Invisible Enemies: Who's the real threat in Little Saigon? Ask the FBI.
Thuyen Nguyen
Invisible Enemies
Who's the real threat in Little Saigon? Ask the FBI.
By Nick Schou
A few weeks ago, an FBI spokesman offered The Orange County Register a
less-than-dramatic news flash: the bureau is monitoring the activities of
communist agents in Little Saigon. The news that the FBI monitors foreign
agents and that some of those agents might operate in Little Saigon should
surprise no one. But in the context of 15,000-person-strong emonstrations
and hysterical attacks on communists, the Register's sensational story added
new urgency-and, for some, credibility-to the massive demonstrations outside
the video store of Truong Van Tran, a man many demonstrators have labeled a
communist.
"It doesn't take much to be called a communist," said Westminster police
Lieutenant Bill Lewis. Tran's crime was to hang a poster of Ho Chi Minh and
a Vietnamese flag on the back wall of his Hi Tek TV and Video store. But
Lewis complained that the Register's story about the presence of communist
spies-accompanying stories about the city's high-profile protests-has only
raised the level of paranoia in the already paranoid Little Saigon.
The danger isn't hypothetical: in Little Saigon, being called a communist
can get you killed. While the FBI boasts of its ability to track communist
spies in Little Saigon-many of whom apparently assume the identity of jailed
or dead ex-South Vietnamese officials-the agency prefers not to discuss a
far-more-serious threat to life and liberty in the Vietnamese community:
Right-wing extremists culled from the ranks of Vietnamese immigrants with
U.S.-supplied training in the art of terror. Such groups are suspected of
being responsible for at least five unsolved murders in Vietnamese
communities throughout the U.S. since the early 1980s-all of them
execution-style killings of Vietnamese journalists.
The FBI hasn't ignored Little Saigon however. As recently as two years ago,
the FBI went so far as to pay for advertisements in Nguoi Viet Daily News
and other Vietnamese-language newspapers across the country, asking readers
to
inform on suspected communist spies. Would-be informants were instructed to
call a Mr. Bo Cau at a Bay Area telephone number. For weeks, the FBI's hot
line was inundated with Vietnamese callers taking advantage of the chance to
accuse one another of spying for Hanoi.
To the outside world, including the FBI, Little Saigon is an impenetrable
world of exiles, organized crime and extreme anti-communist politics.
Unlike many other Vietnamese enclaves in the United States, its residents
include not only refugees who fled Vietnam's communist regime, but also
scores of former high-ranking military officers and officials of the South
Vietnamese government. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the killings
of political dissidents in neighborhoods like Little Saigon have stopped,
according to a 1994 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ). What
hasn't stopped is the fear that the killings will start anew-perhaps set off
by the kind of anti-communist hysteria sweeping Little Saigon over the past
several weeks.
One of the Vietnamese journalists who managed to survive the wave of terror
is Yen Ngoc Do, former editor of Little Saigon's Nguoi Viet Daily News. In
April 1990, Do's name turned up on a hit list circulated by anti-communists
in Little Saigon. Do's troubles started when a local television broadcast he
produced briefly-and inadvertently-aired the image of a Vietnamese flag.
According to the CPJ report, an unidentified group threatened to execute Do
and other Vietnamese-community leaders on the anniversary of the fall of
Saigon.
The paper took the threat seriously. The year before, a Nguoi Viet delivery
truck parked in front of the newspaper office had been set ablaze. Scrawled
on the wall of the building was the following message: "Nguoi Viet, if you
are VC
[Viet Cong], we kill." Do's last offense as editor was to be quoted in a New
York Times article about companies doing business in Vietnam. On Sept. 28,
1994, following an angry protest and threatened boycott by 300 people, he
resigned, although he retained his post as Nguoi Viet's publisher.
Do appeared downright nervous while being interviewed last week. His hands
shook continuously as he spoke. He refused to discuss his resignation in
detail. "I didn't want to invite any more trouble, so I resigned," he said
evasively. "There is freedom to publish here, but not freedom of expression.
There is no room to disagree in this community."
Although few things are more dangerous than being branded a communist in
Little Saigon, Tran seems strangely unworried about his predicament.
