Larry Berman and the book.

Nhan Dan Online- Larry Berman’s book titled Perfect Spy featuring the double life of Pham Xuan An,  a reporter for Time Reporter and Vietnamese Secret Agent, will soon be available in bookstores.

The News Agency Publishing House plans to release the Vietnamese version of Larry Berman’s 300-page work on the late well-known intelligence agent to commemorate his his first death anniversary, September 20. Hollywood is also reported to be interested in this script.

Perfect Spy was first released in the US by Smithsonian Harper Collins Publisher this April and has attracted considerable interest.

Larry Berman, a professor of political science at the University of California- Davis, who devoted his career to understanding the American War, had a talk about his book on  September 11, in Hanoi.

A member of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Pham Xuan An, who received the title of the Hero of the People’s Armed Forces in 1976, spent years during the American war working for western news agencies including Reuters, the New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Time magazine as a secret spy. He was widely respected in international media circles for his brilliant political insight and journalistic abilities.      

Professor Berman first met An in July 2001 but not until 2003, he agree to let Larry write about his life by telling Larry that he hoped young generation in the US would have a chance to understand more about the war in Vietnam through the book on his life. 

Larry said that it took him five years to finish the book. He has been to Vietnam 20 times all together to collect information. Each time when he was in Vietnam, he had spent two weeks to talk with the secret agent. They worked together from 8 in the morning until whenever An’s health permitted.

 Larry Berman has written other quite famous works about the American war in Vietnam including  No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson’s War:  The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam. But all the above books on Vietnam are written through the eyes of the Americans while Perfect Spy is Larry’s view on Vietnam through the eyes of a Vietnamese. Larry is also the first American writer who has written about Major General Pham Xuan An.

The Vietnamese version of the book is translated by reporter Nguyen Dai Phuong from Tien Phong newspaper and will be made public this week.