One morning last week Deputy Tran Van Van, 59, climbed into his black De Soto and headed for downtown Saigon and another day's work as the most prominent member of the southern bloc in South Viet Nam's three-month-old Constituent Assembly. Three blocks from home, his car was caught in a traffic jam. Two Vietnamese youths who had been following him on a red-and-white Honda motorbike roared up alongside and shot Tran Van Van dead with four bullets from a Walther .32-cal. automatic pistol.
As one of the nation's wealthiest men, Van Van naturally had his share of personal enemies. Some of them were the squatters he evicted from his extensive Saigon property holdings. But the Viet Cong were happy to spread the rumor that the government was behind the assassination, since Van, a fiery southern regionalist, had long argued against the "northern domination" of the predominantly northern-born generals around Premier Nguyen Cao Ky.
Eight hours after the assassination, the government silenced most of the suspicions by producing a hot suspect. He was one-eyed Vo Van Em, 20, captured shortly after the shooting when the Honda overturned near U.S. Ambassador Lodge's house while the killers were trying to escape through traffic. He admitted that he had been sent the week before from Cu Chi, 35 miles north of Saigon, with the express mission of killing Tran Van Van for the Viet Cong.