http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...little-saigon/

http://stories.frontline.org/terror-in-little-saigon-

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica | Nov. 3, 2015

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, California, when an arsonist set fire to the building. He was heard screaming before he succumbed to smoke inhalation.

In Houston, a killer chased Nguyen Dam Phong from his home in his pajamas and shot him seven times with a .45-caliber handgun. The murder marked the end of Dam Phong's twice-monthly broadsheet newspaper, which he had named Tu Do: Freedom.

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 that 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 that 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 FBI never made a single arrest for the killings or terror crimes, and the case was formally closed two decades ago.

Violent attacks on journalists often function as a brutal form of censorship, and as a result often stir public mourning and outrage. In the months after Arizona reporter Don Bolles was murdered in 1976, a group of nearly 40 reporters from around the country dedicated themselves to continuing his reporting on organized crime and making a statement about freedom of expression. Suspects in the murder were ultimately identified and convicted. The mass slaying of staffers at the French weekly Charlie Hebdo sparked vigils and protests around the world.

Last year, when fighters from the Islamic State Group executed war correspondent James Foley, President Obama praised him as a man "who courageously told the stories of his fellow human beings," and promised to hunt his killers.

"Our reach is long," Obama said. "We are patient. Justice will be done."

The families of the murdered Vietnamese-American journalists long ago gave up hope of seeing justice done. They remain disappointed and confused. They expected more of the government they had adopted as their own, excited by its promise of liberty and convinced of its fearlessness in seeking the truth.

Early in 2014, ProPublica and Frontline reopened the investigation. We obtained thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI documents, as well as CIA cables and immigration files. We uncovered additional leads and witnesses not previously interviewed by either the FBI or local authorities -- including former members of the Front who told us 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.

The Front openly raised money in America to restart the Vietnam War, even launching three failed invasions from the borders of Thailand and Laos. Our reporting shows that officials at the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI knew about the Front's military operations in Southeast Asia. But federal authorities never acted to enforce the Neutrality Act, which bars residents and citizens of this country from efforts to overthrow a foreign government.

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 the headstone of Nguyen Dam Phong. Grass has crept over the small, rectangular marker. A single 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.

Today, ProPublica and Frontline, here and in the television documentary "Terror in Little Saigon," tell the story of a reign of intimidation and murder for which no one has been held to account.
Part I: The Front

Hoang Co Minh founded the Front, which raised money in America to restart the Vietnam War.

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.

Minh, a former officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, 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 in 1975 -- 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.

Minh had started his guerrilla army a few years earlier. It was called the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam. 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: Front 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.

FBI agents eventually opened a domestic terrorism investigation into the Front's activities. Thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI records obtained by ProPublica and Frontline show that the agents came to suspect that Minh's group had orchestrated the killing of Vietnamese-American journalists, as well as a wide variety of fire-bombings, beatings and death threats.

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, California. Death threats were issued -- to individuals, families and businesses across the country. And investigators believed the Front also mailed out communiqués claiming responsibility for the crimes.

Still, some 30 years later, the FBI has arrested no one for the violence or terrorism, much less charged and convicted them. Again and again, 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. We tracked down former police detectives, federal agents and prosecutors, and a number of people who had emerged as suspects. We also interviewed former government and military officials from the U.S., Vietnam and Thailand.

As well, we found and spoke with more than two dozen former members of the Front. We tracked down a number of former Front soldiers and traveled to Thailand to meet former Laotian guerillas who had once fought alongside them.
Finally, we spent hours with the families of the dead, and with people who had been shot or beaten. Some of the victims had never spoken publicly -- either because they remained afraid or because they had become disillusioned with American law enforcement.

