The BBC has just laid to rest one of the great urban legends left over from the Vietnam war, one that has been used to besmirch the memory of the last president of the defeated republic, Nguyen Van Thieu.
It is about literally tons of South Vietnamese gold and who wound up with it after the war.
A translated version of the BBC story by reporter Bui Thu, which has just been disseminated by the network’s Vietnamese language service, appears at the end this commentary. The article can be accessed online through this link.
Over the past 50 years, Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora have obsessed over the prospect that Thieu, upon departing the country on April 25, 1975, four days before the communist takeover, absconded with $220 million in gold, the last vestiges of South Vietnam’s national treasury.
Since I was the CIA officer appointed to deliver Thieu to the “black” aircraft that carried him away to Taiwan, my comments on the subject have weighed heavily in wild public speculation about the gold. The same off-the-charts rumor-mongering has even rebounded against me by mispresenting what I have written and said about what I witnessed on the night of Thieu’s departure and what I know about disposition of the gold in question.
To some Generation Zers, the entire subject may seem to be meaningless ancient history. But it bears on the way Thieu himself is remembered, and the way the US role in the conflict is assessed all these years later.
If Thieu, a handpicked favorite of the US government, was a crook and pilferer of his own nation’s treasury, then further onus attaches to us for our involvement in the war and more glory adheres to the invaders from the north who seized neighboring South Vietnam under the pretense of liberating it from the “corrupt” US “neocolonialists” and their allegedly irredeemable “puppets.”
Thus, much is at stake in how the Thieu departure story with its gold angle is told.
Within a larger framework, the evolving distortion of what actually happened is a textbook example of how fake news can be made to appear to be truth if it is repeated often enough, Goebbels-style. It is therefore a cautionary gloss on the media and online shenanigans that allow Trump to maintain a stranglehold on so many Americans’ perceptions of reality.
The BBC story, for which I agreed to be interviewed, and which reflects rigorous independent reporting, bears out what I have always written and said about the underlying events: though Thieu left Saigon with some of his own holdings, possibly including some precious metal, the gold stores in the national treasury remained in place, and were finally seized by the victorious invaders.
Nothing but the facts
Midway through in the final month of the Vietnam war, US Ambassador Graham Martin contemplated moving Saigon’s large gold stash to Switzerland or even to a US depository for safekeeping. But logistical issues intruded, including the prohibitive cost of flight insurance.
Moreover, Vice president, Tran Van Huong, who had replaced Thieu just days before I delivered him to his evacuation flight, wanted to keep the gold in country as a bargaining chip. He hoped to use it to tempt the communists into a final peace deal. Ditto, General Duong Van (Big) Minh, the neutralist who would replace Huong as Saigon’s top guy just hours before North Vietnamese legions moved on the capital.
By that point, Martin had likewise come around to seeing the gold as a potential game changer leading to negotiations.
He and Huong and Minh were wrong, wrong and wrong again. Indeed, the CIA’s best spy had warned the Communists would never negotiate.
Never mind. The gold was dangled as an incentive for the communists to come to terms. And then, just as our spy had indicated, the 140,000 regulars from Hanoi struck, and within a few days of seizing Saigon, they located and pocketed Saigon’s gold.
Did they trumpet their lucky score to the world? Not on your life. They remained silent about it for years, preferring to let their fact-free admirers around the world believe Thieu had stolen the gold and our last pretense to having done some good in Vietnam.
The Yours Truly factor
Within a year of war’s end, I resigned from the CIA out of concern that no one wanted to learn from our mistakes or do anything to ease the suffering of Vietnamese allies left behind.
In November 1977, a year and a half later, I published my own unauthorized memoir about what I had witnessed during my five and a half years in the war zone. It was titled “Decent Interval,” an ironic comment on Kissinger’s determination to preserve Saigon just long enough to ensure the US suffered no reputational blemish if and when the enemy triumphed.
Among other things I described my role in evacuating Thieu four days short of the decent interval coming to an end.
Here are the facts I drew upon with respect to the gold story.
