Terror in Little Saigon: An Objection and a Response
Our
reporting with Frontline on an unsolved campaign of violence within the
Vietnamese-American community has provoked passionate debate.
Frontline’s film, “Terror in Little Saigon,”
and the accompanying ProPublica article, revisited a painful chapter in
the Vietnamese-American experience. Since publication, we have heard
from many viewers and readers who expressed deep gratitude for our
reporting on the murders of five Vietnamese-American journalists and a
broader pattern of violence within the refugee communities that grew up
in America after the Vietnam War. The film and article showed that the
FBI came to believe that an organization started by former South
Vietnamese military officers, the National United Front for the
Liberation of Vietnam, was linked to the violence.
Over the last week, we have also heard criticisms, in particular from a Vietnamese-American advocacy group called Viet Tan.
Viet Tan, whose founders were leaders of the National United Front, has
asserted that our reporting failed to prove the connection between the
organization and the violence, and was, in certain respects, culturally
insulting to Vietnamese Americans. Viet Tan maintains that the National
United Front, known most commonly as the Front, was a group committed to
fostering political change in Vietnam, and that it has been the target
of rumors and false allegations for years.
ProPublica
and Frontline’s reporting included an unprecedented examination of the
local police and the FBI investigations into the murders in California,
Texas and Virginia. The police and FBI files had been secret for decades
until we obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act. Now the
American public, including the Vietnamese-American community, can begin
to assess the substance and shortcomings of years of investigation. For
the families of the victims, this was the only opportunity they had been
afforded to take stock of what investigators had uncovered and
theorized about the deaths of their loved ones. Those investigative
files show that FBI agents were persuaded that the Front was behind a
campaign of murder, arson and beatings, and they capture the frustration
of investigators in never managing to bring any of the perpetrators to
justice. As well, five former leaders of the organization told us the
group had run its own assassination unit to deal with its critics or
suspected Communists.
Viet
Tan has also asserted that one or more former Front members who
appeared in the film and article were either misquoted or somehow
otherwise misrepresented. No one featured in the film or article has
contacted us making such a claim. Viet Tan says that one former Front
leader, Nguyen Xuan Nghia, now insists he never told our reporter, A.C.
Thompson, and director, Richard Rowley, that he had been in a meeting
with Front members who talked about killing a newspaper publisher. We
would be happy to respond directly to Nghia should he want to raise an
objection with us.
Viet
Tan says that the Front never ran an assassination unit. The FBI’s
files, however, are laden with discussions of the Front and the unit,
known as K-9 — its suspected members and its catalogue of victims. These
entries were built on in part accounts from former members of the
Front. Katherine Tang-Wilcox, a retired FBI special agent who helped run
the investigation of the Front, said it plainly, in the film and in the
article: “K-9 was established as the assassination arm of the Front.”
Viet
Tan asserts that there was a preconceived narrative for the reporting
behind the film and the article, and it claims that our work was
insulting to the wider Vietnamese-American community. Vietnamese
patriots, it says, “are relegated to being vengeful veterans motivated
by a loss of social status.”
ProPublica
and Frontline followed the reporting where it took us. Where it took us
over and over again was to the Front. We in no way sought to demonize
Vietnamese refugees, and the profound hardships they endured both during
the war and in the exodus after. We exposed the work of extremists, and
the facts are the facts: Although there may have been other aspects to
the Front, it was founded with the express mission of toppling the
Communist regime in Hanoi, and it raised money in the U.S. to mount such
an effort. It created a makeshift fighting force and tried three times
to get inside Vietnam. That such an effort would have held appeal for
many displaced and traumatized refugees from a lost war is no surprise.
It just happened to violate American law.
It’s
worth noting that we spent time with veterans of the former South
Vietnamese military during the course of our reporting, at the cemetery
on Memorial Day, at cafes, at their homes, and we are grateful to them
for sharing their time with us. Two associate producers on the project,
filmmaker Tony Nguyen and Jimmy Tong Nguyen, a translator and veteran of
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, helped in our reporting and our
understanding of the appropriate historical context and cultural
sensitivity.
In
1993, several Front leaders brought a libel lawsuit against
Vietnamese-American journalists who had accused them of being behind
acts of violence within the community. Viet Tan suggests that any
reading of that case would support the idea that, in fact, the Front was
not behind any violence. The claim by the Front plaintiffs that they
had been libeled was rejected by a jury.
The
story of a long-forgotten and unsolved spate of politically motivated
murders and attacks may not have been the story Viet Tan wanted
published nationwide, and indeed it is a grim, unresolved chapter in a
vibrant community’s rich history. But that is the story told by
documents, investigators and interviews in the Vietnamese-American
community itself. During our interviews, we were frequently told about
additional violence that had never been reported to the FBI, and since
the film and articles were published, we have received numerous notes
from viewers and readers who want to share accounts of being similarly
threatened and harassed.
Over
the last week, our journalists have talked about the project in
numerous interviews — including in the Vietnamese-American media, where
these murders and violence are being passionately debated. We hope the
reporting we’ve done can now lead to a break in these long cold cases.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, and as Tang-Wilcox, the
retired FBI agent, said, “Somebody knows who’s responsible for each and
every one of these acts.”
No comments:
Post a Comment