Our investigation lays bare the failure of the authorities to curb the Front's violence and suggests that 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 that 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. James Comey, the bureau's director, would not be interviewed, and neither would the bureau's specialists in domestic terrorism. The FBI also 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:

In the early 1980s, the FBI launched a series of investigations into the alleged politically motivated attacks in Vietnamese-American communities. While initially worked as separate cases across multiple field offices, the investigations were eventually consolidated under a major case designation codenamed 'VOECRN' at the direction of then-Director Louis Freeh. 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.

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 stretching from 1980 to 1991, 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."

Every now and again, the Front's former leaders turn out for memorial services or reunions or rallies that still call for the overthrow of the regime in Hanoi. They mingle with men in freshly pressed military uniforms. The air at the events is one of pride and enduring anger, bitterness and defiance.

Trang Q. Nguyen, a co-founder of Little Saigon TV and Radio in Orange County, California, said the Front's efforts to intimidate journalists were well known in the Vietnamese-American media. And she is clear about why she thinks the group was able to elude the authorities: "People were scared."

Like many Vietnamese who fled to the U.S. in the aftermath of the war, Hoang Co Minh experienced a precipitous drop in status when he arrived in this country.

He was an educated man, schooled at Saigon University's law school and the South

Vietnamese naval academy, and, later, in the 1960s, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. During the war, he commanded a coastal minesweeper, a 370-ton vessel with a crew of nearly 40 sailors. He held the rank of rear admiral in the South Vietnamese Navy.

Richard Armitage, a former U.S. Navy officer who worked closely with the South Vietnamese Navy before rising to a senior Pentagon position in the 1980s, knew Minh well and called him a "noted combat soldier.''

But by 1975, Minh no longer had a country, or a Navy to help direct. He set off for America on the day Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. By the time he reached the U.S., immigration records show, he had $200 stashed in a Korean bank account, a small chunk of gold, and a couple of cheap rings. He was effectively destitute.

Along with Armitage, Minh had some influential friends: James Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy officer who served as a senior director on the National Security Council during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, invited Minh's family to live with him in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington. But Minh's new life in America nonetheless started humbly. He did yard work for suburban homeowners and later began hiring himself out as a house painter.

Moving to a foreign land is rarely easy. But the Vietnamese who came to America by the hundreds of thousands during the 1970s weren't the typical economic migrants seeking better jobs and living conditions. They were refugees of a brutal war that had killed an estimated 3 million people. They had been forced to choose between exile or life under the harsh rule of the Communists.

"Front 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."

The ensuing exodus was Biblical in scale, set on overloaded boats and in an archipelago of miserable refugee camps, all stuffed with scared people.

Many who stayed in Vietnam wound up dead or in Communist re-education camps where food was scarce and physical abuse abundant. "The Communists had lists of people who had cooperated with the Americans. Those people were called traitors," recalled a South Vietnamese infantryman in "Tears Before the Rain," an oral history. They "were shot right away, right there in the street," he said. "The Communists had no mercy."

Each wave of refugees brought with it disturbing tales of conditions in Southern Vietnam as the Hanoi government remade the country.

By the 1980s, there were some 400,000 Vietnamese living in the U.S., clustering in places like San Francisco, San Jose, Houston, New Orleans, Northern Virginia and Orange County, California. Traumatized, these new communities, often called Little Saigons, proved remarkably resilient, and in time, even wonderfully vibrant. But in the earliest years, they could be insular: handicapped by language barriers, heartsick for their homeland, hungry for vengeance.

Minh recognized the hunger, shared it and set about developing a plan for satisfying it.

After abandoning his house painting business in Virginia, Minh by 1981 had moved to Fresno, California. On immigration paperwork, he said he'd taken up a new job working for a refugee relief organization. Whether he ever did join such an effort, Minh had certainly spent years mixing in circles of fellow former South Vietnamese military officers and others nursing the desire to take up the fight again back in Vietnam. And in those circles, Minh appears to have regained a degree of his former stature.

"I had a very deep respect for him," said Nguyen Xuan Nghia, a former senior Front official. Another former member called Minh "clever" and "brave."

