Anti-Communist Group Says It Caused Publisher’s Death

An anti-communist group has claimed responsibility, in a letter postmarked in San Jose and received Wednesday by at least two Vietnamese-language newspapers in Orange County, for setting the fire in which editor and publisher Tap Van Pham was killed Sunday.

The letter, dated Aug. 9 and sent to the offices of the newspapers Nguoi Viet and Tay Phai, says the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation was responsible for Sunday’s firebombing of the offices of Pham’s weekly magazine, Mai.

Some Vietnamese leaders in Orange County’s Little Saigon expressed reservations about the truth of the claims.

The typewritten letter says, in Vietnamese, that the “order to destroy” Pham’s offices was a result of his publishing ads for three Canadian companies that the group opposes. The letter makes no mention of any intention to kill Pham.

“Due to this intransigent attitude of receiving money from the enemy by those at the Mai weekly, and in order to have carried out (a previous warning), the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation decided to destroy the editorial offices of the Mai weekly,” the letter says.

The letter specifically criticizes three Canadian companies that advertised in Pham’s magazine, Vinamedic Inc., Laser Express and QTK Express, all based in Montreal. It accuses them of being linked with the Communist government of Vietnam.

Also included in the letter is a stern warning: “The party will continue to punish the Vietnamese Communist cadres and their lackeys. In addition, those individuals and their establishments who work for the benefits of Hanoi, directly or indirectly, specifically those magazines and newspapers that carry advertisements promoting the financial plans of Vietnam.”

Pham, 45, died when a 2 a.m. fire swept his small, one-story office at 10708 Westminster Ave. His body was found on the floor of the office by firefighters. Pham, who was also known by the pen name Hoai Diep Tu, died of smoke inhalation, according to preliminary autopsy results.

Garden Grove police handling the investigation of Pham’s death could not be reached for comment on the letter Wednesday night.

Douglas Zwemke, a San Jose Police Department intelligence officer specializing in the Vietnamese community, said Wednesday that he had been familiar with the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation before the arson.

He said he had first heard of the group last year when it claimed responsibility for the shooting of Tran Khanh Van of Santa Ana. Khanh Van, once a top housing official of the South Vietnamese government, was shot twice in Westminster on March 20, 1986, after an assailant made an extortion demand for $10,000 to help pay for anti-communist efforts.

Khanh Van, who survived the assassination bid, believed he was targeted because he had been portrayed as favoring normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam.

A few days after the shooting, a Vietnamese-language newspaper in San Jose received a copy of a threatening letter Khanh Van received before the attack, Zwemke said. It was sent by the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation from Southern California, he said.

The fact that this time the group’s letter was mailed from San Jose is “a wrinkle I didn’t know,” Zwemke said. “That bothers me a little bit.”

“This letter has tragic implications for the Vietnamese community,” said Do Ngoc Yen, editor of Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in Orange County’s Little Saigon. “Many businessmen also received it, and they and others are very, very frightened.

“If the group actually did kill Mr. Pham, this is tragic news. But if they didn’t, then I think the author of the letter also wants to exploit the situation by trying to spread fear in the community.”

Do said he intended to print excerpts from the letter in today’s edition of his paper.

When Pham was found dead in his office after the fire Sunday, friends searching for an explanation seized quickly on the theory that he was the victim of an arsonist angered by ads in his Vietnamese-language magazine.

Garden Grove police confirmed that it was arson but have said they are uncertain about the motivation. They say that the ads, which also had appeared in other Vietnamese publications in the county, may have been a factor but that they also are considering the possibility that the fire was the work of extortionists or the result of a personal grudge.

In the letter received Wednesday, the anti-communist group also took credit for the killings of two alleged pro-communists in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Nov. 23, 1985, firebombing of the Montreal offices of Vinamedic Inc. and Laser Express.

Duong Trong Lam, 27, the head of a Vietnamese youth development center, was shot and killed outside his apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district July 21, 1981. A friend and worker in Lam’s restaurant, Nguyen Van Dat, was arrested in connection with the murder but was not convicted.

In May, 1984, the wife of the founder and president of a San Francisco-based organization known as the Associated Vietnamese Community, Pham Thi Luy, 66, was shot to death outside her Sunset District home. Her husband, Nguyen Van Luy, 72, was critically wounded in the shooting.

But Zwemke said he doubted that the Party to Eliminate the Communists actually was responsible for the two killings.

He said the party’s existence as an organization, rather than just one or two persons, “hasn’t been clearly established.”

“Other than the (Khanh Van) shooting, the letter sent up here and the situation down there (in Orange County), I know of no other example in the United States where this organization has surfaced,” Zwemke said.

