He was an American spy. She was a South Vietnamese chemist for an oil firm. They teamed up to root out corruption that threatened her country’s survival.
When William R. Johnson arrived in Saigon at the end of 1972 as the new chief of the CIA’s base there, he badly needed two sources: someone who could provide information on the military operations of South Vietnam’s high command; and an oil industry insider who could help figure out why petroleum that arrived in the country often did not reach its intended destinations at airports and military bases. Johnson was fortunate to find both sources in a single person: Le Thi Ngoc Ha, chief chemist for oil company Esso Vietnam and the niece of an army general.
The two first met in January 1973 at a banquet in Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel for several Esso employees and Americans from the U.S. Embassy. Le Ha was a 31-year-old native of Vietnam—the eldest among five girls and six boys—with a doctorate in biochemistry from Victoria University in New Zealand. After returning to Saigon in the summer of 1968, she married, taught school for a semester and accepted a position with Esso at the end of the year. She was fluent in Russian, French and English. Her husband, Tran Ba Touc, held a position with the Central Bank of Vietnam.
Johnson, 53, was born in Colorado, majored in English literature at Yale University, served with the Military Intelligence Service in World War II and joined the CIA in 1948. Fluent in French and Italian, he was one of five base chiefs in South Vietnam. Each operated in a different city, and all reported to the CIA’s top official in the country, station chief Thomas Polgar, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
That night at the Caravelle, Johnson told Le Ha he worked in the embassy’s political section. He said his wife, Pat, also at the banquet, was an embassy employee too. She was in fact another CIA agent. Le Ha was drawn to the couple and met socially with them several times. At first they talked about their travels and family and friends, but before long their discussions shifted to South Vietnam’s problems and prospects for survival.
Johnson had been optimistic about the country’s chances when he started working in Saigon. “I thought as far as the military situation was concerned—with real and genuine American support, and real commitment of air support when it was needed, and with funding for the government of South Vietnam—there was a good chance the South Vietnamese could prevail,” he said in an interview.
Le Ha, deeply concerned about her country’s deteriorating fortunes, told Johnson corruption was crippling the war effort. She had heard that a significant portion of the corruption involved Americans as well as Vietnamese. During one dinner conversation, Le Ha said a CIA officer in charge of a base in the Central Highlands was caught stealing funds that had been allocated to South Vietnamese armed forces. She mentioned the amount of money he had diverted and gave Johnson the name of the officer’s Vietnamese mistress, who participated in the scheme. The fraud was so widely known in Vietnamese military and political circles that surely people in the U.S. Embassy were aware of it, she suggested.
Johnson, aware of the incident involving the CIA officer, knew that Le Ha must be connected to an information pipeline, likely through her work or relatives. One uncle, Vinh Loc, was a cousin of Emperor Bao Dai, who lost power in 1955 when a referendum made Ngo Ninh Diem president of the new Republic of Vietnam. Vinh Loc had been an aide to the emperor and was now one of the highest-ranking generals in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Le Ha’s boss, Do Nguyen, was in charge of Esso Vietnam’s logistics, marketing and supply department. He had worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Esso sent him to the United States for a year to study management and the petroleum business.
In 1971 Esso also gave Le Ha a year of specialized training in the United States. “I learned that many Americans really knew very little about Vietnam,” she later recalled in an interview. “When I tried to speak with Americans and tell them what was happening in Vietnam, they would not listen. They did not want to hear.” When Le Ha returned to Saigon, Esso named her public affairs manager as well as lab supervisor.
Le Ha had been just as curious about Johnson’s connections as he was about hers. She did some research and learned of his CIA ties. Though reluctant to admit it at first, Johnson eventually revealed his true identity as the Saigon base chief. He came to trust Le Ha and in early spring 1973 asked her to work for him.
Johnson had taken to calling Le Ha “Holly,” a nickname derived from switching the order of the two parts of her name and mispronouncing them as Americans would: Ha Le. Johnson told her that South Vietnam’s survival depended on quick action to stop corrupt officials from selling to the other side supplies purchased with American dollars, including rice, weapons and petroleum. His information indicated that the culprits included people high up in the South Vietnamese government and military. He wanted to know who they were. And if they had American partners, Johnson said, he wanted to know that too. Le Ha might be able to uncover that information through her contacts in the Vietnamese government, he said.
The pilferage of supplies was not the only problem, Johnson added. South Vietnam’s armed forces were getting gasoline, jet fuel, diesel fuel and lubricating oil that was often contaminated. Fuel bound for military units was tested by the Esso lab, and Johnson suggested that Le Ha could use her contacts and position as head of the lab to help track down the people hijacking and contaminating petroleum products.
