The Man Who Loved 2 Countries : Vietnam: A veteran U.S. correspondent goes back to find a close Viet friend who liked Americans--and was an undercover Vietcong colonel.

Revisiting this city, once Saigon, is like returning to a ghost town. I see familiar sights everywhere: the boulevards, the buildings, even my hotel--formerly the Majestic, renamed the Cuu Long or “Nine Dragons”--where I first stayed in 1959 and during many subsequent trips as Vietnam turned into a battlefield.

But the people I knew have gone since the communist takeover 15 years ago. Except for one.

I dodged the bicycles and motor scooters clogging the street, and peered through an iron gate into the courtyard of a dilapidated villa. A skeletal figure in white boxer shorts emerged to embrace me. I recognized him instantly and, over the next three days, listened to his story--for me one of the most fascinating personal stories of the war.

Pham Xuan An is my oldest Vietnamese colleague and friend. We go back more than 30 years ago, when he was a stringer for Reuters, the British news agency. Later he joined Time as the only Vietnamese staff correspondent for an American publication. He was extremely well-informed, always ready to share information.

We would sit for hours in one of Saigon’s cafes as he chain-smoked and explained convoluted Vietnamese politics. He also had special insights into communist strategies, for reasons that would become clear to me afterward.

I was puzzled to hear later that he had not fled when Saigon fell. Perhaps, I thought, he had been trapped--as were so many Vietnamese. On a journey back here nine years ago, I asked a communist official to schedule a meeting for me with him.

“Forget it,” the official snapped. “Col. Pham Xuan An doesn’t want to see you or any other Americans.”

“Colonel?”

“Yes,” the official explained. “He was one of us.”

Thus I learned to my amazement that An had served the communists and Americans simultaneously. That a Vietnamese had been duplicitous did not surprise me, since civil wars invariably test allegiances. For example, one of South Vietnam’s senior officers, whose ties to the U.S. mission in Saigon were close, had been a covert communist.

But An’s alleged conduct astonished me. He had seemed so detached, like the professional reporter he was. Nor did he appear to toe the communist line.

Douglas E. Pike, formerly with the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and now at the University of California at Berkeley, relied on him for communist documents--which, Pike recalled, were “always genuine.” Before Saigon collapsed, An arranged the escape of a leading Central Intelligence Agency protege, whom the communists would have punished severely. He also intervened to save Robert Sam Anson, a Time correspondent who had been captured by the communists in Cambodia.

Though I had not seen him, I wrote about An at the time, speculating on his enigmatic behavior. But I hoped to solve his mystery eventually, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

Now, amid the yellowed newspapers, mildewed books and battered filing cabinets that clutter his parlor, we sat under a ceiling fan--and, still chain-smoking, he talked.

“First,” he said, “I apologize for not seeing you in 1981. I wanted to, but they, the authorities, wouldn’t let me. They had doubts about me. They were nervous. Since then they’ve become more relaxed. Anyway, they’re not under illusions about what I think.”

With that, he went on: “It’s true that I worked for the communists, but let me put it into perspective.”

The year was 1944, and he was 16. The only foes of the Japanese occupation army were the communist-led Vietminh guerrillas, and An joined their ranks, along with most of his classmates. When the French reimposed their rigid colonial rule soon afterward, An stayed with the Vietminh, mainly running errands. “So my motives from the start,” he said, “were patriotic, not ideological.”

In 1954 the communists defeated France in the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu--a victory that even anti-communist Vietnamese hailed as a national triumph. Vietnam was split into two zones, and the United States started to support President Ngo Dinh Diem’s fragile Saigon regime.

Already 26, and behind in his studies, An went back to school. But then he was drafted into the South Vietnamese army and assigned to perform lowly tasks for Col. Edward G. Lansdale, Diem’s CIA adviser. It was An’s introduction to Americans, and he fastened onto them immediately.