Instead, Tran, 37, insists he's just like most of his neighbors in Little
Saigon. In 1980, like millions of others, he fled Vietnam on a rickety
wooden vessel crammed with 90 people. After four months in a Thai refugee
camp, the
then-17-year-old Tran arrived in Little Saigon, where he met his future
wife, Kim Nguyen. In America, the couple prospered. Tran learned how to fix
televisions and VCRs and opened Hi Tek TV and Video in a mini-mall at the
corner of Bolsa and Bushard in Westminster. To complete their pursuit of the
picture-perfect American Dream, they have raised two children. Like
many other Vietnamese-Americans, the couple gave their kids
European-sounding first names, Fritzi and Don Washington-the latter after
the American revolutionary leader.
Meanwhile, curiosity about Vietnamese history led Tran to read books about
the life of Ho Chi Minh. Last November, Tran finally cashed in on his
interest in Ho and paid a first-time visit to Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital.
Like many
American visitors, including several U.S. congressmen who arrived after the
U.S. government normalized relations with Vietnam in 1994, Tran found Hanoi
to be a beautiful city full of friendly people who liked Americans. More
to the point, Vietnam seemed much less repressive and impoverished than the
country he remembered fleeing 18 years earlier. The day after he returned
from Hanoi, Tran decided to hang the portrait of Ho Chi Minh in his store
and risk the
worst label that could be pinned to a Vietnamese in Little Saigon: being a
communist.
Yet Tran insisted he has nothing to worry about. "If I can have a chance to
talk with the people, maybe they will understand why I am doing this," said
Tran. "I am fighting for freedom in the Vietnamese community."
Tran's determination may be outmatched only by that of his opponents. What
began in mid-January as a sign-waving stunt by a few dozen demonstrators
quickly metamorphosed into a daily protest by hundreds of enraged
protesters. In the past two weeks, the protest exploded after police were
photographed arresting elderly Vietnamese women who crossed a police line.
By the end of the month, up to 15,000 people at a time were estimated to
have gathered together in a mass display of Little Saigon's hatred for
communism, Ho Chi Minh, and least but not last, Tran himself. In the words
of Nguoi Viet's Do,
the protest is the first chance many younger Vietnamese have ever had to
exercise their free-speech rights as Americans. He calls the protests the
equivalent of "a Vietnamese Woodstock."
While his behavior is far more provocative-and some would say downright
naive or even crazy-than that of anyone who came before him, Tran is not the
first person to take a controversial political stance in Little Saigon. That
person would most likely be Tap Van Pham, the former editor of Mai, the
Vietnamese-language entertainment magazine now run by his wife and daughter.
Around 2 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1987, Pham was asleep at his otherwise empty office
on Westminster Boulevard in Garden Grove, when a fire broke out. Pham died
of smoke inhalation.
Garden Grove police detectives determined that the fire was intentionally
started with gasoline, and they noted that there had been no attempt to make
the crime seem accidental. Whoever was responsible had even poured gasoline
into Pham's car, which was parked outside, but apparently chose not to light
it.
Because of the destructiveness of the fire and the absence of eyewitnesses,
police had almost no evidence to pursue. It was well-known that Pham had
angered many of his neighbors by accepting-and printing-advertisements for
companies that offered refugees an opportunity to send money to relatives in
Vietnam. But who might have been responsible for the killing? The mystery
appeared to be cut short the day after the bombing, when a cryptic note
arrived in the mail at Nguoi Viet Daily News. The typewritten message
claimed responsibility for the murder on behalf of a group identifying
itself
as Viet Nam Diet Cong Hung Quoc Dang, or the Vietnamese Organization to
Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation (VOECRN).
Do said he still remembers police arriving at Nguoi Viet to examine the
note, which he remembered had been postmarked Las Vegas. "They asked us all
if we had touched the letter," he said. "Many of us had, and they took all
of our
fingerprints."
According to Tam Thanh Pham, Pham's daughter, her father wasn't killed
because of his politics. She said Pham had loaned approximately $70,000 to
various Little Saigon businessmen. She believes the note claiming
responsibility for
the murder was a ruse to throw police off the track. She said she told the
FBI as much, and the agency followed up. "Whenever the FBI's
Vietnamese-speaking agent interviewed the suspects, [the suspects] already
seemed to know
he was coming and were prepared with a statement."
