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<b>John Le Carre</b> I was deeply impressed by this book. It is relevant, instructive, funny. The shock of the double never goes away. Neither does the gullibility of the arrogant intruder.

Swiftly paced narrative of a Vietnamese James Bond who worked both sides of the game.Bass (English and Journalism/Univ. of Albany; The Predictors, 1999, etc.), whose 1996 book Vietnamerica concerned Amerasian children of the Vietnam War, returns to Indochina to flesh out a story he wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago. His subject, a former Reuters and Time correspondent named Pham Xuan An, proved to be a lively, often prickly interlocutor. He had received official clearance for the magazine piece, but he still knew things that no one else was supposed to know - most likely why the man known as Agent Z.21 chose not to speak on the record for the book. The result is the unauthorized biography of a spy, Bass writes. An, the author reveals, was renowned for his skills as a reporter and writer - but also as a storyteller capable of spinning entertaining yarns over a hotel bar for hours on end. He was also famed, among certain compatriots, for endlessly detailed reports that made Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap clap their hands with glee and exclaim over the verve and narrative grip of the Tolstoy in their midst. It was An, for instance, who revealed to Hanoi information that American ground forces were first on their way to Vietnam. This would not be the only time that Pham Xuan An got a scoop from Time long before the magazine's readers back in the United States, writes Bass. An saved the lives of several fellow journalists, though, including Robert Sam Anson. At the end of the war, he put his family on helicopters leaving Saigon for American ships offshore, then gladly greeted the Communist liberators - though he had to serve time in a reeducation camp simply for having been tainted by contact with the West.Bass writes himself into the story too much, but the intriguing character of An provides the center of a fascinating account. (Kirkus Reviews)

Morley Safer, Correspondent, CBS 60 Minutes and author of Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam <br> The story of Pham Xuan An is the revelation of a remarkable life and a remarkable man. Fictional accounts of practitioners of the Great Game--the craft of spying--come nowhere near the real thing that was practiced by An. In The Spy Who Loved Us, An is revealed as a man of split loyalties, who managed to maintain his humanity. Cast prejudices aside and you will discover a true hero, scholar, patriot, humanist and masterful spy. <p>Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers <br> This is a brilliant book about a man and his times. It strengthens the feeling I got from meeting him late in his life that Pham Xuan An was one of the most impressive people I have ever encountered. He was a man of wisdom, courage, and clear-headed patriotism. He was also--even if it seems ironic to say this under the circumstances--a man of extraordinary integrity. He loved us at our best even while confronting us at our worst. <p>H.D.S. Greenway, Editor, The Boston Globe and Vietnam war reporter for Time and the Washington Post <br> Thomas Bass tells a fantastic tale of intrigue, espionage, and friendship. His book reads as if it came from the farthest shores of fiction, and I wouldn't believe a word of it if I hadn't met so many of its characters and didn't know the story to be true. <p>John Laurence, Vietnam war reporter for CBS News and author of The Cat from Hue: a Vietnam War Story <br> Every veteran, every scholar, every student, everyone who survived the Vietnam War is advised to read this book and reflect on its wisdom. In his thoughtful, provocativebiography of one of the most successful espionage agents in history, Thomas Bass challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about what really happened in Vietnam and what it means to us today. <p>Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib <br> This is a chilling account of betrayal of an American army -- and an American press corps -- involved in a guerrilla war in a society about which little was known or understood. The spy here was in South Vietnam, and his ultimate motives, as Thomas Bass makes clear, were far more complex than those of traditional espionage. This book, coming now, has another message, too, for me -- have we put ourselves in the same position, once again, in Iraq? <p>Seymour Topping, former Southeast Asia Bureau Chief and Managing Editor of The New York Times <br> Thomas Bass has rendered a sensitive, revealing portrait of the strangely ambivalent personality I knew during the Vietnam War. In doing so he provided us with unique insights into the nature, conflicting sentiments and heartbreak of many Vietnamese who worked with Americans, made friends with them, but in the end loved their land more and sought, as their ancestors had a for a thousand years, to free it from all trespassers. <p> The Foreword, January/February issue<br> Intriguing ... masterful ....This first-rate account, which will appeal to general readers as well as historians, portrays An as a man caught between two cultures who never lost sight of his ultimate goal, peace and prosperity for Vietnam.

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Thomas A. Bass is the author of The Eudaemonic Pie, Vietnamerica, The Predictors, and other books. Cited by the Overseas Press Club for his foreign reporting, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and other publications. He is Professor of English and Journalism at the State University of New York in Albany.

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