Not long afterward he won a scholarship to a community college in Orange County, Calif. He perfected his English, worked on the college newspaper and did a summer stint at the Sacramento Bee. “Those years,” he recalled wistfully, “were the best of my life.”

The late 1950s were dark for the communists in the south. Diem rounded them up by the thousands and executed many without trial. But in 1959 the communist leaders in Hanoi decided to fight back. To give their southern movement a local veneer, they formed the National Liberation Front--which one of Diem’s aides perjoratively dubbed the Vietcong, or communist Vietnamese.

By then An was back in Saigon and working for Reuters, which gave him access to the government army. The Vietcong wanted access to his access, and one of its agents urged him to rejoin the movement. He agreed. A Vietcong courier would slip into Saigon to pick up his reports--which, as a precaution, he wrote in primitive invisible ink made from starch. He gradually climbed in the communist hierarchy to the rank of colonel, without ever wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon. At the same time, he rose in status in Saigon’s foreign-press community, going from Reuters to the New York Herald Tribune before moving to Time.

Ironically, he furnished largely the same details to his Vietcong and U.S. employers. “It was not especially confidential stuff--the government army’s deployments and strength, which commanders were capable or incompetent or corrupt. And there was gossip--who’s sleeping with whose wife or girlfriend.”

The communists often sought An’s advice on strategy. In late 1967, for instance, they sounded him out on the idea of launching a large-scale drive designed to spark uprisings in South Vietnam’s cities. He warned against it, explaining that they were not strong enough and that the population would not support them. At best, he suggested, they might try hit-and-run raids.

Disregarding him, they staged the massive Tet offensive of 1968, which caused them horrendous losses--even though it made an enormous impact in the United States. “Only now do they admit that it was a ghastly blunder,” he said.

My original disclosure of An’s secret life delighted right-wing American press watchdogs who have long argued, without proof, that communist moles influenced the U.S. news media. Some even held An responsible for America’s defeat.

An vociferously denies that he was a “disinformation” agent who planted fake stories in U.S. publications. “The allegation is preposterous,” he insists. “If I’d done that I would have been found out instantly. I couldn’t afford to blow my cover. My value lay in my credibility.”

In April, 1975, aware that the communists were planning their final thrust, An feared for the safety of his wife and four children should there be a last-ditch battle in Saigon. He sent them to America aboard an airplane provided by Time. But he did not flee himself, he explains, because he could not abandon his old and ailing mother.

There was no fierce battle for Saigon, however, and he subsequently brought his family back. “It was the stupidest thing I ever did,” he says. The communists summoned An to Hanoi for a kind of “indoctrination” course, during which he spent a year listening to tedious lectures on Marxist theory. But, worried by his former American connections, they never fully trusted him.

Returning to Saigon--Ho Chi Minh City--he worked as a “consultant” before retiring on a pension equivalent to $30 a month. To supplement his meager income, he breeds dogs and fighting cocks.

During our hours together, An made no attempt to hide his feeling that communism has ruined Vietnam. Sectarian programs propelled its economy to the brink of disaster and political repression stifled its talented elite. Thousands of skilled technicians left over from the former regime, for example, wasted away in so-called “re-education” camps.”

But An is not alone in his criticism. In the course of my visit here, I have heard the same complaints from many other Vietnamese, including top communist officials--one of whom said bluntly: “We have squandered the last 15 years.”

Recent reforms have improved things significantly, particularly in agriculture. Vietnam, though still desperately poor, now ranks third in world rice exports.

In any case, An stresses that he collaborated with the communists because they were the vanguard of nationalism, not because he believed in their doctrines. Knowing that millennia of struggle against alien invaders have made the Vietnamese intensely patriotic, I understand the attitude.

I can also appreciate the trauma that tormented An--and still tortures him. History divided his country and divided his loyalties. Now, in the solitude of his shabby villa, he ponders the past.

As I was leaving after our last session, he reminded me of the old Josephine Baker lyric: “My two loves are my land and Paris.”

“I also have two loves,” he said. “Vietnam and America.”