FBI Works to Link Viet Slaying With U.S. Terror Ring

The FBI has begun an investigation into political violence in U.S. Vietnamese exile communities as a result of the death last year of a Garden Grove publisher, an FBI spokesman said Tuesday.

Publisher Tap Van Pham died Aug. 9, 1987, in a fire at his office that police said was arson. A group calling itself the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation claimed responsibility in a communique sent to police the same day.

Similar communiques, naming the same group, have claimed credit for several other acts of violence in Vietnamese communities in other parts of the nation since 1980. That pattern prompted police to solicit the FBI’s help about three months ago, Garden Grove Police Sgt. Phil Mason said.

FBI spokesman Fred Reagan said Tuesday the bureau is trying to determine whether “a pattern is emerging” involving violent acts against Vietnamese victims in several U.S. cities.

“We opened this as a smaller part of a much larger investigation on a nationwide basis,” Reagan said.

Pham was editor and publisher of Mai magazine, a popular Vietnamese-language entertainment publication distributed in Orange County. A communique claiming responsibility for the fire in which he died said Pham had “received money from the enemy” by running advertising from businesses accused of being linked with the Communist government of Vietnam.

In October, The Times reported that law enforcement officials in many cities had concluded that at least 11 violent incidents in 1981-87 in Vietnamese communities across the country were politically motivated.

The FBI, which was not then involved in investigations into any of those crimes, has not included the attacks in its annual index of terrorist acts, known as the “Analysis of Terrorist Incidents in the United States.” That was because none of the incidents fulfilled the criteria for inclusion on the list, FBI spokesman Lane Bonner said last year.

“That’s the purpose of why we’re looking into the (Pham) investigation--to check if instances here are related and whether or not they’re going to meet our criteria,” Reagan said.

Agents, he said, are “looking for patterns among the variety of instances which have happened.”

He would not elaborate.

The 11 incidents included fires at the offices of export companies in Canada and a Los Angeles export firm; shootings of journalists in Arlington, Va., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Silver Spring, Md., in which two people were slain; the shooting of a pro-Hanoi activist and his wife in San Francisco, in which the wife was slain, and the wounding by gunfire of a former Saigon housing official in Orange County.

Brian Jenkins, director of research on political violence for the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, said the FBI’s involvement in the Garden Grove investigation “makes sense.”

He said many of the 11 incidents were probably motivated by deeply felt anti-Communist sentiments within Vietnamese exile communities in the United States.

Until now, Jenkins said, “there was a tendency to see them as disparate acts” with little in common but anti-Communist sentiment.

“There has to be some reasonable notion that there is a broader conspiracy and not isolated actions,” Jenkins said.

Garden Grove’s Sgt. Mason said police investigators asked the FBI to enter the Pham case because of the bureau’s vast resources and number of agents. “The FBI agreed to help us out--to look over the cases that we think might be related (to Pham’s death)--in other parts of the country,” he said.

Before his death, Pham received anonymous threats about publishing ads that anti-Communists tied to the government in Hanoi, friends and associates said. After the publisher’s death, police said the appearance of such ads in his magazine appeared to be the motive.

Police said investigators found about $80,000 in gold, jewelry and cash during a search after the fire.

Communique Called Authentic

Several weeks after Pham’s death, Mason and others involved in the investigation concluded that the communique claiming credit for the arson was authentic. At the time, Mason said he believed that its author “is responsible for, or directly connected to,” Pham’s death. He said that belief was based in part on a detailed examination of all the letters purportedly sent by the same group and claiming responsibility for other attacks.

Thus far, the Garden Grove investigation into Pham’s death has taken officers to Montreal, San Francisco and San Jose--cities with substantial Vietnamese populations. But with a limited budget, Mason said, he welcomed the FBI’s help.

“And they are serving their own needs too, because they’re trying to find out the relationships with these kinds of organizations,” Mason said.

No suspects have been identified, Mason said.