At some point during the day, April 25, 1975, CIA Station Chief Tom Polgar advised me that I had been tagged to drive Thieu under conditions of deep secrecy to Tan Son Nut airbase that night to be evacuated from the country. It was a sobering assignment because multiple parties within a forty-mile radius of the capital, including much of the North Vietnamese army, wanted Thieu dead.
Polgar told me Thieu might be bringing some luggage with him, possibly some personal gold, and that I should help ensure the luggage got properly loaded and stowed. Neither of us thought there was anything untoward about this. Thieu was fleeing the country for good, and it seemed only logical he would be taking some of his own valuables with him. Indeed, it was known that he had begun moving such items out of the country ten days before, even as Polgar and various South Vietnamese opportunists had begun plotting his removal (Thieu formally resigned on April 21.)
My rendezvous point with Thieu that night was a fortified military compound near Tan Son Nhut, where ex-Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem, who was to be evacuated in the same operation, kept a residence.
Before joining me, Thieu slipped into Khiem’s place to confer with him, Polgar and Ret. Army General Charles Timmes, a super-grade CIA contractor who had known Thieu ever since Timmes had headed up the first US advisory mission in Vietnam.
As I idled in the driveway, several Vietnamese showed up out of nowhere and began shoving luggage into trunk of the car I had been assigned. I noted the clink of metal on metal. Since I was on alert for any clink that might signal someone locking and loading, I took note — but consoled myself that it was simply pieces of gold banging around in Thieu’s suitcase. This was pure guesswork but seemed reasonable.
Blessedly, my sojourn to Tan Son Nhut with Thieu in the backseat went off without a hitch. He and his traveling companion, General Timmes, reminisced about times together in the past and remarked on my unlikely appointment as their driver, this initiated by Timmes presumably to reassure Thieu that we weren’t there to do him harm.
Upon arrival at a blacked-out section of the airbase, Thieu shook my hand and then, joining Khiem, headed for the waiting aircraft, as Timmes, Polgar. Ambassador Martin, and Khiem’s own driver, a close CIA colleague of mine, looked on. Some luggage was boarded as well. The aircraft then departed as errant tracers and enemy groundfire lit up the night’s sky.
Afterwards, I huddled with Polgar and gave him a brief after action report, recalling what I had witnessed, including my impression that some metal, likely gold, had been in Thieu’s luggage. Again, nothing seemed noteworthy about any of this since we knew the national treasury, including its gold stocks, remained nestled in a Saigon hideaway, and that most of Thieu’s own personal holdings had departed days before.
Reporting after the fact
In recounting these happenings in my postwar memoir Decent interval, I noted hearing the metal clinking in Thieu’s luggage but was careful to point out that the gold stores in the national treasury had never been evacuated. Shortly after my publication date, Mike Wallace interviewed me for a CBS 60 Minutes report. He bore in on what had happened to the national treasury and its gold.
Here’s my reply: “Up until the last minute, Mike, the South Vietnamese government was working to get out of the country, its $220 million in gold, that which made-up what remained of its National Treasury. For a variety of reasons, this gold was never evacuated.”
He later asked about my recollection of having heard metallic noises emanating from Thieu’s luggage.
Wallace, without waiting for a reply, interjected: “What you’re saying is that he was taking gold with him.”
Frank: “He had shipped most of his gold out of the country in early April. This was simply what was left over.”
In neither my written account nor in the Wallace interview did I suggest that Thieu had pilfered the national treasury or smuggled parts of it out of the country. On the contrary, by noting that it had remained intact in Saigon, I sought to underscore that Thieu had had no hand in its final disposition.
In a blog recorded on December 19, 2012, Timmes confirmed my account to the extent possible based on his own personal exposure. Though he acknowledged not having been on hand for the loading of my car, he said he had seen luggage at the boarding site at Tan Son Nhut.
Timmes (to interviewer): “We went to the place [at Tan Son Nhut] where the ambassador was and I saw them loading on the bags and I never saw — as Frank Snepp says in his book — big bags with heavy … I never saw that. Possibly I could be wrong and didn’t notice, but I thought I was aware of everything that was going on, because if word had gotten out about the president leaving it could have been —
Interviewer interrupts: “Were you afraid of an assassination attempt?
Timmes: “Concerned about it.”
