TTTTTT
On August 9, 2002, Hanoi
state-run newspaper Nhan Dan (People) and foreign media from Hanoi reported the
death of a North Vietnamese Communist spy in the South Vietnam government
during the war. Vu Ngoc Nha, 74, passed away on August 7 in his Saigon home
after years of illness.
Most
of reports regarding his story as a spy are based on documents and materials
released by the Communist propaganda system, in the so-called true stories or
memoirs. Vu Ngoc Nha has been a main
character in such a book published by the state-run publisher. Hanoi even
produced a television documentary about his life in espionage in which Nha was
playing the part of himself. The Hanoi satellite TV channel VTV4 covering North
America was broadcasting the documentary a month prior to Nha's death.
According
to the books and the documentary, Vu Ngoc Nha began his spying task for the
Vietnam Communist Party and its army since 1954 after the Geneva Agreement
dividing the country into two parts.
He
gained confidence of the Rev. Le Huu Tu, the well-known anti-Communist bishop
of Phat Diem diocese in North Vietnam, then a popular Catholic leader in
Saigon.
Shortly
after leaving North Vietnam for Saigon, Nha became a top confidential advisor
to the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, an intimate friend of President Diem and
his brothers, even treated as a member of the president's family, Nha claimed.
Under
the Second Republic and President Nguyen Van Thieu, the story goes, he was
still working as a top advisor to the president. President Thieu trusted him to
the extent that he regularly shared meals with Nha and gave Nha a key to his
bedroom.
The
stories by Hanoi assert that in 15 years serving the two South Vietnam
presidents, Nha regularly passed Saigon government secret information to the
Communist high command without being suspected by the presidents until 1969.
According
to news reports, the American CIA uncovered the espionage ring led by Nha in
1969 and Saigon security authorities arrested him on July 16 the same year. Nha
and three others in a spy cell were convicted of treason and sentenced to life
in prison. He was released to the Communist side at the POW exchange following
the Jan-27 Paris Agreement in 1973. Hanoi then promoted him to brigadier
general.
His
story is a sensational work of the Hanoi propaganda system. The book "Ong
Co Van" (The Advisor) drew a large number of readers as it is based on
many facts, real characters and true events inserted into a neatly worked-out
plot full of lies for propaganda purpose. That makes the work half fiction,
half news story.
Following
are true facts against the tall story provided by several reliable sources,
some of which are confirmed by former security authorities of the South Vietnam
government who had been directly in charge of supervision on the case. One of
the reports came from Tu Gan, real name Nguyen Can, former judge in South
Vietnam before 1975, now a journalist writing for Saigon Nho (Little Saigon
Weekly) in Orange County, California. Before November 1963, Nguyen Can had been
a close friend to many leading figures of the Diem government, of the
intelligence community in particular.
Nguyen
Can said that after the book was published in 1987 in Hanoi; every of its five
later editions by 2002 have some parts rewritten. So there are many differences between the contents of the first
and the fifth.
It
is true that Nha was sent to South Vietnam in 1954 to work for the Communists
as a mole in the South Vietnam government. He became a confident aid to Rev.
Hoang Quynh, a priest and a close assistant to Rev. Le Huu Tu. Thanks to Father
Hoang Quynh's recommendation, Nha found a job as a regular, non-specialized
clerk typist at the Ministry of Public Works. On the pay scale, his name was
near the bottom because of his low degree in education (5th grade).
His salary was a little higher than the wage earner's pay (class B-3 in the SVN
civil servant pay scale). At that time, he was a member of the spy cell, known
under the code name as A-22.
In
1958, the so-called Special Operation Group, a counter-espionage organization
of the National Police General Department, arrested Nha and detained him at a
special incarceration center in Hue.
Mr. Nguyen Tu Thai, nickname Thai Den (Darky Thai), was a member of the
group who took part in the arrest, detention and supervision of Vu Ngoc Nha
until President Diem regime collapsed on November 3, 1963.
Thai
is now a resident in the United States after spending 18 years in the Vietnam
Communist prisons. He provided Tu Gan with further details, which are confirmed
by Mr. Duong Van Hieu, the chief of the Special Operation Group. Hieu has been
known as the most fearful spy hunter to the Communist spies and moles, and in
some cases, allegedly the skilful investigator to nationalist dissidents as
well. Hieu is living quietly in America.
The
sources assert that Vu Ngoc Nha was at the third rank in the 3-spy cell A-22.