And so when a loose collection of men eager to return to their homeland banded together to form the Front, Minh became their leader. He cultivated a small, devoted following, and within two years he was ready to take his message more broadly to the Vietnamese-American community.

"We resolve to rise up to topple the Viet Cong oligarchy from power," said one early Front propaganda piece. The Front's aim was to create a "humane, free and just democracy."

To do that, interviews and FBI files show, the Front developed a ruthless ethical calculus, believing its men were justified in taking nearly any action to advance their struggle.

Minh had a grand vision for the army he wanted to build. The Front would not only recruit in the U.S., but also use its network of contacts among former South Vietnamese government and military officials to attract volunteer soldiers from the ranks of refugees in Asia and Australia.

In time, Minh secured a tract of land in the forests of Northeast Thailand to establish a secret base of operations. The Front's recruits would live at the base, drilling and strategizing. When the moment was right, they would slip into Vietnam and mount a classic guerrilla campaign, linking up with anti-Communist partisans within the country, spreading revolt from village to village.

Eventually, the Hanoi government would collapse just as Saigon had.

Like any army, the rebels needed a reliable supply chain that could deliver all the necessities of combat to the base. Weapons. Ammunition. Food. Medicine.

Uniforms. Communications gear.

To keep the warriors equipped, Minh and his colleagues created a sophisticated fundraising apparatus in the U.S. It started with Front chapters across the country. Chapter members pledged money to the group, often on a monthly basis.

The Front began publishing a magazine called Khang Chien, or Resistance, to spread news of their insurgency and bring in more contributions. They even opened a chain of pho noodle houses to generate revenue.

Combat-hardened veterans flocked to the Front. For South Vietnamese soldiers and sailors, the war had certainly been harrowing, but it also had provided a profound sense of purpose and camaraderie. Now many of these veterans found themselves adrift in America, toiling at menial jobs in an alien land. For them, the idea of reviving the fight held deep emotional appeal.

A journalist who attended some of the Front's rallies in the early 1980s described them as "surreal" events with an ecstatic, near-religious feel.

One of the group's founders, Do Thong Minh, helped sketch out the Front's organizational chart in a recent interview. At the top was Hoang Co Minh, who ran the operation from the Front's encampment in Thailand and communicated with his lieutenants around the world via courier and coded messages. His deputy, a South Vietnamese war hero named Le Hong, also helped direct the Front's trainees in Thailand. Another man oversaw the Front's radio operations, which beamed insurrectionist messages into Vietnam from a transmitter in the Thai base.

In the U.S., an executive committee of roughly 10 people handled fundraising and publicity. Led by an ex-colonel from the South Vietnamese army, the committee established Front chapters in Europe and Canada, as well as Australia and Asia.

To build excitement -- and keep the money coming in -- the Front's propaganda arm distributed photos of Minh and his soldiers, clad in fatigues, preparing for war at the secret base. One pamphlet included a picture of troops who had just finished basic training. They were kneeling, their rifles held aloft. The men pledged "to dedicate their entire lives to the liberation of Vietnam."

In the U.S., Front loyalists began dressing in a uniform of chocolate-colored, button-down shirts and khaki pants; they became known as "brown shirts" within the Vietnamese-American communities, a historical echo that some found frightening. They held regular chapter meetings and staged protests against the Hanoi regime.

The brown shirts also supported the troops by raising money. They prodded owners of Vietnamese-American retail businesses to make cash contributions to the Front and to place donation cans for the group in their stores and restaurants. Some shop owners felt that the Front was shaking them down and complained to the FBI.

Agents in San Francisco, for example, received information that the Front used "extortion and other illegal means in the collection and solicitation of money," according to an FBI memo. Another FBI report estimated that the Front's cash-generating efforts had raised "several million dollars."

Some Vietnamese-Americans began to wonder where all that money was going. Was it really being used to the supply the soldiers?