Her task was not without risk, Johnson acknowledged. If Le Ha was identified as a CIA source, her life would be in danger. On the other hand, he assured her, if she shared what she was doing with no one outside her family, the chances of being detected were nearly zero.
Le Ha did not tell her husband about Johnson’s offer, but she did ask her father for advice. He cautioned that the CIA could neither gather nor keep secrets very well. She responded that all Johnson had promised her was a chance to help her country survive. A few days later Le Ha told Johnson she would help him.
In the Esso Vietnam lab, Le Ha worked closely with a prominent union leader who was outspoken in his denunciations of the government and subtly indicated he favored the Communist cause. Because other workers constantly deferred to him and seemed to fear him, Le Ha began to monitor his work more carefully. It did not take her long to realize that he, his assistants and co-workers were sabotaging petroleum tests.
The petroleum products were shipped in tankers from a refinery in Singapore. When the shipments arrived in South Vietnam, samples from the tankers were tested for contamination. The fuel then was transported on barges and trucks to military installations. Because the fuel could be contaminated at the point of import, during transportation or in the field, there were several stages of testing.
“If one test was not right, it could slow down the whole operation of getting fuel to our troops and aircraft,” Le Ha said. “And every time we had barges loading and unloading, many people knew about it and could pass information to someone else who could either warn the enemy of an impending action or contaminate some of the fuel and slow down field operations.
“Each time they sent samples of fuel to us to test, they had aircraft on the ground, waiting, literally, for us to radio them that the fuel was good so they could fly their missions. In a troubling number of cases, the fuel was contaminated or the tests were delayed when someone might drop a sample or spill it, and another sample would have to be flown in.
“Anything small could slow down the tests for a number of hours or even a day—enough time to get word to enemy forces or agents or targets about what was happening. When we ruled the fuel was contaminated, we had to get more samples and order the batch we tested destroyed.”
Often the fuel was good, but the test results were faked, Le Ha discovered. To make her case, she took duplicate samples of fuel that came into the lab and secretly tested them. While other lab workers tested the official samples and found contamination, her tests of the same batch showed none. Le Ha calmly asked that the fuel be tested again, “in front of me.” A second test often indicated no contamination, as did a third test for confirmation. She told Nguyen Do, her boss, the tests were negative for contamination.
“He asked me several times if there had been more than one test. I told him two of three were good. At times he demanded a fourth—a delaying test. He seemed, I thought, upset that the fuel was good.”
Le Ha told Johnson what she had found, but she did not mention names and said she needed time to learn more details. “I did not know how high this system went,” she said. “I was sure that the guilty parties were working for someone else.”
After several weeks of more double checks, Le Ha called her workers into her office and told them: “I have been here long enough to know what has been going on. I am not going to name or accuse anybody. I always give people a chance. I am new in my position here and you know that I can be fired if I allow this to continue. But after I leave here I can get a job next door at Shell or CalTex because of my qualifications. But you, once you lose your job here, I don’t think you can find a job anywhere. This is not a threat.” Then, holding up a folder, she added, “All the incidents are recorded right here in my files.”
She said she would “forget and forgive” everything that happened if her workers cooperated and signed receipts for the samples they tested to make them accountable for the results. Le Ha concluded: “We are at war and if we make mistakes here in the lab we can be brought before a military court. Contaminated products can kill people. Aircraft will crash. Trucks will not run. Bad work here means lives lost elsewhere. If you don’t want to be responsible for your work, you had better resign.”
Her workers were being paid by the Communists to taint the tests, Le Ha said later. “It was easy to be exploited by the Communists at that time. There was a wide separation between the rich and poor, and greed and envy and a sense of life’s unfairness were all very powerful motivations in Vietnam. So also was fear. Particularly fear.
“Most of my workers had family members in the countryside, and those families were exposed to repercussions from the Viet Cong if they refused to cooperate. Failing to cooperate with me might mean losing their jobs. But failing to cooperate with the VC meant their loved ones would lose their lives. They were trapped.”
After Le Ha’s meeting with her staff, “less and less fuel was found to be contaminated and no contaminated fuel was put into aircraft or vehicles,” she said.
But there were other problems. Le Ha was convinced that much of the fuel purchased in Singapore and consigned to South Vietnam never arrived. The oil was being sold on the large black market in Asia, while only the receipts or invoices were sent to the South Vietnamese government. The ships that supposedly carried the fuel also existed only on paper. Several thousand barrels of petroleum had disappeared since 1973. No one was able to track down the culprits, particularly after so many records were destroyed in the spring of 1975 just before Saigon fell to the Communist forces.
