US Justice System and Intelligence Agencies (I)

We are generally led to believe by residents of Linda Bazar that there is a rule of law in America. Its prosecution and courts are dedicated to dispensing justice. Let’s examine how much truth there is in this claim.

 It was April 30, 1975, when the last American and facilitator left Vietnam from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon. The facilitators who were taken were placed together in five different US states to maintain a sense of community in them.

Among those who settled in Texas, their community soon gained the informal name of “Little Saigon.” Everything seemed to have come to a very orderly conclusion and life was peaceful. But trouble began when a Vietnamese, Zhong Chong Lam, was murdered in San Francisco on July 21, 1981. He was shot three times on the sidewalk in front of his office. Then soon another murder took place on August 24, 1982.

This time the incident took place in Houston, Texas and the victim was Diem Fang who was shot in the doorway of his home. There were many similarities between the two events. The first is that both of them had come to America and obtained declarations of Vietnamese language journals and were publishing these journals as journalists.

Another similarity was that the killers in both cases did not leave shell casings at the crime scene, indicating that they were highly trained and well aware of the importance of forensic evidence. A third similarity further emerged was that in both cases, the police and prosecution acted as a strategy to protect the killers.

For example, there were three witnesses to the murder of Zhong Chong Lam. But the police neither summoned any of them nor recorded their statements. Similarly, Zhong Chong Lam’s sister, Nancy Zhong, told the police that some time ago, she was threatened with a gun to her head to tell her brother to leave America with his family or else he would be killed.

However, the police did not give any importance to this statement and the case was presented to the court that Zhong had a personal grudge against a friend who killed him. This friend of Zhong was also formally charged. But the case was so ridiculous that the judge threw it out of the court at the very first hearing. Thus, this case went to cold storage. Surprisingly, Nancy Zhong says that for two months after the murder, she received threatening phone calls every morning and evening, but the police did not take any notice.

Since there were murders and there were similarities between the two, the FBI soon began investigating. Thus began the mysterious revelations that stretched from Texas to the jungles of Thailand and from there to the shores of Vietnam. And in this circle, the footprints or fingerprints of both the Pentagon and the CIA were also evident.

The majority of those who were taken from Vietnam were from the Vietnamese Armed Forces and included officers of all ranks. When the FBI began to investigate the two murders, it was soon revealed that there were three underground organizations of Vietnamese in the United States. The main organization was called “The Front” while a sub-organization was K9.

K-Nine’s status was a death squad whose members were unknown. The name of K9 was circulating among the Vietnamese about the case of Dam Phang, who was murdered in Houston Texas, but any Vietnamese who was asked about it would shut up.

On the other hand, the responsibility for the murder of Zhong Chong Lam, who was killed in San Francisco, was accepted by an organization called VOECRN (The Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation), but this responsibility for the murder was not accepted in this way. As usual, terrorist organizations around the world accept to claim responsibility by contacting media offices by phone or other means of communication. In Zhong’s case, this responsibility was only accepted by calling the family and informing the Vietnamese community closely. That is, the word was kept only to the Vietnamese community, ordinary Americans were unaware of it.

The impression was that three different organizations were active, but the FBI soon discovered in its investigation that VOECRN was just one name. It is created to take responsibility for the events of Front and K9 so that no one can be attracted to the death squad called K9. As a result of these investigations, the FBI quickly learned that the case was not limited to the two murders of Zhong Chong Lam and Dam Fang. Rather, similar incidents have occurred in the Vietnamese community settled in other states.

In total, seven murders and dozens of attempted murders were found. All seven of those killed were Vietnamese journalists, and the majority of those who were targeted in assassination attacks were also journalists. Importantly, the killers were everywhere Vietnamese themselves. They were not known, but the threats proved that whoever they were, they were Vietnamese. So, the question became important for the FBI, why are the Vietnamese who arrived in the United States after becoming stateless, killing their journalists?

When the investigation turned to this aspect, it was revealed that many communists among those who came from Vietnam had succeeded in reaching here by deceiving the US. And they are addressing the Vietnamese community by making declarations in journals and newspapers and trying to change their minds along their lines. It was found that not everyone who was the victim of the act of murder was a journalist, but all of them, including the victims, were communists. Readers who are familiar with the history of ideological movements around the world know very well that the most important source of the communist movement in every country has been journals and pamphlets.

So Vietnamese communists were also on their global movement and they were also advancing their goals through journalism. The FBI investigation also revealed that the underground organization of Vietnamese living in the United States had three conditions for killing someone: first, he must be a communist, and second, he must be a threat to the existence of the Front. And the third is that he is a threat to the identity of a member of the Front. Any one of these three conditions was found to be eligible for death.

During an on-camera interview, the famous American investigative journalist AC Thompson asked Tran Vinh Beto, the only Vietnamese convicted of attempted murder in Orange County, California, why and how he attacked his target. So he said without hesitation:

“I started shooting him in the parking lot of an Orange County market and he grabbed my hand. But I freed my hand and shot him in the head. He fell like a tree. I thought he died. But later it was found that he had survived. I was killing him because he was a communist, and he told the Los Angeles Times that there should be dialogue with the communist government in Vietnam. Communists are sick people. Sick people have to die. People consider me a possible murderer, but it was not.”

Similarly, Thompson asked former Front member Naveen Deng Khao:

“If someone had expressed communist ideas in front of you in the 80s, what would have been your reaction?”

Deng Hua replied:

“I would have stabbed him, or cut his throat, anything but killed him.”

When asked:

“Were you related to K9?”

So he looked the other way and said:

“No !”

The most surprising thing about this whole issue is that the entire FBI investigation went into the cold storege without a prosecution. So, about thirty years after these events, AC Thomson made it the subject of his research as to why so much happened on American soil but no one was punished except Beto. (To be continued)