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25: loyalty and honor (1969) hien’s arrest came as a shock. As I left my house for the National Assembly building one day in April 1969, I had no idea that it marked the beginning of what would become an international cause célèbre and the most disastrous eight years in my life. I enjoyed the early-morning drive through Saigon’s quiet streets, planning in my mind the work I wanted to accomplish before other Assembly members and staff arrived. My first clue that this would not be a typical morning came when I saw several dozen people milling about in the Assembly square, which was usually almost deserted this early in the morning. As I drew closer, I realized they were all reporters or photographers. The official story was that Hien had been arrested in a routine road check, during which an alert security officer spotted Hien’s fake identity card. I suspected that the CIA actually triggered the arrest, knowing that the Agency had been aware of my brother’s intelligence work since I informed them about our first meeting in 1965. I learned later, while in prison, that this was all too true. The CIA in fact had “turned” Hien’s liaison officer contact for North Vietnamese intelligence, and he reported all of Hien’s activities to the Americans. When I learned this, it dispelled much of the guilt I had felt because I thought I was responsible for my brother’s capture. Hien’s arrest created a furor, both for me personally and in South Vietnam. It led to the arrest and trial of two dozen South Vietnamese officials, some of them quite prominent, who had been meeting with Hien and discussing issues over the years. Among them were Nguyen Lau, publisher of the English-language Saigon Daily News (later closed by the government), and Vo Dinh Cuong, a cousin of Hien’s and head of the Buddhist Layman’s Association (aligned with the An Quang pagoda). A few military officers and policemen also arrested at the time were either acquitted or not brought to trial at all.1 The storm centered on me. The fact that we were brothers and that we had a series of meetings, which I admitted publicly before Hien’s trial in July, created suspicion in some quarters that I, too, was a Communist sympathizer, if not an intelligence agent serving the North. Some hard-core Catholic anti-Communists who had sided with the French in the 1940s and 1950s had long been suspicious about my true reasons for defecting from the Viet Minh and joining the South. Many of them also regarded all Buddhists as Communist sympathizers, which was false. True, South Vietnamese Buddhists advocated government reform, but they were aware that their fate would worsen under a Communist government.2 335 loyalty and honor Others, particularly my political opponents, took advantage of the situation to weaken my support by casting doubt on my true allegiance, though privately almost all of them knew full well that I was not a Communist agent, or even a sympathizer. My failure to formally notify South Vietnamese officials about my initial and subsequent meetings with Hien was illegal under the letter of the law. One must consider the context of the times, as Elizabeth Pond explained accurately and succinctly :3 “Chau’s decision not to tell Vietnamese authorities anything formally was natural enough, given the inept and ephemeral nature of the post-coup governments . A certain economy of information is advisable when someone new may be in power in a few months and anyone with access to the files could turn information against one. [In this period and later many Vietnamese had contacts with ‘the other side’ and didn’t report them. This situation was considered normal.] And after Thieu came to power Chau probably thought that the private understandings, whatever they were, would cover him.” Furthermore, I did believe that my discussions with John Vann and his reports to the U.S. embassy provided evidence of my good faith and loyalty. I was not too concerned at first. The government did refuse permission for me to travel abroad, but Thieu did not immediately move against me after Hien’s trial in July.4 But true friends were already deeply concerned about what they assessed as my precarious position. My good friend Captain Sauvageot (a colonel when he retired) told me that a few weeks earlier he had been ordered to...

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