While Americans blamed South Vietnamese corruption for the missing fuel, Le Ha suspected American malfeasance. She repeatedly warned Johnson that Americans were deeply implicated in the corrupt practices, but he appeared not to heed her. His concerns were elsewhere.
Johnson had developed an increasingly dark view of South Vietnam’s future. At a dinner one evening in the summer of 1974, a senior aide provided a briefing on developments in Washington, including the Watergate scandal. “Watergate changed everything,” Johnson recalled. “It became clear to me in the course of that discussion that the whole atmosphere in Washington had changed, that congressional funding was going to be cut dramatically. The money was going to run out, and soon.”
In the spring of 1975, Esso’s general manager in Vietnam, Edwin “Ed” Ketchum, asked Le Ha for her personal feelings about the military situation. After a long pause, she replied, almost in a whisper, “I don’t think we will survive like this much longer.” The next day Le Ha was informed that Esso was preparing plans to evacuate its principal employees if North Vietnamese troops advanced to the outskirts of Saigon. Le Ha and her husband were on the list.
The final offensive of the North Vietnamese Army began on Dec. 12, 1974, in Phuoc Long province, less than 75 miles from Saigon. On March 3, 1975, the North launched an attack in the Central Highlands at Ban Me Thuot. The South Vietnamese army broke and retreated. By mid-March 1975, Le Ha remembered, “few of us had much hope any longer.”
In early April, one of Le Ha’s brothers, an air force captain, visited her in Saigon. “You know you are the oldest in the family,” he said. “You had better quickly think of a solution for mom and dad and the rest of the family because it is getting very dangerous very fast. From high above, I see the mountains moving with Communist forces camouflaged with branches. We are lost.” The captain was killed on April 29.
Johnson sent his wife to Bangkok on April 20. The final evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese was set for Thursday, April 30, “but the next to the last day by our planning turned out to be the last day,” Johnson said.
The weekend before the planned evacuation, Johnson had assured Le Ha he would get her and her husband out of Vietnam. Johnson also promised he would make arrangements to evacuate her mother and father and the rest of her family. “Stay home, stay put and wait for my call,” he said.
Early on the morning of April 29, Johnson was summoned to the embassy to prepare for evacuation. A crowd surrounded the embassy as people tried to get inside and catch a ride on one of the evacuation helicopters.
“I went to my office, but it was on fire,” Johnson said. “Somebody too enthusiastically had been burning papers and files, and the furniture caught on fire.” He spent most of his time on the phone trying to contact people and tell them to get out or where to go. “The damned phone system was jammed, though it had not broken down completely,” he said. “I continued trying to telephone Holly but without success. I’d go down to the gate and check around. No sign of her.”
That night Johnson boarded a helicopter with other U.S. officials. They landed on the amphibious transport dock USS Denver and sailed to Subic Bay in the Philippines. They then flew to Manila and on to Guam. Johnson said he moved into a tent and went to look for “my missing people.”
“I looked for Holly and didn’t see her and began to fear the worst,” he said. “We put a girl on a bicycle with a megaphone, and she went up and down the tent streets shouting names and telling people where they should go to be processed.”
Holly was still in Saigon. “Early in the morning on the 29th, we heard shooting, and in the early daylight we could see North Vietnamese soldiers running around,” Le Ha recalled. She and her husband went to her father’s house, where they found Le Ha’s mother and father, three of her sisters and four of her brothers listening to the radio as her uncle Vinh Loc addressed the nation.
He had just been named to a position equivalent to that of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and said “he would fight to the end and all that,” Le Ha recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Well you don’t have to worry; you don’t have to leave now.’ But there was no military response in Saigon from my uncle’s forces.”
Le Ha knew her father had to get out quickly; the Viet Cong had a bounty out for his capture because he had been a prominent South Vietnamese official, including a period as mayor of Da Nang. There were many boats leaving Saigon with refugees, but they were charging the equivalent of $200 a head.
“We managed to put together $800 so four of us could go,” Le Ha said. She figured the first to go should be her father, a brother who was in the military police and a brother who was the production manager of an American company.
Le Ha told her husband to go, but he would not leave. Another brother went instead. “The rest of us stayed,” Le Ha said, “and awaited whatever fate had in store for us.”
