On this date, January 31, 1978, Ronald Humphrey, then age 42, a Department of State foreign service officer within the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) was arrested and charged with spying on behalf of Vietnam. He was sentenced to prison for a period of 15 years. According to the Bureau of Prisons, he was released in 1990.
Humphrey said in his defense that his actions were taken in order to secure the release of his Vietnamese girlfriend who was in government custody. He admitted he took the documents from USIA and gave them to his co-conspirator, who then gave them to a courier for the government of Vietnam.
Humphrey’s crime and discovery
The Vietnam conflict ended in 1975. Though the conflict had ended, Humphrey and his co-conspirator, David Troung (aka Troung Dinh Hung) remained entangled with Vietnam.
In 1977, the United States and Vietnam were engaged in negotiations concerning MIAs and the entrance of Vietnam into the United Nations.
In the spring of 1977, a Vietnamese courier, code-named “Keyseat”, hand-carried 49 classified documents from the Department of State to Paris, and passed these documents on to the Vietnamese government via their representatives in Paris. It was revealed in court that she had made three courier runs on behalf of the Vietnamese government, in September 1976, April 1977, and again in June 1977.
It would later be revealed that Keyseat (identified as Dung Krall, a daughter of a former Vietcong ambassador to the Soviet Union) had been recruited by the CIA. She not only played a material role in the joint FBI/CIA counterespionage investigation called, “Magic Dragon” which was focused on David Truong, who resided in Washington D.C., she would be the key witness in the prosecution of Humphrey and Troung.
As part of Magic Dragon, the FBI had wiretapped Troung’s phone. A man named “Ron” was heard talking with Troung on the phone and a personal meeting with Troung at Troung’s apartment was observed from afar. When “Ron” departed the building, FBI surveillance followed him back to the USIA building in Washington D.C. The FBI reviewed the building sign-in registry and noted “Ron” was “R. Humphrey”.
In May 1977 Humphrey’s office was placed under video warrantless surveillance, and Troung’s apartment was placed under audio surveillance, both with the approval of Attorney General Griffin Bell and President Jimmy Carter, using the President’s “inherent power.”
In June 1977, Keyseat was observed by the FBI receiving a grocery bag of documents from Troung. Humphrey had passed 33 classified State documents and one classified one Defense Intelligence Agency document to Troung.
Prosecutors had no case without the cooperation of Keyseat, and in late-January 1978 secured her cooperation and provided her $11,800 for her to relocate. It was revealed that she had been receiving $1200/month for her clandestine cooperation with the CIA. Once Keyseat’s cooperation was cemented, Humphrey was arrested.
Following the publication of Humphrey’s arrest, the United States on February 3, 1978 expelled Vietnam’s chief delegate, Dinh Ba Thi, from the United Nations. He refused to go, until his own government ordered him to leave as requested.
Coercion of Humphrey
Humphrey, a USIA officer, estranged from his wife Marylou, was assigned to Saigon from 1969-70 and while there, he fell in love with Cheiu Thi Nguyen (aka Kim), a widow with children. When the conflict ended, there was a mass exodus from the country. Kim was unable to leave the country, so she was put in a government camp.
Humphrey, then posted to West Germany attempted to facilitate her evacuation from afar. The Swedish Ambassador in Bonn sent a message to his counterpart in Hanoi on behalf of Humphrey asking the Vietnamese government to release Kim.
Humphrey claimed his cooperation was solely to obtain the release of Kim and her children. The Vietnamese upheld their end of the bargain – almost. They allowed Kim and two of her three children to emigrate, but they forced Kim to leave behind her 16-year-old son, who was viewed as a hostage-in-place as leverage to ensure Humphrey’s continued cooperation.
Kim and family arrived in the United States on Thanksgiving Day 1977.
At his sentencing, Kim Humphrey stood on the courthouse steps in Alexandria and summed up the case succinctly as she professed his innocence, “I got him in trouble. I was jailed (in a Vietnamese prison camp) for 225 days. I got him in trouble.”