That, they learned, was a question they shouldn't ask.

It was about 11:20 p.m. on Sept. 22, 1990, when Le Triet pulled his car into the driveway of his house in Baileys Crossroads, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Triet, one of the best-known writers in the Vietnamese diaspora, was returning home from a dinner party with his wife.

A spray of .380 caliber bullets shattered their car window. Within moments Triet and his wife, Dang-Tran Thi Tuyet, were dead.

Investigators later theorized that two killers armed with automatic pistols followed the couple to their modest one-story home. To FBI agents, it looked like a professional hit.

Triet, a columnist for Van Nghe Tien Phong, a popular monthly magazine, had mixed erudition with an acerbic tone. His columns discussed poetry and literature, controversies within the Vietnamese-American community, and, often, his disdain for the Front. While Triet was staunchly anti-Communist, he was skeptical of the Front and its leadership. Convinced that the organization was more concerned with fundraising than actually overthrowing the Hanoi government, Triet frequently criticized the Front in print.

In one issue he bluntly accused Front leaders of endangering their own soldiers. "The comedy will end with a tragedy," he wrote.

FBI documents make clear that the Front had been offended, and had threatened Triet. The writer, records show, began carrying a .22-caliber revolver and varying his driving routes. Shortly before Triet was killed, he met with Front leaders at a home in Frederick, Maryland, according to FBI records and interviews. The Front leaders tried to persuade him to quit criticizing the organization in print. He refused.

Newspapers, magazines and newsletters had become vital outlets for the emerging Vietnamese refugee community. For publishers and readers alike, the publications amounted to an initial, thrilling taste of life in a democracy.

"Vietnam never had a history of a free press," said Jeffrey Brody, a communications professor at California State University, Fullerton. Brody, who covered Little Saigon for the Orange County Register, said that for Vietnamese reporters arriving in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, "it was a Wild West of freedom, of opportunity to say what you want."

Some entrepreneurs hoped to become media moguls. Others saw their mission in altruistic terms. A large chunk of the immigrant populace was still learning English, desperate for Vietnamese-language news sources. These emerging publications came to serve as a crucial guide for those learning to navigate a new culture.

"Some Vietnamese-Americans began to wonder where all that money was going. Was it really being used to supply the soldiers? That, they learned, was a question they shouldn't ask."

For the Front, the Vietnamese-American media could be quite useful. If the organization wanted to draw people to its events and persuade them to bankroll its guerrilla war, it needed the Vietnamese-language press to spread its message and publish its appeals.

But journalists could also be a threat, and several of them, Triet included, slammed the group for its heavy-handed fundraising tactics and questioned whether the money was really going to the soldiers. They demanded a thorough accounting of the donations. They didn't believe Minh's claims that he had built a 10,000-man army and they told their readers the real number was likely far lower.

The FBI's files, typed up in field offices around the country, are rich with accounts of what happened when journalists criticized the Front: threats, intimidation and violence. One communiqué threatened a writer with death, along with four newspaper publishers who ran his stories. A hit list mailed out to the Vietnamese-language media identified five journalists who had criticized the Front. It labeled them "traitors" and said they would be executed. Two of the people on the list ended up dead.

A group of Front members dressed in their customary brown shirts assaulted an Orange County, California, newspaper owner twice; his attackers were angered by an article he'd published "regarding the Front's scheme to defraud the Vietnamese community," according to an FBI report.

Front members mounted a harassment campaign against the staff of Viet Press, another Orange County newspaper, pressuring businesses to pull their advertisements until the paper shut down. "I lost, I believe, about $84,000," the publisher, Nguyen Tu A, recalled.

In Fresno, gunmen shot a writer in the face after he dared take on the Front in a newspaper essay. He survived.

Pham Van Tap wasn't as fortunate. Tap ran MAI, an entertainment-focused magazine that carried ads for three companies engaged in commerce with Vietnam, wiring money or shipping packages to the country. An arsonist torched Tap's office in Garden Grove while he slept in the building. He died of smoke inhalation.