Vietnamese Communists entered Saigon in full force on the morning of April 30. “News came that their tanks had crashed through the fence into the Independence Palace,” Le Ha said. “We saw tanks and trucks in the streets. We heard South Vietnam’s last president, Duong Van Minh, speak on television and say that he had given up. We were so afraid that we could hardly move.”
The next day Communist officials announced on radio and television that all residents had to report to their jobs. “They came to work and they came to the house,” Le Ha said. “We had to go to block meetings and all of us had to write out our biographies again and again. These were read and examined for inconsistencies. I was interrogated daily.”
Le Ha realized that suspicions about her boss were justified. “Do Nguyen, the only Vietnamese on the Esso executive committee, was in my office waiting to greet me when I returned to work,” she said. “But he had a new name, now, and new attire. He wore the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army and he introduced himself as comrade Dong Van Chi and boasted he had been a member of the Communist Party and an agent of the revolution for two decades.
“I also learned that the Communists had used one of my supervisors, Nguyen Ngoc Chau, to destroy Esso storage tanks and tankers. He had provided a cousin who was with the Communists in the countryside with the exact coordinates of our facilities and our tankers and their scheduled time of arrival, and they sent in rockets to destroy them.” Additionally, a dozen chemists revealed that they were Communists, Le Ha said.
Communist officials found the list that Esso had compiled of people it wanted to get out of the country and went to see Le Ha, who was high on the list. They wanted to know what she had done at Esso and asked about her husband’s work at the bank. She responded with a carefully edited version of their careers.
Her husband was sent to a re-education camp, but Le Ha was assigned to on-the-job re-education at Esso, she said, “which meant that I reported to work, where I attended intense political meetings for three days.”
Top officials of the new regime wanted to keep Le Ha at the former Esso facility because of her expertise and experience. She was also the only remaining Esso employee fluent in Russian. Le Ha served as the primary translator in discussions with the Russians about petroleum facilities.
In the fall of 1975, several high-ranking Communist cadres accused Le Ha of having worked for the Americans. She feared they had found Johnson’s files, but they kept referring to Ketchum and other American managers at Esso.
“I reminded them that I was scientifically and technically trained,” Le Ha said, “and that if the Americans needed me for that sort of work, they paid me for it and they got their money’s worth of my expertise.”
Le Ha discovered that the new masters were far more corrupt than South Vietnamese and American officials. “I was absolutely delighted when I saw how corrupt they were,” she said, “because I knew I could use their corruption in order to escape from Vietnam.”
She paid a few dishonest and greedy minor officials to draw up legal papers, signed by witnesses in Hanoi, attesting that her father-in-law had been a Communist hero in the 1940s in the North. Le Ha took the papers to the re-education board’s office to petition for her husband’s release, but was unsuccessful. She returned a dozen times, and each time was ignored or ordered to leave. A small gift to an official’s secretary resulted in the address for his home. Le Ha spoke with his wife, brought her gifts and eventually paid her in gold. She told the woman she was heartbroken because her husband, the son of a Communist hero, was wrongly held in a re-education camp. The woman accepted Le Ha’s petition and gave it to her husband. Le Ha’s husband returned home the day before Christmas 1975.
Le Ha’s first child, Tony Le, was born in 1977. Three years later, Le Ha paid a Communist official 35 ounces of gold to secure exit visas for her and her son so they both could get treatment abroad for toxoplasmosis, a diagnosis based on phony test results provided by a doctor she bribed. They flew to Bangkok and then on to Tel Aviv and Paris before ending their journey in Berlin. Le Ha contacted her father and brothers in the United States. They helped her immigrate in 1980. Le Ha’s mother joined the family in 1982.
Le Ha and Tony Le became American citizens. Le Ha tried to get her husband to join them, but he had changed his mind about leaving Vietnam. They divorced, and both remarried. Le Ha was hired as a chemist by Exxon Corp., Esso’s U.S. parent company. Eventually, Le Ha contacted and visited Bill and Pat Johnson. Bill Johnson had retired from the CIA in 1976. He died in 2005, at age 86. Le Ha died in 2010. She was 69.
“I do not bear any grudges against the United States for leaving Vietnam,” Le Ha had said.
“I do, however, feel sad, very sad, about them leaving so many Vietnamese behind to suffer and die in re-education camps. I see the consequences for the Vietnamese men who fought side by side with the Americans because they believed in a free country for themselves and their own families. Many of those men who survived the war paid for their idealism with their lives in re-education camps after 1975.”
Larry Engelmann lives in San Jose, California. He is the author of Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam and five other nonfiction books. This story is based on interviews with William R. Johnson, Le Ha, Tony Le and Luan Le.
Originally published in the December 2014 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.
