Author Archives: WholeDude

The Cold War in Asia – The Unfinished Korea-Vietnam War

James E. Parker Jr., CIA’s last Vietnam evacuee shares his bitter memories of April 30, 1975 in a story published by The Washington Times. Mr. Parker joined the CIA in 1970. I joined the Indian Army on July 26, 1970 after grant of Short Service Regular Commission during September 1969. Both of us served the CIA’s Mission in Southeast Asia with different expectations. My sadness, and mental pain continue in the context of Tibet’s continued Military Occupation since 1950s. Vietnam War gave me hope of USA’s willingness to engage and contain the threat posed by Communist Expansionism in Southern Asia.

I am still patiently waiting for the US to fulfill its Mission to evict the Military Occupier of Tibet.

Rudra Narasimham Rebbapragada

Special Frontier Force – Establishment 22 – Vikas Regiment

James Parker, CIA’s last Vietnam evacuee, holds bitter memories of fateful day – Washington Times

Sunday, April 30, 2017, 8:18 PM

Last CIA evacuee bitterly recalls U.S. Embassy cowardice, betrayals as Saigon fell to North Vietnam

James Parker (right) received the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit from CIA Director William Colby in 1975. This photograph is signed: “To James Parker – with thanks and applause for a job well done in Vietnam. William Colby.

By Richard C. Ehrlich – Special to the Washington Times – – Sunday, April 30, 2017

BANGKOK — Time has done little to dull the anger of James Parker James Parker, the last CIA officer to evacuate Vietnam, as the world marks the latest anniversary of the U.S. evacuation of its embassy in Saigon just ahead of advancing North Vietnamese forces in 1975.

When South Vietnam’s capital fell on the last day of April that year, the intelligence officer’s two best military sources committed suicide and the actions of an American diplomat endangered the lives
of escaping diplomats and CIA personnel, the 73-year-old Mr. Parker recalled in an interview. Off the coast of Danang, panicked South Vietnamese who evacuated onto a U.S. ship shot, stabbed, raped, trampled and executed one another in revenge attacks.

But much of his anger targets Mr. Parker‘s fellow Americans as they stumbled through one of the low points of the postwar era in their nation’s history.

“As for my experiences, back in Vietnam at the end, [I remember] the absolute chickens—t character of the men in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, how they were so petty and self-indulgent, so pedantic and so distant from the fighting,” Mr. Parker said in an interview with The Washington Times.

He said the attitude in the embassy contributed to the ignominious defeat.

“Their pusillanimity disrespected the men, American and Asian, I had known who died fighting the good fight,” he said. “The State Department people were not folks to look up to in a combat zone.”

Mr. Parker lives in Las Vegas after a 32-year career in the CIA that started in 1970. He has written several books about his experiences in Southeast Asia, including his newest volume published last year, “The Vietnam War: Its Own Self.” The colorful, 706-page book includes photographs of CIA officers, Hmong and Vietnamese soldiers, maps of bomb sites, and pictures of dead bodies and one nude Lao bar girl.

His memories of the bitter end remain especially vivid. One week before the communist North defeated the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, the “evacuation plan for the consulate” in Can Tho city where Mr. Parker was based degenerated into chaos.

“Jim D., a career Central Intelligence Operations officer and chief of the CIA base in the Delta of South Vietnam” insisted that the safest, most reliable evacuation would be in helicopters, Mr. Parker said in the interview, declining to reveal Jim D.’s full name. But Consul General Terry McNamara
did not trust that the CIA‘s battle-hardened Air America pilots would fly them to a waiting U.S. Navy ship.

Mr. McNamara yelled: “They could leave us all here. They are wild, uncontrollable animals, the Air America people. We control our own destiny if we go out by boat” on a 60-mile Bassac River route to the South China Sea.

Jim D. replied: “I have my people to protect, and I have [Air America] helicopters. My people go out by helicopter.”

Mr. Parker‘s and his CIA colleagues’ escape was also at risk.

“Mr. McNamara’s plan did not provide for the safety of the CIA officers,” he wrote. “We had no cover. If we were captured by the North Vietnamese, as was entirely possible, McNamara suggested we tell them that we were USAID engineers, which would not have held up during any type of serious interrogation.”

Mr. McNamara, his diplomatic staff and some South Vietnamese nationals went on boats down the “extremely dangerous” river, Mr. Parker said in the interview. “He must have known his plan would leave CIA agents behind. And I don’t think he cared.”

The State Department eventually overruled Mr. McNamara and cleared an evacuation by air.

This allowed Mr. Parker, Jim D. and others to arrange Air America helicopter flights to U.S. Navy ships for themselves, the consulate, embassy and CIA, plus more than 100 CIA key local allies during the final 48 hours.

LOSING SOURCES

One week before the war’s end, Mr. Parker‘s best South Vietnamese source, Gen. Tran Van Hai, predicted the April 30 deadline of North Vietnam’s victory. But the CIA station chief in Saigon, Tom Polgar, and CIA head analyst Frank Snepp refused to believe Mr. Parker.

backed South Vietnamese Rangers also climbed aboard.

“The Vietnamese Rangers took over my ship. Killed, raped, robbed. You could hear gunshots all the time. Soldiers were walking around with bloody knives,” Capt. Flink told Mr. Parker. “We had to lock ourselves in the pilot house. I only had a crew of 40 plus some security, but there were thousands of those wild, crazy Vietnamese people.

They insisted that North Vietnam would allow Saigon and the southern Delta to remain under U.S. protection after a cease-fire, he said.

On May 1, 1975, Gen. Hai was found dead.

“General Hai lay face down at his desk. Alone during the night, without saying good-bye to anyone, he had committed suicide. A half-empty glass of brandy, laced with poison, was near an outstretched hand,” Mr. Parker wrote.

“That report Hai gave me [predicting] the day Saigon would fall to the NVA” probably helped Mr. Parker win a top citation from his Langley bosses, the agent bitterly recalled in the interview.

Hours after Hanoi’s victory, South Vietnamese Gen. Le Van Hung — Mr. Parker‘s other top intelligence source — saluted his troops “and then shook each man’s hand. He asked everyone to leave. Some of his men did not move, so he pushed them out the door, shook off his wife’s final pleas and finally was alone in his office.

“Within moments there was a loud shot. General Hung was dead,” he wrote.

There were other bitter memories in those final days. One month before the final defeat, Merchant Marine Capt. Ed Flink aboard the Pioneer Contender — a U.S. ship chartered to the Military Sealift Command — was evacuating Americans and thousands of South Vietnamese civilians from Danang when it fell to the communists. As the mission proceeded, however, some U.S.-

“They finally shot some of the worst, once we docked but I’ll tell you, son, it was hell. We found bodies all over the ship after everyone got off. Babies, old women, young boys. Cut, shot and trampled to death.”

Mr. Parker said in the interview: “It was Vietnamese officials who shot the rioters.”

Capt. Flink later told interviewers that Vietnamese conducted onboard “kangaroo courts” and executed suspected communists.

Mr. Parker was the last CIA officer to evacuate Vietnam, escaping on May 1, 1975, two days after the U.S. abandoned the embassy in Saigon.

He joined the CIA in 1971 as a paramilitary case officer fighting alongside ethnic Hmong guerrillas and Thai forces against Lao and North Vietnamese communists inside Laos until 1973. In 1974, he became a CIA intelligence officer in South Vietnam handling Vietnamese agents and South Vietnam’s military.

He retired in 1992 but returned to the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001, as a contractor to “teach tradecraft to new hires” and work inside Cambodia, Afghanistan and elsewhere before retiring again in 2011.

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