Another communiqué, sent to the Vietnamese-American press, followed the killing. This one said Tap had been killed because he was a greedy character who supported the Communists by publishing the ads.

Duong Trong Lam, 27, was killed in San Francisco for being unacceptably sympathetic to the Hanoi regime. While Lam didn't openly criticize the Front, he had opposed the Vietnam War and his pro-Communist views, deeply unpopular with many Vietnamese-Americans, were reflected in his newspaper.

The communique issued after Lam's murder was signed by the Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation, or VOECRN. The FBI came to theorize that VOECRN -- the name would pop up in other acts of violence -- was simply a kind of cover name for the Front.

If the effort was meant to disguise the Front's role in the growing catalogue of mayhem, it didn't work.

"What appeared to link them all together were the communiqués," said Katherine Tang-Wilcox, a former agent who helped lead the FBI probe. "There were death threats, there were attacks, the murders. These communiqués, they took credit for them, or they threatened they were going to do it."

Tang-Wilcox said investigators eventually began to collect accounts from former members of the Front who said the group had actually created a death squad and code-named it "K-9." An FBI investigative summary dated Nov. 4, 1991 is laden with references to K-9. One report names K-9's alleged leader. Another connects K-9 to specific murders. Yet another calls K-9 the Front's "enforcement branch."

"K-9 was established as the assassination arm of the Front," Tang-Wilcox recalled.

Now retired from the bureau, Tang-Wilcox remains unsure about who ordered the hits. But she is convinced that the Front and its death squad were responsible for the killing of Triet and his wife. And she is just as certain that the group killed Houston publisher Nguyen Dam Phong years before.

When Dam Phong started his newspaper in 1981, it was difficult to find a typewriter with the accent marks used in the Vietnamese script. So Dam Phong painstakingly went through the copy line by line, writing in the accents by hand with a pen. He was, by any measure, a media pioneer, one of the first Vietnamese immigrants to establish a newspaper in the U.S.

After spending his days working as an assistant in a dentist's office, Dam Phong came home and poured himself into the paper, tapping at the typewriter, pasting up columns of copy on a light table. The enterprise devoured his time and gobbled up his money. Still, Dam Phong loved it.

"The objective was to be the voice for the people," said his son, Tu Nguyen, who helped distribute the paper, named Tu Do. "Really that was his goal. He was not in it to make money. There was no money to be made."

His father, he said, was driven to hunt for the truth, regardless of the consequences.

Dam Phong eventually began to publish his version of the truth about the Front. Dam Phong had no love for Communism, but he thought Minh was a fraud, a charlatan who was misleading the Vietnamese people. So he attacked the Front in editorials -- in one he labeled Minh and his followers "clowns" -- and in muckraking articles.

In 1982, the Front pulled off a major publicity coup: CBS News described Minh's guerrillas and their cause in a dramatic segment that aired nationally.

Featuring footage of Front soldiers trudging through the jungle, the story relayed the Front's claim that its troops had gone behind enemy lines and set up camp in the Vietnamese backcountry.

Dam Phong began poking holes in the story, discovering that the troops hadn't gotten anywhere near Vietnam. One headline in Tu Do shouted: The Truth About Admiral's Minh Return to Vietnam. Dam Phong flew to Bangkok, where his reporting led to more revelations, including the location of the Front's base in Thailand, which the group had tried to keep secret.

The Front tried to silence Dam Phong using an array of different tactics, according to his son, Tu. They tried to bribe him with envelopes of cash, but he refused. Then, Tu recalled, there was an incessant series of phone calls "from people threatening to kill him if he doesn't stop publishing the articles about the Front." Finally, there was a meeting with Front leaders in a restaurant in downtown Houston.

The leaders, Tu said, gave his father an ultimatum: Stop the stories or perish.

