Finding the Dragon Lady Read Free Page B

were soaked with urine. Madame Chuong’s upper lip was bruised, and she had a scratch under her chin. The red pinpoints on her eyeballs were from petechial hemorrhage, when blood leaks from the eye’s tiny capillaries, a strong indication of death by strangulation or smothering—in this case, probably with a pillow.
    All the evidence pointed to the Chuongs’ only son, Tran Van Khiem. Khiem had been left behind in Vietnam in 1963 and had suffered badly. Until then, Khiem had been the scion of a once elite Vietnamese family to whom things had always been handed. When his sister was the First Lady, he was given a seat in the South Vietnamese government’s National Assembly and diplomatic missions to foreign countries. Khiem skated along in typical playboy fashion, but he was fascinated with the inner workings of politics, especially the intrigue. Khiem started rumors that he was the head of a secret security force. He told Australian journalist Denis Warner that he had a hit list of American targets in Saigon that included embassy and militarypersonnel. Madame Nhu’s husband didn’t like him much; he thought Khiem was immature and headstrong. So when Khiem came to the palace to visit his sister, Madame Nhu made sure to close the door to the sitting room or used the bedroom. Nhu and Diem weren’t to know he was there. In fact, it didn’t matter whether the Ngo brothers liked Khiem or not. He was family, and the regime’s umbrella was broad enough to cover him. No real harm could come to him while the Ngos were in power. 2
    But afterwards, when Madame Nhu was in exile, Khiem was on his own in South Vietnam. The new military junta in Saigon arrested him. His mother tried to intercede from Washington. She called Roger Hilsman at the State Department, begging him to do something to save her only son. He would recall that Madame Chuong had been highly distraught, but even in her hysteria, unsentimental and pragmatic. Khiem was “only a stupid boy,” Madame Chuong pleaded. He was harmless, just someone who had fallen “foolishly under the sway of his older sister,” Madame Nhu.
    Madame Chuong’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, might have helped but he had no sympathy. He thought Khiem a “thoroughly reprehensible individual” and would not interfere with what he said, without a trace of irony, was the junta’s “orderly administration of justice.” 3 Khiem was locked in a cell in Saigon’s old French prison. Looking back on his time there, he called what they did to him—using sleep deprivation and exhaustion to break his mind—“scientific torture.” 4 At least he had been spared the firing squad. The new junta didn’t like holdovers from the old regime that might threaten their power, but apparently they didn’t think Khiem posed much of a threat. Or maybe he was more useful to them alive, an example of what happened to those loyal to the old regime. Madame Nhu’s brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Can, didn’t fare as well. He was so paralyzed by diabetes left untreated during his incarceration at Chi Hoa Prison that he had to be carried to the courtyard, unable to stand for his own execution.
    Khiem was subsequently shipped south to the prison island of Poulo Condor, assigned to hard labor until his broken body matched his fragile mind. Who knows what backroom negotiations got him outof Vietnam and to France, but by then forty-year-old Khiem had the body of an old man. He suffered from a heart condition and a kidney ailment. His other scars, the mental ones, were not immediately as visible.
    Khiem couldn’t find a job, and he had a wife and twelve-year-old son to support. His parents came up with an arrangement that was supposed to save face: they said they needed him to move in with them now that they were getting old. By allowing Khiem, his wife, and son to live with them in Washington,