When journalists are killed for doing their job, their names often become known around the world, martyrs in the cause of media freedom. But we turn now to a series of killings that happened in this country but were all but ignored. During the ’80s, five Vietnamese-American reporters were murdered. The killings shared key traits. All five victims appeared to be deliberately targeted. All five worked for small outlets serving the Vietnamese refugee community after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. All had either voiced support for Vietnam’s Communists or had published criticism of a right-wing paramilitary Vietnamese exile group called the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, known as “the Front.” And despite a lengthy FBI investigation, none of the victims’ killers were ever brought to justice.
The journalist duo of correspondent A.C. Thompson and director Rick Rowley uncover new evidence potentially tying Front members to the journalists’ deaths—and a U.S. government link that may have helped them evade justice.
The Front was led by a group of former Vietnamese military officers from the U.S.-backed army of South Vietnam. They ran a militia out of Thailand to try to restart the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the Front had its own death squad, the K-9. In interviews with the filmmakers, five former K-9 members concede the group assassinated political opponents. One of the K-9 members also admits their responsibility for two of the journalists’ murders.
The documentary also reveals Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state, helped the Front’s leader obtain U.S. citizenship. And as a high-ranking Pentagon official, Armitage contacted Thai generals to back the Front’s effort to establish its base in Thailand. The FBI investigators suspected Front members of carrying out the killings, but never made a single arrest.
A.C. Thompson talking:
one of the fundamental questions that we set out to ask. It was baffling to me, when I started looking into these cases, that you could have this wave of terror and no one would be arrested. Here’s what I think. Looking at the documents, interviewing people involved, you can see early on local police departments really didn’t know how to deal with these cases. They didn’t understand the political nature of them. They didn’t realize that these were terror cases, early on, and so they made crucial mistakes.
The FBI started looking at these cases in the ’80s. And for a long time, in some FBI offices, there was another big mistake being made, that these were chalked up again as sort of singular incidents that weren’t linked to one another. So, for example, in the San Francisco FBI office, the first killing happened in 1981. All the way to 1987, the FBI was acting as if there was no politics, that it wasn’t an act of terror, and it wasn’t linked to other cases. Those were sort of crucial failings, I think, on law enforcement’s part.
Beyond that, when the FBI finally started taking these cases seriously, 15 years after the first killing, in 1995, they really had trouble penetrating the inner layers of the group they were looking at, the Front, and really getting people to spill the beans and really talk about what happened.
when we spoke to former Front members, we’d say, “Hey, was the CIA involved in this? Was there someone helping you in the U.S. government?” And they would all say, “No, the CIA didn’t help us.” But the name Richard Armitage kept coming up. They kept saying, “He was our patron. He was the person that seemed to be supporting us.”
We came to Armitage, and we said, “Hey, this is what we’ve been hearing. Is there any truth to this?” And he said, “I made an introduction between the leader of the Front and the Thai military. It wasn’t in person, but I told the Thai military, ‘Hey, this is a great officer. I knew him,’ etc., etc.” And we believe that that introduction helped the Front set up its base in Thailand, from which it tried to invade Vietnam on three occasions. Now, Armitage says, “I warned the Thais that we’re not supporting these guys officially through the U.S. government. I don’t think this is a good idea.” But he does seem to have made this introduction that really helped the group set up its cause.
Rick Rowley talking:
one of the things that is kind of tragic, I think, you know, looking at the story as a journalist, is that—like Dam Phong, for instance. He knew his killers were coming. He was getting death threats for weeks before he was killed. People—he had angry meetings where leaders of the Front told him to stop publishing what he was publishing. And he saw his killers coming, and he let them come. He kept publishing, because he thought that his work was worth it, was worth the risk, and that, you know, he—it will be remembered after he was gone, and that if something happened to him, other journalists would flock to his story and pick up the threads of his reporting and would hold accountable the people who were responsible for his killing. But now, you know, 30 years later, he was wrong. I mean, the terrorists won. His stories were all but forgotten. We think that the Houston police didn’t even translate the newspapers that he was publishing. And yet, the group—the leaders of the group that were at the center of his criticism and his writing, they remain prominent members in their community.
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Rick Rowley
producer, writer and director of the Frontline documentary, Terror in Little Saigon. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the 2013 film Dirty Wars. He is an independent journalist with Big Noise Films.
A.C. Thompson
producer and correspondent of the Frontline documentary, Terror in Little Saigon. He is a staff reporter at ProPublica and co-author of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights.
— source democracynow.org