Word: pham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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RELEASED. PHAM DUC KHAM, 65, Vietnamese dissident who circulated the Freedom Forum; before completing his 12-year sentence; in Hanoi...
...late afternoon on Jan. 26, 1967, when the Air Force CH-53 helicopter dropped off Pham Ninh Ngoc and 10 other South Vietnamese at a clearing in North Vietnam, just across the Laotian border. The team, code named Hadley, was supposed to gather intelligence on supply convoys traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but within a day North Vietnamese soldiers began rounding up the commandos. An iron shackle was secured to Pham with a stake driven through the flesh of his leg, and he was taken north. Once in prison, he spent hours hanging upside down in the sun with...
After all this torture, Pham suffered something almost as terrible: betrayal. The U.S. Army officers who recruited him had promised that if he were captured, his mother and father would receive a stipend while he was in prison. But the U.S. reneged on the deal. Officers visited his parents and told them Pham was dead, and his family received nothing during the 16 years he was held by the North Vietnamese. When he returned home in 1982, his parents thought they were seeing a ghost...
...Pham, who is 49 and now lives in Garden Grove, California, was one of about 450 South Vietnamese commandos who were part of an operation called Oplan-34A, which the CIA and Pentagon ran between 1961 and 1968. Two hundred of the commandos who are now living in the U.S. have filed a suit asking that all commandos still alive be paid $2,000 for every year they served in prison--an estimated total of $11 million. Two weeks ago, the case broke open when a federal claims court forced the CIA and the Pentagon to declassify secret payroll rosters...
...general counsel Jeffrey Smith told Time. White House aides quickly cobbled together an amendment that calls for the commandos to be paid; it will be attached to the defense appropriations bill now before Congress. For about the cost of a new Comanche helicopter, the betrayal of Pham Ninh Ngoc and his comrades may finally be repented...