Since I had never alleged that Thieu left with anything but personal valuables, Timmes’ failure to recollect anything different represents no smoking gun but leaves us simply with an echo of the more modest facts I had recounted.
And yet continuously, for fifty years, the great re-looping soundtrack that resides in conspiracy theorists’ imaginations has played and replayed a tune that casts Thieu as a Master Thief. It has even persuaded some younger documentarians not to include any interviews I might give to clean up the record.
Case in point: I recently appeared in a Netflix documentary about the fall of Vietnam, for which I had recorded just such an interview. The producer explained to me it had been omitted in part because of “the gold thing.”
I don’t care about being left on the cutting floor since I am a blustery interview anyway. And at my age, I have to squint even to see the screen. But I remain determined that a lingering distortion about the final days of the war, one that impugns the final leader of the lost republic, get corrected.
So, I am grateful to Bui Thu for her splendid reporting.
The story she wrote for the BBC, which is translated into English below, echoes and confirms much of what I have written in the preceding paragraphs. But the last several pages of her report offer critical detail about what Hanoi did with the gold.
English translation of the original Vietnamese-language BBC article (edited by me)
[Headline:] Looking inside the suitcases of Former President Nguyen Van Thieu on the day he left Vietnam
BBC May 5, 2025
As the driver who delivered ex-President Nguyen Van Thieu to Tan Son Hut airbase to be evacuated on April 25, 1975, former CIA officer Frank Snepp has revealed what was inside the suitcases that left with the fallen leader.
Nguyen Van Thieu was the president of the Republic of Vietnam from 1967 to 1975. On April 21, 1975, he resigned. Four days later, he departed Vietnam on a US military plane bound for Taiwan, where his brother was the ambassador.
Snepp, then senior strategy analyst for the CIA Station, was assigned to smuggle Thieu to the flight line. That night, Snepp drove a car with fake license plates to ex-Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem’s house on the edge of Tan Son Nhut, the starting point of the journey.
In his book Decent Interval, Snepp recalled that before Thieu stepped out of the Khiem residence, a group of his burley assistants emerged from nearby bushes, each carrying a large suitcase.
“They asked us to open the trunk and insisted on loading the luggage themselves. As they threw the bags in, the clank of metal echoed through the silence like muffled wind chimes,” Snepp recalled to the BBC.
What was in the suitcases?
There was much immediate speculation about this in Saigon, and it intensified as rumors began circulating to the effect that Thieu had left with 16 tons of gold from the national treasury.
In Decent Interval, first published in 1977, Snepp wrote that these gold reserves remained under the Saigon government’s control at that time of Thieu’s departure.
But, in Vietnam and elsewhere, rumors to the contrary persisted for many years, creating the myth that Thieu had stolen from the national treasury.
In his BBC interview, Snepp said that CIA Station Chief Thomas Polgar had informed him that Thieu might take personal assets with him, perhaps some gold and cash, and had directed Snepp to help load the luggage if need be.
“I was not surprised,” Snepp said. “Thieu was leaving Vietnam permanently and it was entirely reasonable that he should carry with him assets to support himself and his family.”
Snepp also told the BBC that although he cannot recall the exact number of suitcases, he heard the sound of metal clinking together as the bags were loaded into his assigned vehicle.
“I guessed they were gold bars, though I had no visual proof. After Thieu’s plane took off, I met Polgar briefly at the embassy and gave him a report,” Snepp recalled
“I told him about the suitcases and speculated they might have contained gold or precious metals, based on the sounds I had heard. Neither of us thought it was anything to worry about — or should be. The most important thing that night was that Thieu had been safely evacuated.”
Snepp explained that because of assassination threats against Thieu, he had been extremely watchful that night for any sign of danger and had therefore been sensitive to the sound of the clanking metal.
In November 1977, during a 60 Minutes interview called “Cover Up,” the esteemed CBS journalist, Mike Wallace, questioned Snepp, who had resigned from the CIA, about his newly published Vietnam memoir Decent Interval. Midway through the interview, he pressed for details about Thieu’s suitcases.