Days later, Dam Phong was dead, shot in his pajamas and left in his driveway. The assassin -- or assassins -- left behind no shell casings.

"I do think that, particularly with Nguyen Dam Phong in Houston, and Le Triet and his wife, unfortunately, in Fairfax, Virginia -- there is a distinct belief on my part that the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam was responsible for those murders," said Tang-Wilcox, the former FBI agent.

Of Dam Phong's murder, she said, "There were no other motives developed, other than the problems that he was having with the Front, because of the articles he was publishing. And then the way the murder was conducted. The casings were picked up and collected ... That was someone who was highly trained, that knew what they were doing, and wasn't going to leave any evidence that would be remotely helpful behind. And the communiqué was left with him."

"It was an assassination."

One man says he knows who was responsible for Dam Phong's death. He is a former South Vietnamese officer and a onetime member of the Front. His light-brown skin is lined by age, his dark hair streaked with white.

In August, he agreed to an interview with ProPublica and Frontline at his tidy one-story home. He said he would discuss the activities of the Front only if we did not name him and referred to his current residence only as a Southern town.

After a long conversation in Vietnamese and English, we placed a list of five names before him, those of the dead journalists. He squinted, leaned forward and pointed a thin finger at the first two names: Duong Trong Lam and Nguyen Dam Phong.

"We killed them," he said quietly.

What about the others?

"I'm not sure," he replied. "And I don't want to say anything unless I'm completely sure."

The man would not say who pulled the trigger or who gave the orders. His demeanor was sober, but he did not evince any obvious remorse. He said he had never been interviewed by anyone in American law enforcement.

In all, ProPublica and Frontline found five former Front members who acknowledged that a death squad known as K-9 had done the group's dirtiest work. One was Tran Van Be Tu.

In the early 1980s, Be Tu was a hardcore anti-Communist: He was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder after shooting a man named Tran Khanh Van in Westminster, California, in 1986. Van had been quoted in a Los Angeles Times feature story advocating for dialogue with the Communist government in Vietnam.

"I shoot, he fell like a tree," Be Tu said. "Communists are like sick, sick people."

Saying he had broken with the Front before the shooting, Be Tu nonetheless spoke with familiarity and pride about his years with the Front, and about the fear the group struck in its enemies. He said people in Orange County regarded those who killed supposed Communists as heroes. Be Tu said he'd been recruited to join the K-9 unit, but chose not to, though he admired its work.
"K-9, they do a good job, they professional," he said. "And they never get caught."

A longtime friend of two of the Front's top commanders -- men the FBI suspected of directing attacks - Be Tu said he thought K-9 had murdered Dam Phong, and was likely responsible for the slayings of Pham Van Tap and Le Triet and his wife.

We asked him directly if he knew the name of the person who had killed Dam Phong.

He laughed.

"Sound like you FBI," he said.

Vietnamese-Americans have in many respects lived out the classic immigrant trajectory -- gradually shedding their identity as exiles and assimilating into the American mainstream.

But venture into any of America's Little Saigon neighborhoods, and it's not hard to detect the enduring tensions, an amalgam of secret histories and disputed allegiances. The slur of "Communist" is still sometimes hurled at business competitors or rival politicians.

Former members of the Front, and those who consider themselves the victims of the group's violent tactics, live alongside each other in these immigrant corners of California and Virginia, Houston and New Orleans. Silence remains the dominant language. Even all these years later, Front members are less than eager to revisit explosive allegations, and victims are often scared to be seen as making trouble.

Doan Van Toai was a writer and activist who criticized the Front in print. In 1989, he was shot in the face near his home in Fresno, California. Toai still doesn't know for sure who tried to kill him -- there have been no arrests -- and is careful not to implicate anybody.

But Toai is sure he was targeted because of his writings and public statements. And he got the message. After the shooting, Toai stopped writing and withdrew from the public eye.

