Terror in Little Saigon: An Old War Comes to a New Country

Illustration by Rob Dobi

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

The journalists were assassinated on American soil, one after another.

Duong Trong Lam was the first. He was 27 years old and ran a Vietnamese-language publication called Cai Dinh Lang, which he mailed to immigrants around the country. A gunman found him as he walked out of his San Francisco apartment building one morning and shot him, a single bullet piercing his pulmonary artery, just above the heart.

For magazine publisher Pham Van Tap, the end came more slowly. He was sleeping in his small office in Garden Grove when an arsonist set fire to the building. He was heard screaming before he succumbed to smoke inhalation.

In Houston, a killer chased pajama-clad Nguyen Dam Phong from his home and shot him seven times with a .45-caliber handgun. The murder marked the end of Dam Phong's twice-monthly broadsheet newspaper, Tu Do.

All together, five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed between 1981 and 1990. All worked for small publications serving the refugee population that sought shelter in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon in 1975. At least two other people were murdered as well.

FBI agents came to believe the journalists' killings, along with an array of fire-bombings and beatings, were terrorist acts ordered by an organization called the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, a prominent group led by former military commanders from South Vietnam. Agents theorized the Front was intimidating or executing those who defied it, FBI documents show, and even sometimes those simply sympathetic to the victorious Communists in Vietnam. But the bureau never made a single arrest for the killings or terror crimes, and the case was formally closed two decades ago.

Early in 2014, ProPublica and Frontline opened their investigation. They obtained thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI documents, as well as CIA cables and immigration files. They uncovered additional leads and witnesses not previously interviewed by either the FBI or local authorities--including former members of the Front who said the group had operated a secret assassination unit in the U.S. It was a tip the FBI had chased for years but had never conclusively proved.

In Pearland, Texas, outside of Houston, there is a cemetery ringed by tall pine and oak trees. Near the back of the graveyard, close to a muddy stream, lies Dam Phong's headstone. Grass has crept over the small, rectangular marker. A dead rose, withered and black, stands in a metal vase.

But the words chiseled into the marble some 33 years ago are still legible: "Killed in pursuit of truth and justice through journalism."

His name was Hoang Co Minh. He had a mess of thinning, coal-black hair and a caterpillar mustache. It was 1983, and Minh had come to a packed convention center in Washington, D.C., to make an announcement: He intended to reconquer Vietnam.

A former officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, Minh told the assembled crowd that he'd built a force that would topple the Hanoi government and liberate his homeland from the totalitarian rule of the Communists.

The crowd--thousands of Vietnamese refugees who'd fled the country after Saigon fell--erupted in celebration and, in some cases, tears of joy. Clad in black, a long plaid scarf draped around his neck, Minh smiled broadly and let the audience's ecstatic reaction wash over him. Video of the event shows Minh thrusting both hands into the air and waving like a head of state.

A few years earlier, Minh had started his guerrilla army, the Front. The group had established a base in the wilds of Southeast Asia--a secret location within striking distance of Vietnam--and built a network of chapters across the U.S. that raised money for the coming invasion.
Those U.S. chapters, it seems, had already opened what amounted to a second front, this one in America: Members used violence to silence Vietnamese-Americans who dared question the group's politics or aims. Calling for normalized relations with the Communist victors back home was enough to merit a beating or, in some cases, a death sentence.

In a memo that has never before been made public, an FBI investigator captured it simply: The Front, the agent wrote, had "undertaken a campaign to silence all opposition to it."
The scope of the suspected terrorism was extensive. Journalists were slain in Texas, California and Virginia. A string of arsons stretched from Montreal to Orange County.
Local police departments opened investigations that ended with no resolution. The FBI quietly closed its inquiry in the late 1990s, making it one of the most significant unsolved domestic-terror cases in the country.

To reconstruct this chapter of history, largely hidden from the majority of Americans, ProPublica and Frontline acquired and scrutinized the FBI's case files, as well as the records of local law-enforcement agencies in Houston, San Francisco and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. They tracked down former police detectives, federal agents and prosecutors, as well as a number of people who had emerged as suspects. They also interviewed former government and military officials from the U.S., Vietnam and Thailand.

They found and spoke with more than two dozen former members of the Front. They traveled to Thailand to meet former Laotian guerrillas who had once fought alongside them.
Their investigation lays bare the failure of the authorities to curb the Front's violence and suggests there are promising leads to pursue should the FBI or others decide to reopen the case. The new information includes accounts from former Front members who had never spoken to law enforcement, one of whom admitted the Front was responsible for the killing of two of the journalists. Records and interviews show that Minh, as a means of disciplining his ragtag army overseas, ordered the killing of his own recruits, possibly as many as 10. The dead may have included Vietnamese-American citizens of the U.S., giving the FBI authority to investigate the crimes.

ProPublica and Frontline invited the current leadership of the FBI to discuss the bureau's investigation of the Front. But the FBI would not answer a series of detailed questions about the actions taken, and not taken, by the bureau during the many years of its investigation. Instead, it issued a statement:

"These cases were led by experienced FBI professionals who collected evidence and conducted numerous interviews while working closely with Department of Justice attorneys to identify those responsible for the crimes and seek justice for the victims," the statement reads in part. "Despite those efforts, after 15 years of investigation, DOJ and FBI officials concluded that thus far, there is insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution."

Spokespeople for the other government agencies with knowledge of the Front's existence would not comment.

Minh ultimately mounted three failed incursions into Vietnam and died in 1987 during one of them. The Front, after a suspected decade of terror, suffered its own divisions and diminished prestige. Some of its onetime leaders have died; others live sprinkled across the country, retired from careers as doctors, restaurant owners or county workers.

Among the former Front members interviewed by ProPublica and Frontline, some insisted the group never engaged in any kind of violent activity in the U.S.

"Never. Never," said Pham To Tu, a Houston resident who said he joined the organization in its early days. The group's enemies, he added, "spread rumors about us."