True Spy Stories Behind ‘The Sympathizer’
The acclaimed novel, now a gripping HBO serial drama, tracks with some real and little known spy vs spy intrigue
Readers and critics the world over, but especially in America, have been dazzled by The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s deeply nuanced, Pulitzer Prize winning spy novel about a conflicted communist double agent ordered to accompany a South Vietnamese general fleeing Saigon at the war’s chaotic end. His mission: to keep an eye on anticommunist exiles in California.
Now finding new admirers as a dramatic series on HBO, its dreamy and even hallucinogenic passages could well lead viewers to think Nguyen’s gripping story, narrated by its troubled hero, is mostly, if not entirely, made up. A key plot line in the novel, however, is drawn from true events that were described by a retired North Vietnamese spymaster in a memoir published in Hanoi several years ago—a memoir I was lucky to obtain, and a general that I was privileged to meet, in his home in 2017.
When I met retired Major General Trần Tiến Cung in Da Nang that August, he was 88 and suffering from spina bifida and bad knees that confined him to a rattan chaise lounge while we talked. I’d hoped to engage him on a wide variety of subjects, in particular how he was able to outsmart the CIA—and me, a military intelligence case officer in Da Nang targeting him when he was the nearby local communist spy chief—in 1968-69. Alas, he was too weak to delve deeply into that, or his subsequent rise to a high rank in Hanoi where, among other things, he thwarted postwar attempts by a California-based anti-communist group trying to infiltrate Vietnam and organize a resistance. A 2015 PBS Frontline investigation with ProPublica into death threats and assassinations carried out by the group against suspected communist sympathizers in exile here got a slice of the story, but not the general’s role.
In his memoir, given to me by Merle Pribbenow, a Vietnamese-speaking former CIA operations officer who has spent his retirement translating wartime documents released by Hanoi, Cung pretty much says he had a spy or spies inside the exile group, probably from the get-go—just like in The Sympathizer.
“One of my primary missions … was to direct my organization in monitoring the general situation and the activities of reactionary Vietnamese living abroad, and in particular those who were trying to send forces back into Vietnam through Thailand and Laos,” he writes in “Home and Fellow Soldiers: A Memoir” (not available in English). In 1984, he says, “I personally participated in the direction of the wrapping up of a number of major cases involving illegal infiltration into Vietnamese territory of groups plotting to cause disruption and overthrow our revolutionary government.”
The first group of infiltrators was headed by a man named Võ Đại Tôn, a former South Vietnamese army special forces sergeant. Cung writes that his Laotian allies intercepted and rolled up the group and flew them to Hanoi for interrogation. He says the men quickly confessed and gave up their leader, who was tried and sentenced to harsh imprisonment, which included, Tôn wrote after his release and expulsion from the country later, a hellacious 10 years of solitary confinement.
Again in 1985, Cung recalled, he rolled up a second group of exiles trying to infiltrate Vietnam, this one led by Hoàng Cơ Minh, a notorious hardline former South Vietnamese vice admiral living in California. Minh ran a thuggish organization which the FBI, according to the PBS Frontline documentary, suspected of “intimidating or executing those who defied it,” particularly Vietnamese exile journalists, but anyone who refused their shakedowns. “Fire-bombings and beatings,” it said, were common.
Watching from Hanoi, it seems Cung was onto them early on.
“Our intelligence forces constantly monitored their activity very closely. In fact, we were even able to obtain a diagram of the locations and deployment of all of Hoang Co Minh’s forces” in Thailand, Cung wrote. “We also knew ahead of time exactly when they planned to leave for Vietnam.”
He adds, “For that reason, as soon as Hoang Co Minh crossed the border into Champassak Province to cross Laos and enter Vietnam, Lao troops working in coordination with our forces repeatedly attacked them along their route. In the end, when they reached a point where we had prepared and positioned forces to wait for them, the entire enemy commando force, made up of a number of different task forces, was annihilated.”
All this tracks with the beguiling drama laid out by Viet Thanh Nguyen1 in The Sympathizer. Like his protagonist, Nguyen, born in 1971, escaped Saigon with his family as the communists closed in four years later. They eventually settled in San Jose, a boiling cauldron of exile politics and the setting for much of his story. Gen. Trần Tiến Cung had the other side’s. Nguyen surely knew of it. ###
Episode 2 of The Sympathizer debuts Sunday night, April 21, on HBO. The series will be available for streaming on HBO/Max. For more on my meeting with Gen. Cung, see my 2017 Newsweek story, here.
The author has adopted an American version of his name, as have most Vietnamese immigrants. In Vietnamese it is Nguyễn Thanh Việt, with the family name first, the given name last.
Speaking of exile operations in old Indochina, the Reagan administration's Project Democracy
experimented with an early variation on the concept. It involved using the US Action Agency, the ostensible mothership of what was left of the Peace Corps, to infiltrate weapons and exiles-turned-operatives into Cambodia to battle and monitor Vietnamese communist forces there and possibly to penetrate Vietnam itself. There is evidence that some recruits came from Little Saigon in Orange County, California and refugee camps in Thailand. Ultimately controlled by the Pentagon, this off the books endeavor served as a protoype for Oliver North's later machinations south of the border. I mentioned this to Viet Thanh Nguyen on meeting him after reading The Sympathizer. He hadn't heard of this little piece of chicanery and seemed to have derived that part of his novel from reading press accounts of seemingly independent dead enders based in Orange County who were supposedly running allegedly private spoiler games in Vietnam. Having done extensive reporting on the Project Democracy op, I have always suspected the privateers from Orange County received a bit of encouragement and possible direction from Reagan's creative spymasters.
Jeff, that's a phot for the ages!