An FBI Scheme We Don’t Need : Effort to enlist U.S. Vietnamese as informants is misguided

The FBI has long used wiretaps and informants, stakeouts and surveillance to catch spies. Now it is buying newspaper advertisements to beseech newcomers from Vietnam to turn in “underground communist spies.” The old ways are better.

The FBI campaign has been running in Vietnamese-language newspapers in a number of areas, including Orange County, which has about 100,000 Vietnamese and Vietnamese American residents divided between supporters and opponents of closer relations with the communists governing Vietnam.

Clearly, ads like these can encourage suspicions that there is a communist under every bed. They recall the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, which smeared many innocent Americans.

Nor is the intelligence haul likely to be impressive, judging by early results. For instance, the leader of an Orange County group that supports former political prisoners in Vietnam said that those people critical of the advertisement “must be communist sympathizers.”

Let’s be clear. Concerns are real. The end of the Cold War was not the end of spying. But the FBI would be better off using its normal investigative techniques. Emigres should be encouraged to understand that their new country protects free speech and unfettered thought, without fear that the next door neighbor is an informer.