The quiet vietnamese: Pham Xuan An was a respected colleague of American reporters in Vietnam--and Hanoi's most valuable spy.

• Author: Jenkins, Loren
• Position: The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game - Book review

The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game

by Thomas A. Bass

Public Affairs, 320 pp.

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For most of us who did time in Saigon covering the Vietnam War, a favorite spot was the old French colonial Continental Palace Hotel. It had history, character, and a strategic location in the heart of the city--it faced the old opera house, flanked the famous rue Catinat of French colonial days, and sat catty-cornered from the government press filing center.

The gracefully aging three-story building, with its potted palms, high ceilings, and slow revolving fans, had the decadent feel of a Somerset Maugham novel. It was, after all, where Graham Greene had come in the 1950s to research--and set--The Quiet American, his classic novel of American political naivete about the Third World. There was a great inner patio at the Continental Palace for al fresco dining after the nightly curfew rang down. And, more importantly, it housed Saigon's best bar, known to the cognoscenti as "The Shelf" for its openness to the streets outside. It was here that every manner of spooks, hacks, diplomats, and Hawaiian-shirted off-duty military types gathered daily to swap tall tales, recent rumors, and political gossip. They did all this while gazing out over chilled beers at the ever-fascinating theater of the absurd along Tu Do Street, which was what the old rue Catinat had been renamed after the departure of the French.

The Continental Palace and its immediate environs comprised a major center of news gathering. Not only did such sages of the war as the New Yorker's Robert Shaplen and the Chicago Daily News's Keyes Beech make the hotel their base in Saigon, but Newsweek and Time had their bustling bureaus on its second floor. Most visiting media stars either camped out there on their way to visit with the generals and ambassadors or used the Shelf as their unofficial office and briefing center to double-check what they heard on their official rounds. It was on the Shelf at the end of a hard day at the front that one repaired for unofficial assignations to exchange information gleaned, sniff the air for newly planned political and military initiatives, or get hints of intended plots and coups.

But the real reason the Continental Palace was such an important center of news was that it was there--at the Time office, or just across the street in the Cafe Givral--that one found a slight, gaunt, and unassuming U.S.-educated...