He had never been close to Ngo Dinh Diem or any of Diem's brothers, let alone a
top advisor to the arrogant president who never employed anyone of low formal
degree as his advisor. He had never met with Diem or Nhu, according to another
source close to the Diem family.
A
few months after being detained in 1958, Nha agreed to work for the Special
Operation Group in exchange for his parole. He was doing good help to the
group. He was paid VN$ 2,200 a month (equal to an Army sergeant's pay) by a
special fund from the president's office. "Darky" Thai was handing on
the money to Nha every month. The last time Thai paid Nha was on October 30,
1963, two days before the coup d'etat overthrowing President Diem on November
1. The payment stopped since the coup.
Actually,
the Special Operation Group in co-operating with other members in the
intelligence community has detected and detained a large number of North
Vietnamese spies. Reliable sources assert that more than 400 ranking secret
agents (from captain to full colonel) sent by Hanoi into South Vietnam were
ensnared
by
the Saigon counter-intelligence nets.
Many
of them were detained in secret and quietly released on parole to serve Saigon
as double agents. They provided valuable advice and information to the South
Vietnamese intelligence services. Some returned to the Communist side and
continued working as moles for Saigon.
One
of them was Colonel Le Cau, Deputy Chief of Intelligence Department, the North
Vietnam Army J-2. He disclosed the accurate location and detailed operations of
the secret base Do Xa (Quang Ngai province) in 1961, previously unknown to
South Vietnamese military. That led to a large-scale bombardment destroying the
huge logistic base. He also advised the government to establish the two
provinces Quang Tin and Phu Bon to control the two infiltration routes into the
central coastal region from the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodge border areas.
Most
of other Hanoi's agents still in prison were released right after November 1,
1963, either by errors (mistaken them for nationalist political prisoners) or
by bribery.
As
the regime collapsed, so did its special police organizations. Some of the
released spies after several years without being watched by secret police,
renewed contact with the Communist intelligence and resumed espionage tasks.
When
General Nguyen Van Thieu became the chairman of the National Leadership
Committee then president of the Second Republic, his political chief of staff
employed Nha as a specialist. Mr. Nguyen Van Huong (also known as Muoi Huong,
Huong the Tenth), the Secretary General of the presidential office might have
been unaware of Nha's background, or he only admitted Nha in his department for
a counter-espionage scheme that he helped a part of it.
Nha's
job in Mr. Huong's staff could have helped him get access to some classified
materials, but not to many national top-secret documents as Hanoi boasts in the
book. Moreover, President Thieu was a skeptical leader. Even his wife didn't
know his intention of appointing a new province chief. There is no evidence that Thieu would
confide in Nha, a former Communist mole, although Nha had faithfully cooperated
with the secret services.
In
fact, the arrests of Nha and the other three moles in 1969 were not a result of
the CIA hunting operation. Their espionage activities must have been recorded
by all the top intelligence agencies in Vietnam and in the United States since
1958 when Nha and his comrades were arrested for the first time.
The
Vu Ngoc Nha story is nothing but a book for propaganda with brazen lies. In the
20-year Vietnam War, there were dozen cases of Communist spies infiltrating
into South Vietnamese government and military agencies. They were causing
considerable devastation to the national security of South Vietnam much more
seriously than what Vu Ngoc Nha did.
An
Army cryptographer sergeant working at the top-secret code room right beside
the office of the Chief of the Joint General Staff had been providing highly
classified information and code keys to North Vietnam Communists for years
until 1961. Others were court-martialed for collaboration with the enemy, among
them a "charge de mission" of the Foreign Ministry, a major in the
Military Justice Directorate, a cryptanalyst serving the SVN Army Signal
Corps...
But
Hanoi selected Nha, not the others, for its scheme of propaganda, possibly
because his story fit better for the purpose and he might have been more
co-operative in making up the book and the TV documentary.
For
the last four decades, the state-run publishing houses of the Communist regime
have produced hundreds of detective stories, in a political cloak-and-dagger
style serving political propaganda purposes in which facts mingle with lies.
As
to the commoners, Hanoi achieved some success with this strategy. Therefore,
its propaganda strategists haven't hesitated to tell brazen lies. They may be
certain that most common people have no access to other sources to make out the
truth. Highly educated and foreign audiences are not their primary targets.
For
the last few years, the effect of such strategy resorting to lies is on the
decrease as more and more information from outside the party-controlled sources
is reaching the grass roots.
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