multi-cultural. He was bilingual in French and English and spoke most of the languages of the region. He was unbeatable on his home ground in Egypt where he knew, and was known by, everyone who mattered. Based first in Alexandria and then in Cairo, he reported on the full spectrum of news – politics and economics, warfare and high society – from before and during the Second World War to the rise of Arab nationalism and the ousting of King Farouk.
In 1956, during the Suez crisis, Nasser’s government expelled him together with many other foreigners. He and his wife, Yolande, and one-year-old baby son, Eric, went into exile in France where they settled permanently and built a strong family life, with their two sons and later grandchildren. Still with Reuters, Gilbert rebuilt his career as a top correspondent in Europe.
I first met Gilbert in Paris in the 1960s. He was equally at home reporting the intricacies of the Vietnam peace talks and the violence of the May 1968 uprising on the streets of Paris. He was already well into his second career, with an enviable range of diplomatic and political contacts. He was an all rounder, a reporter who would tackle any assignment. Gradually he also carved out his own special field of expertise in the defence and aviation sectors. In his autobiography entitled ‘From the Nile to the Seine’ – written in his nineties and published only last year – Gilbert recalls the journalistic coups and scoops of a remarkable multifaceted career.
A popular figure in the Paris press corps and around the world, Gilbert will be sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues. He is survived by his wife, Yolande, their two sons, Eric and Thierry, and four grandchildren.
Steve Somerville
vbnbnbn
In 1956, during the Suez crisis, Nasser’s government expelled him together with many other foreigners. He and his wife, Yolande, and one-year-old baby son, Eric, went into exile in France where they settled permanently and built a strong family life, with their two sons and later grandchildren. Still with Reuters, Gilbert rebuilt his career as a top correspondent in Europe.
I first met Gilbert in Paris in the 1960s. He was equally at home reporting the intricacies of the Vietnam peace talks and the violence of the May 1968 uprising on the streets of Paris. He was already well into his second career, with an enviable range of diplomatic and political contacts. He was an all rounder, a reporter who would tackle any assignment. Gradually he also carved out his own special field of expertise in the defence and aviation sectors. In his autobiography entitled ‘From the Nile to the Seine’ – written in his nineties and published only last year – Gilbert recalls the journalistic coups and scoops of a remarkable multifaceted career.
A popular figure in the Paris press corps and around the world, Gilbert will be sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues. He is survived by his wife, Yolande, their two sons, Eric and Thierry, and four grandchildren.
Steve Somerville
vbnbnbn
Myrtom House, Beirut
Friday 15 October 2010
Calling old Beirut hands: does anyone have any photos of Myrtom House in its prime? I have received mail from a Norwegian, Magne Kjølstad, who came across my piece in The Baron’s ● Haunts. He worked as a ski instructor in the mountain resort of Laklouk in 1969-71 and used to stay at Hans’ bar/restaurant/hotel when he came down to the city. He writes: ‘I enjoyed your article in the Baron, especially your description of Hans!! I must also say that I always enjoyed my stays at Myrtom House, a very special atmosphere with the international community there. I was wondering if you, or anybody you know, have any photos from Myrtom House. I had a fire two years back and lost all my photos from those days.’
Steve Somerville
Steve Somerville
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
The Baron
Thursday 13 May 2010
Congratulations on the Baron’s impressive ‘view & visit’ numbers, and on your analytical editorial, ● Connections and camaraderie. It is indeed remarkable that a website born out of one man’s enthusiasm for one company has not only tapped into a rich vein of shared nostalgia, but has also stimulated such spirited debate – and touched a few raw nerves – on the controversial frontiers of ‘new journalism’. Not just memory lane, but future shock. From Reuters to Thomson Reuters, from the fellowship of the family news agency to the challenges of new media and new markets, the Baron website is fast becoming a dynamic forum for professional discussion. Bravo!
Baron Reuter himself would no doubt be well pleased with this tribute to his vision and lasting influence. But, given the chance, would he have been blogging like a modern CEO? Discuss.
Steve Somerville
Baron Reuter himself would no doubt be well pleased with this tribute to his vision and lasting influence. But, given the chance, would he have been blogging like a modern CEO? Discuss.
Steve Somerville
David Chipp
Tuesday 16 September 2008
CHIPP!
The world will be a duller place without the sheer exuberance of Chipp! (David always introduced himself with an emphatic exclamation mark.) A combative but ever courteous journalist, he was one of my most influential mentors, always practising and demanding the highest professional standards. He was also a warm family friend. Our paths crossed many times over the years.
The very first time was when, as a rather nervous student, I went for a rather intimidating boardroom interview to join Reuters. David, an assistant to the General Manager, encouraged me before leading me into the arena – and cheered me up with a beer in his office afterwards.
Some years later David visited Saigon soon after I had taken over as Bureau Chief. He was by then Reuters’ Manager for South East Asia, and my overall boss. The American war in Vietnam was gathering pace. David’s arrival coincided with a serious Viet Cong attack in the city. He came straight to the office from the airport, rolled up his shirtsleeves, grabbed a typewriter and said: “Tell me what to do!” He then subbed copy, wrote sidebars and ran the wireroom until the story subsided. However senior an executive, David was always a hands-on agency journalist.