One Vietnamese-community activist, who asked not to be identified, recalled
that he was rumored to have been involved in Pham's murder by people
familiar with his stridently anti-communist views. He claimed he was not
involved with
the murder but had visited Pham several times to ask him to run
advertisements in his magazine for right-wing groups. Pham refused. "Every
time I asked, he refused my request," he said. "I wasn't surprised when they
killed him."
Besides Pham, four other Vietnamese journalists were slaughtered between
1980 and 1991. They included, in chronological order, publisher Lam Tran
Duong of San Francisco, editor Nguyen Dam Phong of Houston, and layout
designer Nhan
Trong Do and editor Triet Le, both of whom worked for a Vietnamese magazine
in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The New York-based CPJ, which documented the murders in a 1994 report, has
also documented eight other incidents involving Vietnamese-Americans who
were threatened or attacked, including Do. On Jan. 5, 1982, someone shot at
Bach Huu Bong, publisher of a now-defunct Vietnamese weekly, as he left a
restaurant in Los Angeles' Chinatown. Bong later identified the triggerman
as Tai Huu Nguyen, the leader of an Orange County gang. Days earlier, Bong
had
written an article showing that the gang had been formed by ex-South
Vietnamese navy frogmen. Tai was convicted of shooting at Bong, but his
sentence was suspended, according to the CPJ report, because "he had no
prior criminal record in this country. Bong ceased publishing his
newspaper."
On April 30, 1988, French-naturalized novelist Long Vu visited Orange County
to meet with former U.S. Congressman Robert Dornan (R-Garden Grove). While
here, he was beaten so badly by unknown assailants that he will suffer
partial
paralysis for the rest of his life. Imprisoned for six years before escaping
Vietnam, Vu's crime was that he was rumored to have collaborated with his
captors.
According to the CPJ report, on Aug. 3, 1988, Tu A. Nguyen, publisher
of Viet Press, and two other people were "sentenced to death" in fliers
stapled
to telephone poles in Westminster shortly after the trio visited Vietnam.
Behind these attacks was one common thread: the victims had all rubbed
their anti-communist neighbors the wrong way. More disturbing, the CPJ
notes,
was the presence in many of these incidents of the same organization that
had claimed responsibility for killing Pham in Little Saigon: the VOECRN.
The group's name first surfaced in 1982, when Houston police discovered it
on a note left next to the body of Houston journalist Nguyen Dan Phong. The
note contained a list of names of several other Vietnamese journalists whom
the VOECRN had also sentenced to death. One of those was Triet Le, who,
along with his wife, was shot to death outside their suburban Virginia home
eight
years later.
According to the CPJ, which cited anonymous law-enforcement sources, the
VOECRN's "suspected masterminds were influential members of the Vietnamese
community and former members of the South Vietnamese government and armed
forces." The CPJ also quoted police sources saying they suspected a link
between the VOECRN and legal anti-communist groups that, among other things,
raised money to lobby for a toughening of U.S. policy toward Vietnam and
published anti-communist magazines.
One such group is the California-based National United Front for the
Liberation of Vietnam, which is more commonly called the Front, or Khang
Chien, which means "resistance forces" in Vietnamese. Led by the late Hoang
Co Minh, a former admiral in the South Vietnamese navy, Khang Chien modeled
itself after the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contras, raising money from
Vietnamese exiles in America to support a liberation army based in Thailand.
At least one Vietnamese journalist to die at the hands of the VOECRN, Le,
had written articles critical of Khang Chien and Minh. Unlike its shadowy,
terror-prone
counterpart, however, Khang Chien over the years has boasted many members,
including storeowner Tran's wife, Kim Nguyen. Throughout the 1980s, its
members wore brown uniforms, attended political rallies, and sold copies of
their magazine on street corners in Little Saigon.
"I gave money but wanted to see results," explained one former
contributor."They later admitted that their 'army' was made up of Thai and
Cambodian people acting as soldiers and that they were using the money to
live the high life in Bangkok."