The idea of a rabid, violent, anti-communist organization behind the violence “sounds simple and tight, but is that what’s really going on? That’s the question, and I have some misgivings about it,” he said. “You have a lot of groups that would endorse (violence). They wouldn’t do it or officially condone it, but they wouldn’t mind seeing a Commie put out of the box.”

Zwemke said 10% of his city’s population of about 700,000 is Vietnamese, and though that community is hundreds of miles from Orange County’s, communication between the two is such that they might as well be side by side. The quickness of communication among relatives and acquaintances in the two areas is “phenomenal,” he said.

Details Quickly Received

“What occurs in the Vietnamese community in Orange County is felt in San Jose, is reported in San Jose, and vice versa. And in Houston and Arlington, Va., or New Orleans or any area where you have some Vietnamese population centers,” Zwemke said.

Consequently, Zwemke was not surprised to receive a telephone call from a Vietnamese acquaintence six hours after the firebombing in Garden Grove Sunday, telling him most of the details. “He didn’t get it from the news wires,” Zwemke said.

But, he said, so far the sort of violence that has occurred in Orange County “hasn’t been what you would call a problem here.”

The three companies whose ads were mentioned in the letter claiming responsibility for Pham’s death provide similar services. All offer to send packages of merchandise to relatives in Vietnam for certain prices.

Of the three, Vinamedic Inc. was singled out by friends of Pham as the most controversial.

In the full-page Vinamedic ad that ran in the July 31 issue of Pham’s magazine, the company offers to sell packages of penicillin and other antibiotics for U.S. dollars and ship them to relatives of the buyers in Vietnam. There, according to the ad, the packages can be picked up by the relatives or sold for specified amounts of Vietnamese money at the delivery points to government delivery agents.

Each of the packages costs from $100 to $200, and the ad “guarantees” the shipment’s value in Vietnamese currency. For example, in the Vinamedic ad, a $100 medical package was guaranteed to be worth 50,000 Vietnamese piasters, or dongs. At the official exchange rate, $100 would be worth about 8,000 Vietnamese piasters.

In fact, according to Vietnamese immigrants here who are upset about the Vinamedic ad, the packages of medicine--and other goods offered by companies conducting similar transactions--go to the Vietnamese government.

Rather than allow a recipient to pick up the package, an effort is made by the government agent to buy the package in exchange for Vietnamese piasters, according to Vietnamese immigrants.

“It’s a trick,” said one Vietnamese activist from Westminster, whose wife and children remain in Vietnam. “If my family receives a package and they refuse to sell it to the agent at the delivery station, they will never receive another package again.

“They have to take the Vietnamese dongs.”

Immediately after the Vietnam War, the United States imposed an embargo on direct shipments of any kind of goods to Vietnam. Since then, the State Department has relaxed its embargo, at least to the point of allowing direct shipments of small individual parcels containing only food, medicine and clothing.

For “humanitarian reasons,” a State Department official said, refugee families now are allowed to send up to $400 per household every three months to relatives in Vietnam.

“The Vietnamese government has said they’ve made it easier to increase the flow of money to that country,” the official said. “If someone sends over $300, it’s usually worth thousands of dollars on the black market, which the Vietnamese government is attempting to control.

“The theory is that they’re trying to fight the black market by attempting to simplify how items get through because it brings a lot of goods and currency.”

The reaction to all this among Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County is highly emotional.

“It’s so difficult for people to stay calm,” said Mai Cong, chairwoman for Vietnamese Community Inc., a private, nonprofit organization in Santa Ana that helps refugees with employment training and refers them to social services.

“In many cases, it concerns your relatives in Vietnam. They’re your blood--it is your relative. It’s a deep-seated emotional reaction.”

People want to help their relatives in Vietnam but don’t want to do anything that might strengthen the government in Hanoi, which is desperately in need of Western currency and medical supplies. The resentment Vietnamese immigrants feel over giving indirect aid to Hanoi is transferred to companies like Vinamedic, Cong said.

“It’s more than hatred,” she said. “It’s very difficult for people here to understand why companies would do this for money. For those who have relatives who have been imprisoned and hurt or persecuted in Vietnam, it will always be there in their mind.”

Yet, because relatives’ medical care may be at stake, there is considerable ambivalence as well.

“If the mechanism to send things home is disrupted, we suffer more than the (Vietnamese) government does,” said a Vietnamese doctor in Santa Ana.

“Most people have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand they need it, but they are also unhappy about it.”

Times staff writer Steve Emmons contributed to this article.