Hanoi to Let U.S. Assist Vietnamese Americans : Asia: Liaison offices will be set up in both countries to perform embassy tasks, officials say. Pact is sign of steps to upgrade relations.

The Clinton Administration has concluded an agreement with the government of Vietnam that will open the way for U.S. diplomats to represent and protect Vietnamese Americans on Vietnamese soil, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The agreement means that any Vietnamese Americans who are arrested or imprisoned in Vietnam will be entitled to have U.S. diplomats visit them and try to ensure that they are treated humanely and fairly. It also means that U.S. diplomats in Vietnam can try to locate Vietnamese Americans who are missing, can help them replace lost U.S. passports and can try to arrange money transfers for those who are robbed.

The understanding is part of a broader accord in which Vietnam and the United States agreed to open up liaison offices in each other’s capitals. These offices, to be staffed by at least 10 diplomats each, will carry out some of the functions of embassies until diplomatic relations are established between the two governments.

The move to set up the offices is one of several indications that the Administration is taking steps to upgrade relations with Vietnam. Last week, Vietnamese Deputy Premier Tran Duc Luong visited Washington for talks with Secretary of State Warren Christopher. “The point is that we have taken another step forward,” a senior Administration official said Tuesday.

President Clinton proposed the creation of liaison offices when he lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam in February. But the final arrangements were not worked out until Friday, after Luong’s visit, when Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord signed the documents spelling out the details.

“We have now agreed on consular protection (for Vietnamese Americans), and we can begin to look for property and open up the offices,” the senior Administration official said.

In the past, Vietnam took the position that Vietnamese Americans are not entitled to the protection of U.S. diplomats because they are Vietnamese nationals. But the Administration stuck to the traditional U.S. view that they are American citizens and are entitled to the same consular protection as any other Americans.

“They (the Vietnamese government) finally came around on this issue,” a State Department official said.

In the 1990 Census, 615,000 Americans identified themselves as of Vietnamese descent, including 280,000 in California. In recent years, many Vietnamese Americans have returned to their homeland to do business or visit relatives.

The new U.S. liaison office in Hanoi could be opened within the next two months. “It’s a matter of finding the property,” a State Department official said.

U.S. and Vietnamese officials also have agreed on a return of the properties that each government owned on the other’s soil.

The U.S. government will get back 32 properties that it owned in Vietnam, most of them in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. The Hanoi government will get back a single property, the building that served before the end of the Vietnam War as South Vietnam’s embassy in Washington.

The U.S. properties probably will include the former U.S. Embassy in Saigon, from which crowds of Americans and Vietnamese were evacuated by helicopter at the end of the war in April, 1975.

In some instances, a State Department official said, the United States might accept replacement property if the building it originally owned is now occupied and used for other purposes.

Administration officials have said that the United States will not establish formal diplomatic relations with Vietnam until after Hanoi cooperates further in the task of accounting for Americans missing in action during the war.