We then went on to a private briefing that I had arranged with Barry Zorthian, the powerful head of ‘public affairs’ in South Vietnam. My agenda was to persuade David that the Saigon bureau had to be reinforced in order to expand our coverage of the war. We had some good local staff but I was Reuters sole international staffer in Vietnam. The American news agencies had already sent in football teams of reporters and photographers, and even AFP had three French correspondents. Zorthian stressed the importance of Vietnam as a world story and the need for Reuters to be competitive. “What are you going to do about it, David?” he asked, and then gave him the advice I wanted to hear: “You have to commit more troops.”
Without hesitation, as if stating the obvious, David replied decisively: “I shall immediately triple the international staff, and the bureau will be up to five full correspondents within six months.” Zorthian looked sceptical and said: “Fine words, David, but what if your masters in London don’t agree?” Chipp (!) stood up, squared his shoulders and declared: “I am the master of Asia. If my colleagues disagree, I shall resign!” He was as good as his word. Within a few months Reuters had a five-man international team in Saigon.
Not only that, but David, always a thoughtful boss, wrote immediately afterwards to my fiancée in France, Marie-Hélène, to tell her he had found me in good spirits in Saigon. He became a lifelong friend of our whole family.
Much later, after retiring from the Press Association, David served Reuters again as Director of the Reuters Foundation. It was a part-time post which he tackled with full-time enthusiasm, for five years, along with many other ‘retirement’ activities. It was a distinguished act to follow, as I discovered in due course when I was appointed as David’s successor. But he gave me the fullest support and encouragement as I took on the task of expanding the Foundation’s range of activities. And he proved again to be the most entertaining of travelling companions as we visited some of the universities associated with the Foundation’s study programmes, and met up with David’s extraordinary network of close friends among former ‘student’ journalists around the world.
Finally, my last memory, very recent: as Editor of Stationers’ News, I asked David, a Liveryman of the Stationers’ Company, to write a report for the newspaper about an after dinner speech by Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. David had, of course, been a longtime and influential member of the Commission. No problem. He produced, as we would all expect, an impeccable piece, finely crafted, exact wordage, right on time. The only problem is that, sadly, he won’t be around for the convivial lunch that I had planned, whenever we were both next in London, to say thank you for the report. And that, for me, is a very great loss.
Steve Somerville
The world will be a duller place without the sheer exuberance of Chipp! (David always introduced himself with an emphatic exclamation mark.) A combative but ever courteous journalist, he was one of my most influential mentors, always practising and demanding the highest professional standards. He was also a warm family friend. Our paths crossed many times over the years.
The very first time was when, as a rather nervous student, I went for a rather intimidating boardroom interview to join Reuters. David, an assistant to the General Manager, encouraged me before leading me into the arena – and cheered me up with a beer in his office afterwards.
Some years later David visited Saigon soon after I had taken over as Bureau Chief. He was by then Reuters’ Manager for South East Asia, and my overall boss. The American war in Vietnam was gathering pace. David’s arrival coincided with a serious Viet Cong attack in the city. He came straight to the office from the airport, rolled up his shirtsleeves, grabbed a typewriter and said: “Tell me what to do!” He then subbed copy, wrote sidebars and ran the wireroom until the story subsided. However senior an executive, David was always a hands-on agency journalist.
We then went on to a private briefing that I had arranged with Barry Zorthian, the powerful head of ‘public affairs’ in South Vietnam. My agenda was to persuade David that the Saigon bureau had to be reinforced in order to expand our coverage of the war. We had some good local staff but I was Reuters sole international staffer in Vietnam. The American news agencies had already sent in football teams of reporters and photographers, and even AFP had three French correspondents. Zorthian stressed the importance of Vietnam as a world story and the need for Reuters to be competitive. “What are you going to do about it, David?” he asked, and then gave him the advice I wanted to hear: “You have to commit more troops.”
Without hesitation, as if stating the obvious, David replied decisively: “I shall immediately triple the international staff, and the bureau will be up to five full correspondents within six months.” Zorthian looked sceptical and said: “Fine words, David, but what if your masters in London don’t agree?” Chipp (!) stood up, squared his shoulders and declared: “I am the master of Asia. If my colleagues disagree, I shall resign!” He was as good as his word. Within a few months Reuters had a five-man international team in Saigon.
Not only that, but David, always a thoughtful boss, wrote immediately afterwards to my fiancée in France, Marie-Hélène, to tell her he had found me in good spirits in Saigon. He became a lifelong friend of our whole family.
Much later, after retiring from the Press Association, David served Reuters again as Director of the Reuters Foundation. It was a part-time post which he tackled with full-time enthusiasm, for five years, along with many other ‘retirement’ activities. It was a distinguished act to follow, as I discovered in due course when I was appointed as David’s successor. But he gave me the fullest support and encouragement as I took on the task of expanding the Foundation’s range of activities. And he proved again to be the most entertaining of travelling companions as we visited some of the universities associated with the Foundation’s study programmes, and met up with David’s extraordinary network of close friends among former ‘student’ journalists around the world.
Finally, my last memory, very recent: as Editor of Stationers’ News, I asked David, a Liveryman of the Stationers’ Company, to write a report for the newspaper about an after dinner speech by Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. David had, of course, been a longtime and influential member of the Commission. No problem. He produced, as we would all expect, an impeccable piece, finely crafted, exact wordage, right on time. The only problem is that, sadly, he won’t be around for the convivial lunch that I had planned, whenever we were both next in London, to say thank you for the report. And that, for me, is a very great loss.
Steve Somerville
