South Viet Nam: Assassination Attempt

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Premier Tran Van Huong was going home to lunch, and the motorcade that assembled to take him to his house was routine security. Led by a policeman on a motor scooter, it consisted of three Jeeps filled with South Vietnamese cops toting M-16 rifles, a fourth Jeep loaded with members of the presidential guard and armed with a .50-cal. machine gun, and the Premier's aging black Mercedes limousine. On both flanks, the cavalcade was guarded by plainclothesmen riding Hondas.

Hardly had the convoy left the Premier's office, a few blocks from the U.S. embassy on Thong Nhut Boulevard, when bedlam broke out. A man wearing a Vietnamese Ranger uniform and carrying a pistol rushed up and opened fire on a traffic cop who was clearing the way for the convoy. A cyclo, one of Saigon's three-wheeled open taxis, suddenly materialized in the middle of the street. Two of the police Jeeps pulled up alongside the Premier's limousine as wild firing broke out; the convoy sped around the cyclo and away from the melee.

Huong was unharmed and returned to his office after lunch for a normal afternoon's work. But it had been a close call. The cyclo contained a Claymore mine and two pounds of plastique. The combination failed to ignite, and despite all the shooting, no one was injured. The attacker, still wearing the Ranger uniform, and a civilian were arrested and later interrogated by Huong's personal security men.

Government sources said that the uniformed man, after originally claiming that he had been paid the equivalent of $85 by Huong's political enemies to kill the Premier, had eventually confessed to being a Communist agent. Inevitably, in the conspiratorial atmosphere of Vietnamese politics, there were those who preferred to believe that the assassination attempt had been a dark and sinister plot hatched against Huong by foes inside the government. The Viet Cong's publicists did not offer any enlightenment, since dissension within the government is, for them, the next best thing to outright assassination.