The headquarters of the Government of Free Vietnam (GFVN) would fit right into the guerilla campaigns of 1930s China or modern-day Colombia. Along the building's walls, reams of photos show Free Vietnam troops training at secret Southeast Asian bases code-named "KC 702." On the top floor, a shortwave radio transmitter broadcasts the GFVN's anti-regime programs into Vietnamese cities and villages.
>From this description, you might expect the GFVN, founded in 1995 and
dedicated to overthrowing the Vietnamese state, to be located in some hidden
jungle redoubt. It's not. Rather, it sits on a mundane commercial street in
the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove, down the road from a Costco. But the
innocuous surroundings belie the group's dead-serious intent. Over the past
three years, GFVN members have been implicated in a half-dozen attacks on
Vietnamese government targets around the world. Some of these assaults
involved homemade explosive devices similar to the bomb deployed by Timothy
McVeigh in Oklahoma City.
The GFVN, which claims over 6,000 members (including many former South Vietnamese soldiers), is only one of several U.S.-based Southeast Asian dissident groups that have begun to give Washington officials heartburn. As the war on terrorism widens and the Bush administration demands cooperation from Southeast Asian governments, it finds its mission complicated by these dissidents, who straddle a fine line between pressing for change in their homelands and planning illegal, violent, and often counterproductive attacks from American shores. [snip]