Amid increasingly convincing reports that the organization and its supposed
Thai-based liberation army was a fraud, support for the movement dwindled in
the late 1980s. In 1991, a federal grand jury indicted five Khang Chien
members for tax evasion and posing as a nonprofit organization after an
investigation revealed that the group spent its money on personal expenses
instead of on weapons to attack Hanoi. Nonetheless, according to UC Irvine
student activist Ao Vai, who uses a nom de guerre, some of the
organization's members are helping to provide uniformed security assistance
for the anti-Tran
rallies in Westminster.
While the CPJ report noted that police believe the VOECRN has been "dormant"
since the early 1990s, it pointed out that the group could resurface at any
point. "There has never been a thorough federal investigation into the
possible links among these murders," the CPJ concluded.
One source involved in the investigation said local police departments were
stymied by their lack of Vietnamese-speaking informants. Further
complicating access to the community, he said, "was the undercurrent of
suspicion that these ex-South Vietnamese army guys were somehow protected by
the CIA-plus the very factual knowledge that these guys were ruthless and
well-organized."
Nguoi Viet's Do believes the group has either gone underground or dissolved.
"In Vietnam, people were trained in this type of action by the Americans,"
he said. "They are more prepared than the people who blew up the building in
Oklahoma City."
While the FBI is happy to acknowledge its efforts to monitor communist spies
in Little Saigon, the agency refused to discuss what it knows about the
group that has caused the most trouble: the VOECRN, the death squad that
claimed responsibility for Pham's murder. Nonetheless, FBI records show that
on April 9, 1992, the agency began a federal racketeering and terrorism
investigation into the secretive death squad.
Even that information was difficult to obtain; the FBI finally provided it
in response to a 3-year-old Freedom of Information Act request filed by the
Weekly. The records also show that in the mid-1970s, the FBI investigated a
Washington, D.C.-based anti-war journal named Nguoi Viet Doan Ket, which is
unrelated to the Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon. Evidently, the
FB suspected that the D.C. paper had been infiltrated by communists. While
the results of the investigation are unknown, the documents reveal an early
and quite keen interest on behalf of the FBI when it came to spying on the
Vietnamese community in the United States.
Most of the FBI records released to the Weekly are heavily redacted by FBI
censors. Page after page is filled with nothing but black stripes. The FBI
also withheld 31 pages relating to its activities in Little Saigon because,
it argued, releasing the information might compromise U.S. national
security.
Meanwhile, the members of the secret death squad that killed Pham and has
claimed responsibility for a reign of terror across the country have never
been identified, at least not publicly. Twelve years after Pham's murder,
the Garden Grove Police Department said the case is still open, but only
because it remains unsolved. Over the years, police have worked with FBI
investigators to find Pham's killers, but according to Sergeant Mike
Hansfield, neither agency has so far been able to produce any leads or
suspects. "We haven't done any recent follow-up investigation on this case,"
he said. "It's kind of
sitting here because we don't have any information to go on."
Hansfield also said that the investigation has been hampered because
residents have been too afraid to speak to the police. "Whenever you have a
violent incident like this, in which someone is capable of firebombing a
newspaper office," said Hansfield, "people are going to be less than
cooperative because they know they could be next."
Former CPJ director Bill Orme is equally pessimistic-but for entirely
different reasons. Now a New York Times reporter in Jerusalem, Orme said the
FBI was slow to investigate the killings of Vietnamese-American journalists
until the CPJ released its report in 1994. "Our contacts in the FBI made it
clear these were cases that could not be fully investigated without a
major investment in time and staff, and it was the view of the FBI agents
involved that they would not get those resources unless it was in response
to political pressure on the Justice Department," Orme said. "The Vietnamese
community
itself was not a source of such pressure, and neither was the local or
national press. We succeeded with our report in getting the Justice
Department to put the FBI back on the case, but I fear that we did not
succeed in keeping the pressure on."
Meanwhile, in Little Saigon, there is fear. Just about the only person who
seems immune to that fear is Tran, who says he won't budge. The fact that
Tran has yet to be stopped is a testament less to the way Little Saigon has
changed over the years than it is to Tran's Zen-like refusal to bow down to
the crowd, even provoking it with a series of high-profile attempts to enter
his store- which hasn't been doing any business for weeks.