In the 1980s, Tam Nguyen worked as a journalist for a Vietnamese-language newspaper in San Jose that challenged the Front. Tam didn't write the contentious stories -- "I wouldn't dare" -- but when he showed up at a Front event with his camera in hand, Front loyalists assaulted him, leaving him bloody and shaken.

Today Tam is a San Jose City Council member, representing the city's 7th District. The era of terror, he said, is "a painful memory I tried to bury deep down." Around San Jose -- at the coffee shops and shopping malls and Buddhist temples -- he sometimes encounters his old foes from the Front, much older, perhaps mellowed. It can be deeply uncomfortable, he said.

Nguyen Xuan Nghia was a member of the Front and today he speaks of his decade with the group with a blend of defensiveness and regret.

Nghia served as a key strategist and communications chief for the Front during the 1980s, and spent roughly a decade in the group's top echelon. Trained as an economist, and a longtime student of Asian history, Nghia today lives in Orange County, California. He is, of all things, a prolific columnist, appearing regularly as a commentator in other Vietnamese media.

In a series of interviews with ProPublica and Frontline, Nghia offered shifting takes on the Front. At first, he insisted that the organization wasn't connected in any way to attacks on journalists or others in the U.S.

In later conversations, when confronted with evidence of the Front's violence, he adopted a different line. In a videotaped interview, Nghia said it was "quite possible" that Front members were behind the assassination of Dam Phong and could have committed other crimes. There was, he acknowledged, a violent faction within the organization, and when the videographers turned off the cameras, Nghia admitted he had participated in a Front meeting during which members discussed a plan to assassinate a well-known newspaper editor in Orange County. Nghia said he dissuaded his colleagues from killing the man.

"It was a dark chapter in my life," he said.

Nguyen Xuan Nghia today calls his time with the Front "a dark chapter" in his life.

In Houston, Dam Phong's family wants nothing more than for the darkness around his death to lift. After the killing, the family didn't have the money to move to a new home. So for years his wife and many of his 10 children continued to live at the address where Dam Phong was slain.

For Tu, his father's death was devastating, but not really surprising. Tu knew about the threatening phone calls. He knew his father had bought a handgun for protection and kept a German shepherd to guard the house.

"They told him they were going to take him out," Tu recalled.

Tu, who once helped his father deliver the newspaper in the family sedan, is now a computer engineer. He lives in an upscale neighborhood of tranquil tree-lined streets.

On some weekends he takes his two children to the cemetery in nearby Pearland, to the grave of Dam Phong.

Sometimes he squats down, stares at the ground and speaks, in a near whisper, to his father. He talks of gaining certainty, if not full justice.

"For us, we just want an answer," he said. "That's it."

Part II: A Failed Case Grows Colder

Duong Trong Lam was 27 when he was killed outside of his San Francisco apartment in 1981.

Just 24 hours after Duong Trong Lam's murder on July 21, 1981, a San Francisco police detective wrote out a short list of motives that might explain how the 27-year-old newspaper publisher had come to be fatally shot outside his apartment building. Some of the detective's guesses were routine: love perhaps, maybe money.

But police records show the detective had reason to consider another possibility: politics. Lam and the newspaper he put out were seen as sympathetic to the Communists back in Vietnam, and Lam had received threats from those in the Vietnamese-American community who considered him a traitor.

Within days of Lam's murder, a public claim of credit surfaced - a communiqué sent to the Associated Press saying Lam had been punished because he was pro-Communist. Weeks later, Lam's friends wrote formally to the local police and the FBI, citing the communiqué and expressing worry that Lam's murder was part of a widening pattern of politically motivated violence.

The authorities, records and interviews show, nonetheless rebuffed the idea.

Pressed by Lam's friends, federal prosecutors asked the FBI if Lam's murder might have been "a possible terrorist act." The FBI stood by its position that the killing was not political.

Ultimately, agents spent years investigating a string of simila...