Nick's red letter

“This is a red-letter day for you,” the postcard from Fiji began. It had been posted to me by Nick Turner, writing in red ink, as he accompanied the Queen on a South Pacific tour in 1963. Reuters had given Nick a well-earned break from the rigours of war reporting and I was holding the fort for him in Saigon.

Nick was both funny and seriously intense and was at his best analysing the political intrigues around President Ngo Dinh Diem, his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his sister-in-law Madam Nhu who earned the nickname “Dragon Lady”. The intrigues and a Buddhist uprising led to an American-backed military coup in which the two brothers were killed, shot in cold blood in an armoured personnel carrier. We pieced together the goings-on at the presidential palace through diplomats and the many contacts of our Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An who later turned out to be a Viet Cong intelligence colonel. I think Nick suspected early on that An was a spy. On his return from the Royal tour he quizzed me on who An had been seeing. An had many visitors who came to the office and he would disappear for a couple of hours each day, returning with a bag of seed and nuts for his birds. At his modest home in the suburb of Cholon you had to make your way through a courtyard full of bird cages to reach An’s living room. According to Nick, An’s unexplained absences later extended to days and so they parted ways. An got a job with Time magazine where I guess the intelligence pickings were better.

Faced with overwhelming odds from AP and UPI, Nick asked the company for additional staff and better communication facilities. He resigned when his request fell on deaf ears. I was told to move from Bangkok and take over the Saigon bureau as the war intensified, with the US bombing North Vietnam and sending in the first combat troops to replace its “military advisers”. The staff reinforcements and improved communications that Nick had asked for later materialised but it was too late. Reuters had lost a talented journalist. ■