"These people are behaving like communists," he said, gesticulating
impatiently. "That is why I will never give up. The more crowds there
are, the more confidence I have."
Although the protests have so far been mostly peaceful, Tran has received
numerous death threats. Sometimes, they're issued on the radio by an
anonymous caller. Otherwise, the threats are shouted at him face-to-face in
front of his
store. On Monday, protest-security guards did Tran a favor by hauling him
away from an almost-certain beating in the parking lot.
Tran admitted he knows little of his community's bloody past and had never
heard of Pham until now, but he insisted, "I am not afraid." In that
respect, the outspoken storeowner seems as determined, principled, and
perhaps equally doomed as the famous Buddhist monk who in 1963 set himslef
ablaze in front of reporters to protest religious persecution of Buddhists
by the South Vietnamese government.
Or maybe Tran is just naive about the danger he has created for himself.
"They cannot stop me," he said in an interview on Friday. "I have a right to
hang a picture in my store. I want to show the Vietnamese community they
must follow
the law in America. The law is the law."
Vinh Dam
threats were actually carried out by the Vietnamese government itself! What's
for? Just to put some blood in the hands of the anti-commie folks and turn the
population's support and approval away from these people.
In fact, the protests' organizers are so worry about this possibility that Mr.
Tran's safety is, or was, one of their high priorities.
Go to bed and think about this. -VD-
William L. Cassidy
> Invisible Enemies
> Who's the real threat in Little Saigon? Ask the FBI.
>
> By Nick Schou
I investigated the incidents and allegations of which the patently
left-leaning Mr. Schou writes in his long propaganda piece. It was one of
the most thorough investigations of my professional career. Herewith my
response to his crap.
> the agency prefers not to discuss a
> far-more-serious threat to life and liberty in the Vietnamese community:
> Right-wing extremists culled from the ranks of Vietnamese immigrants with
> U.S.-supplied training in the art of terror.
Utter, total and complete bullshit. This propaganda theme first moved in
the late 1970s. It was the work of a group of ultra-leftist Americans,
including Hanoi agent-of-influence Edward Lee Cooperman, Pentagon Papers
activist Anthony Russo, and a convicted spy, Morton Sobel.
> Such groups are suspected of
> being responsible for at least five unsolved murders in Vietnamese
> communities throughout the U.S. since the early 1980s-all of them
> execution-style killings of Vietnamese journalists.
Utter, total and complete bullshit.
> The FBI hasn't ignored Little Saigon however. As recently as two years ago,
> the FBI went so far as to pay for advertisements in Nguoi Viet Daily News
> and other Vietnamese-language newspapers across the country, asking readers to
> inform on suspected communist spies. Would-be informants were instructed to
> call a Mr. Bo Cau at a Bay Area telephone number. For weeks, the FBI's hot
> line was inundated with Vietnamese callers taking advantage of the chance to
> accuse one another of spying for Hanoi.
This program was an iteration of the original "Captain Seven" (Dai Uy Bay)
operation by the Washington Field Office of the FBI. Yes, the
signal-to-noise ratio was high, which is why the original program was
terminated.
> To the outside world, including the FBI, Little Saigon is an impenetrable
> world of exiles, organized crime and extreme anti-communist politics.
A disgustingly cynical, racially offensive promulgation of stereotypes. Mr.
Schou should be ashamed of himself.
> Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the killings
> of political dissidents in neighborhoods like Little Saigon have stopped,
> according to a 1994 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect
> Journalists (CPJ).
Beneath contempt.
> What
> hasn't stopped is the fear that the killings will start anew-perhaps set off
> by the kind of anti-communist hysteria sweeping Little Saigon over the past
> several weeks.
Mr. Schou should know -- his propganda piece is probably timed to coinncide
with another communist assassination.
> One of the Vietnamese journalists who managed to survive the wave of terror
Disgusting lies.
> Tran is not the
> first person to take a controversial political stance in Little Saigon. That
> person would most likely be Tap Van Pham, the former editor of Mai
Utter, total and complete bullshit.
> The typewritten message
> claimed responsibility for the murder on behalf of a group identifying
> itself
> as Viet Nam Diet Cong Hung Quoc Dang, or the Vietnamese Organization to
> Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation (VOECRN).
