Family Fears 2 Evangelists Are Being Held in Vietnam : Religion: No word has been heard in two weeks. Two others escaped and have asked Reps. Rohrabacher and Dornan to help.

Vu Van Ho’s visa read “tourist” when he traveled to Vietnam in May for the fourth time in recent years. But tucked carefully among the beachwear in his five suitcases were also 35 Bibles, his tools as an underground Christian evangelist.

Arriving at the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Ho slipped an inspector a few bills and managed to get his religious staples into the country with ease, he said.

But the coming weeks proved far tougher as Ho and three other Orange County-based evangelists, including his father, taught their ways of worship to Christians in Vietnam. Authorities questioned the four for two days about their activities, including one stretch of 11 hours, Ho said.

Ho, 31, of Cypress and another member of the group made it back to Orange County last week, unharmed. But Ho’s father and another minister in their group have not been heard from in two weeks, and the Ho family fears they are still being detained in Vietnam.

Ho family members, who left Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975, have waited since the end of June, hoping for word on Nhi Van Ho, 58, and his fellow minister on the trip, Tuan Phuc Ma.

But Wednesday, they got tired of waiting and contacted Reps. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) to appeal for help.

“It’s kind of outrageous,” Paul Behrends, a legislative aide in foreign affairs for Rohrabacher, said of the family’s story. “Vietnam is a corrupt regime, and it’s more based on the fear of losing power than anything else. Learning about God . . . (is) the kind of thing that will undermine their society. They’re afraid of that.”

Behrends said Rohrabacher plans to use contacts he developed in a December trip to Vietnam to get information on the men. “We’ll do everything we can,” he said.

Pham Que, first secretary in the Permanent Mission of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the United Nations, said in an interview from New York Wednesday: “I don’t know anything about anyone detained in Vietnam. And as for religion, our policy is that there is freedom of religion in Vietnam.”

But the secretary added that foreign missionary work is “not encouraged. If they want to have religious activities, they should work with our government first to get permission.”

Vu Ho, a former Pacific Bell agent who volunteers at Ma’s Vietnamese Full Gospel Church in Santa Ana, said he and his father never sought government permission because they believed they knew what the answer would be.

Despite public assurances in the last few years that the Vietnamese government is loosening its hold over religion, Vu Ho and his brother, Thi Van Ho, a former aide to Dornan and a Republican and Vietnamese activist, said they believe just the opposite is true.

The brothers maintained that a “crackdown” on unpopular forms of religion has led to a growth in Vietnam of an underground church movement of Pentecostals.

Thousands in Vietnam meet secretly in homes, old meeting halls or wherever they find a spot, the brothers said. “There’s a lot of people being persecuted for what they believe,” Thi Ho said.

Vu Ho said he and the other three evangelists working with him knew the risk in traveling to Vietnam. But, he said, “we are Christians, and I believe it’s the Lord’s work to protect us.”

The men took Bibles, videos and other literature aimed at helping Vietnamese spread the word of Christianity, said Vu Ho and Thanh Tran, 23, one of the other four evangelists. And they visited several churches around Ho Chi Minh City and Vung Tau, taking part in revival-style meetings and distributing literature and Bibles.

But at one such meeting at the end of June in Vung Tau, some participants believed there were undercover agents among their ranks. The four Americans started to leave the city quickly in a van, according to Vu Ho’s account, but were stopped by local police.

Even as the officer drove the van to a local police station, Ho said he and the other men in the back of the vehicle destroyed videos they had with them. But still in their possession were Bibles, and these were discovered by agents once they arrived at a station, he said.

“They never say they’re arresting you,” Ho recounted. “They invite you for questioning.”

Ho said he was subjected at one point to 11 straight hours of interrogation. He was put overnight in a local hotel, guarded by agents from Ho Chi Minh City who had arrived in town to do the questioning.

The men were not allowed to leave, Ho said. They were moved from one room to another, sometimes together, sometimes alone, grilled by as many as three local police and federal agents, he said.

“ ‘You better tell the truth!’ ” Ho recalled his interrogators yelling as they asked him about what churches he had visited and whom he had seen. “The call you stupid--they yell and scream at you.”

Tran said his questioners never physically hurt him. But, he added, “they were rough, undisciplined people. . . . They want to play with your mind--they ask the same thing over and over and try to harass you.”

Tran and Ho said they tried to withhold information on the names of churches and of the members they had seen, but discovered that the authorities already knew much about their activities.

Ho remembers the troubling thoughts that ran through his mind as he endured the interrogations.

“By faith, I think I’m OK. But by intelligence, I think I’m in trouble,” he said. “They knew too much.”

On Sunday, June 30, Ho said his father drove to a relative’s house in Ho Chi Minh City and retrieved $800 for the four of them to pay in fines for violations of Vietnamese religious law and for traveling without their passports. They were released and thought the ordeal had ended then, Ho said.

But the next day, as the men were staying at a relative’s home in Ho Chi Minh City, the elder Ho and Ma were “invited” to come down--alone--to the station for further questioning, the younger Ho said. And the two men were told to come back the next day as well, Ho said.

The younger Ho had been planning to stay in Vietnam for several more months. But plans changed after a relative took Ho’s father to the station that Tuesday morning and came back with an ominous message from his father: Get out of the country, any way you can. Ho has not seen his father since that morning.

Authorities arrived at the relative’s home that Tuesday afternoon with a warrant and searched the place. Ho and Tran went the next day to the airport and, through what Ho called a “miracle,” managed to move up their flights to America by weeks--without interference from local authorities.

Ho has waited and prayed, but now says he is uncertain about the future.