FBI Reportedly Will Investigate Shooting of Viet Writer

The FBI will investigate the attempted assassination of Vietnamese author Doan Van Toai, who reportedly had received death threats at his home several weeks after writing a controversial magazine article that called for the United States to establish diplomatic ties with Vietnam.

Toai, who was shot three times as he was walking home Saturday, had informed the FBI about threats including a mailed warning accompanied by a bullet, sources within the Fresno Vietnamese community said.

A Fresno County Sheriff’s Department spokesman declined Sunday to comment on reports of recent death threats but said the FBI decided to intervene in the case at the request of the family.

Toai, who remained in serious condition Sunday at Valley Medical Center in Fresno, has long been a controversial figure because of his actions during the Vietnam War and his writing since.

Through his books “The Vietnamese Gulag” and “Portrait of the Enemy,” co-written with David Chanoff, and his magazine, Toai in recent years has advocated restoring ties with Vietnam to deliver humanitarian aid to the people. In a 1986 interview with The Times, he said that an article he wrote exposing alleged fraud by an anti-Communist group provoked death threats.

Family Threatened

“I wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times saying these people who want to fight the Communist government are collecting money for that cause but are actually using the money for themselves,” Toai said then. “The group that I wrote about in 1982 was overwhelmingly supported by the refugee community in Los Angeles.

“The group threatened to kill my whole family after the story ran,” Toai said.

An associate blamed the attempt on Toai’s life on a mistranslation of something Toai had written recently in his newsletter about reeducation camps and resettlement. “Due to that mistranslation we received a lot of tension, the community (became) upset,” said the associate, Vinh Ngo.

Fresno police said Toai was shot about half a mile from his home in an upper-middle-class section of northern Fresno. He had dropped his car off shortly before 9 a.m. at a service station, shopped and was walking home when he was intercepted.

He was hit three times--once in the head and twice in the body--at close range by gunfire from an automatic pistol, authorities said. Witnesses told police the shots came from a dirty brown Pontiac station wagon carrying two Asian men.

“Apparently he was talking to them” when he was shot, Fresno Police Lt. Robert Hagler said. Toai staggered to the front door of a nearby house and asked for help before collapsing.

The shooting is the latest of several attacks in California in recent years against Vietnamese refugees who advocate that the United States establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

In 1986, a former Saigon housing official, Tran Khanh Van, was shot in Orange County’s Little Saigon after he was quoted as saying he supported normalizing relations with Vietnam. His assailant pleaded guilty and was convicted. And on April 30, 1988, novelist Long Vu suffered partial paralysis after a severe beating in the same Westminster refugee community. Vu’s columns were critical of both the South Vietnamese and present Communist governments in Vietnam. Last January, an arson fire destroyed a Garden Grove travel agency specializing in tours to Vietnam. No suspects have been arrested in the last two incidents.

Toai’s political views have long put him at odds with many in Southern California’s Vietnamese refugee community. Vietnamese-language newspapers have written editorials against him, and outspoken leaders warned him that his views are unwelcome.

Nhat Tien, a Santa Ana writer and poet, said Toai recently published a Washington magazine, Institute for Democracy in Vietnam, which served as a vehicle for expressing his political views on Vietnam.

In the magazine’s summer, 1989, issue, Toai argued that the United States should establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam, said Tien, who had a copy of Toai’s magazine.

Toai “believes that if there is a relationship with the United States, the condition of the poor Vietnamese people would change for the better. He believed that if economic conditions improved, the political climate would change, much like China,” Tien said.

On Sunday, Fresno Sheriff’s Sgt. Rick Cobbs said there have been no recent political firestorms “that I know of” in Fresno’s Vietnamese community.

In both Fresno, one of the largest Vietnamese resettlement communities in the country, and in Orange County’s Little Saigon, Toai was far from popular among refugees, several community leaders said Sunday.

In Fresno, a member of the Vietnamese Assn. of Central Valley said many people in the refugee community were suspicious of Toai because he made statements that led people to believe he supported the Communists. “He said, ‘The Communists do some good things for the people of Vietnam.’ . . . We escaped to come here; no way we can support the Communists.”

A prominent member of Fresno’s Vietnamese community who asked not to be identified added: “The Vietnamese community is really talking about this, they’re not surprised he was shot.”

Chuyen V. Nguyen, a former South Vietnamese Air Force pilot who lives in Orange County, recalled that Toai was a member of South Vietnam’s educated class who led anti-war protests in Saigon.

“He did a lot of damage to the democracy of Vietnam back home,” Nguyen said.

“Even after Toai escaped from some so-called prison in 1977 or 1978, he traveled to China with a North Vietnamese official who then opposed the regime in North Vietnam. We in the Vietnamese refugee community believe he has close ties to Vietnam,” Nguyen said.

“The Vietnamese people here in the U.S. view him as another member of the Communist Party.”

Wilkinson reported from Fresno, Reyes from Orange County. Times staff writer Nancy Wride also contributed to this report.