It is a documented fact that VOECRN was a creation of the Vietnamese
Communist Party in America: the work of the San Francisco Bay Area unit.
The Vietnamese political operator who created VOECRN is well known, as are
the indidviduals who assisted him. They have been the subject of attention
for decades.
> According to Tam Thanh Pham, Pham's daughter, her father wasn't killed
> because of his politics.
There you have the truth of the matter.
> Besides Pham, four other Vietnamese journalists were slaughtered between
> 1980 and 1991. They included, in chronological order, publisher Lam Tran
> Duong of San Francisco,
Killed because of a love-tryst.
> editor Nguyen Dam Phong of Houston,
Killed in reprisal for extortion attempts.
> and layout
> designer Nhan
> Trong Do and editor Triet Le, both of whom worked for a Vietnamese magazine
> in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Killed by a communist hit squad out of Montreal.
> On Jan. 5, 1982, someone shot at
> Bach Huu Bong, publisher of a now-defunct Vietnamese weekly, as he left a
> restaurant in Los Angeles' Chinatown.
Thoroughly documented as not a political case.
> On April 30, 1988, French-naturalized novelist Long Vu visited Orange County
> to meet with former U.S. Congressman Robert Dornan (R-Garden Grove). While
> here, he was beaten so badly by unknown assailants
A communist hit squad operating out of Texas did the job.
> According to the CPJ report, on Aug. 3, 1988, Tu A. Nguyen, publisher
> of Viet Press, and two other people were "sentenced to death" in fliers
> stapled
> to telephone poles in Westminster shortly after the trio visited Vietnam.
Nguyen Tu A... how disgusting. The "death sentences" were stapled up by a
local woman he had wronged. I saw him in Saigon in 1991-- just another
hustler on the make.
> The group's name first surfaced in 1982,
Wrong. It first surfaced in San Jose, in the papers of a VCP cell. It
thereafter surfaced in connection with an arson.
> Triet Le, who,
> along with his wife, was shot to death outside their suburban Virginia home
> eight
> years later.
Triet Le was a cooperating individual who assisted in investigations of
Vietnamese communist activities in the United States.
> According to the CPJ, which cited anonymous law-enforcement sources,
Made-up sources, ergo, anonymous.
> While the CPJ report noted that police believe the VOECRN has been "dormant"
> since the early 1990s, it pointed out that the group could resurface at any
> point. "There has never been a thorough federal investigation into the
> possible links among these murders," the CPJ concluded.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I investigated them, using every resource at my
disposal, even to tasking outside agencies.
> While the FBI is happy to acknowledge its efforts to monitor communist spies
> in Little Saigon, the agency refused to discuss what it knows about the
> group that has caused the most trouble: the VOECRN, the death squad that
> claimed responsibility for Pham's murder. Nonetheless, FBI records show that
> on April 9, 1992, the agency began a federal racketeering and terrorism
> investigation into the secretive death squad.
Do you know the way to San Jose?
> Former CPJ director Bill Orme is equally pessimistic-but for entirely
> different reasons. Now a New York Times reporter in Jerusalem, Orme said the
> FBI was slow to investigate the killings of Vietnamese-American journalists
> until the CPJ released its report in 1994. "Our contacts in the FBI made it
> clear these were cases that could not be fully investigated without a
> major investment in time and staff, and it was the view of the FBI agents
> involved that they would not get those resources unless it was in response
> to political pressure on the Justice Department," Orme said.
Ridiculous speculation.
> On Monday, protest-security guards did Tran a favor by hauling him
> away from an almost-certain beating in the parking lot.
Gee. If they are all old Khang Chien boys, why didn't they just whack him out?
Crawl back under your rock, Nick Schou.
--
"It exceedeth the compasse of Conceit, to thinke that Wisedome which made
everie thing so orderlie in the parts, should make a confusion in the
whole."
-William Drummond, 1585-1649.
William L. Cassidy
> Yet, many of us seem to forget to consider the possibility that these
crimes and
> threats were actually carried out by the Vietnamese government itself! What's
> for? Just to put some blood in the hands of the anti-commie folks and
turn the
> population's support and approval away from these people.
You have hit the nail squarely on the head.