Snepp told him that Thieu’s luggage-toting aides had arrived while the former president was inside the Khiem residence. Wallace interjected, “What you’re saying is that he was taking gold with him.”
Snepp replied, “He had shipped most of his gold out of the country in early April. This was simply what was left over.”
In his BBC interview, Snepp emphasized that he had merely been speculating about the contents of the luggage based on the sounds coming from them. He added that even if the contents included gold, it was unrelated to the nation’s 16 tons of it, since that supply was locked away in the treasury at the time.
In sharing this with the BBC, Snepp said, he wanted to end speculation that Thieu had made off with the national reserves.
He stressed that, in writing about the suitcases, he had never imputed any wrongdoing to Thieu or suggested he had stolen the reserves because that simply was not true.
The former CIA officer also explained that Thieu’s friend, former Major General Charles Timmes, who accompanied him on the ride to Tan Son Nhut, had corroborated Snepp’s recollections.
“General Timmes wrote his own account of that night and acknowledged my role and the accuracy of my report,” Snepp said.
“Timmes was not present when the suitcases were loaded into the car, but later witnessed bags being transferred to the plane.”
“It was a completely normal procedure, not shady at all,” Snepp added. “If tons of gold had followed Thieu aboard, I, Timmes, Station Chief Polgar and Ambassador Martin – all present at that time – would have seen it.”
In Decent Interval, Snepp explained that Martin may have intentionally left the gold in the treasury in hopes of making the communists more amenable to negotiations.
Snepp also pointed out that Thieu’s immediate successors as president, Tran Van Huong and then General Duong Van Minh, both opposed shipping the nation’s gold abroad because both considered it a “bargaining chip” with the communist side.
“The economics minister appears to have accepted Mr. Huong’s wish to keep the gold in-country,” Snepp said.
“Earlier plans to ship it out had stalled due to flight insurance problems and controversy about where to send it: a Swiss bank or an official US depository,” Snepp told the BBC.
In a book called Secret Files of the Independence Palace, Nguyen Tien Hung, Thieu’s former Minister of Planning, recalled rumors in Saigon after the president left that he had taken the country’s gold reserves with him “to enjoy.” He also remembered widespread skepticism among his associates that the gold would wind up being used for national purposes.
Hung, by his own account, proposed using it to buy ammunition for the final defense effort.
He recalled having convinced the cabinet that the reserves would be the communists’ first target if and when they seized Saigon.
As a result, he wrote, Thieu agreed to transfer the gold abroad. After that, the National Bank asked Ambassador Martin to make the necessary arrangements, but the US State Department was slow to respond, and by the time it did, Thieu had resigned.
“On April 26, [the day after Thieu’s departure] State Department officials telegraphed the Embassy in Saigon that they had arranged insurance to transport the gold valued at US $60,240,000 (only half of the value of the reserves),” Hung recalled in his book,
“In addition, they specified that for the insurance to be effective, the gold would have to be shipped out before 7:00 a.m. on April 27. The reserves were [to be] packed in boxes at the bank’s headquarters, and a US plane would be waiting at Clark airbase in the Philippines to go to Saigon when ordered to transport them,” according to Hung.
But newly appointed deputy prime minister, Nguyen Van Hao, concluded the government could reach a deal with the communists, so he objected to releasing the gold, Hung added.
At one point, according to Hung’s account, Hao even threatened Acting President Tran Van Huong, warning him that if he allowed the gold to be moved abroad and, even if he were replaced by General Minh, he “will be condemned as a traitor.”
Huong was cowed and decided to keep the gold in place, Hung wrote in his book.
In a previous interview with the BBC, Hung recalled a cabinet proposal to fly the gold to Switzerland and then on to the US Federal Reserve Bank, using US Air Force planes, but, he said, President Huong vetoed this.
In the meantime, despite denials by a government spokesperson, rumors were raging through Saigon that Thieu had made off with the gold, Hung recalled.
After the Communist takeover, this myth was amplified and embellished by communist propogandists intent on defaming the fallen regime, Snepp told the BBC.
And what finally happened to the reserves?
Soon after the “liberation” of Saigon, they were seized by Communist forces, and, the following June, they were inventoried by the national bank in Hanoi, according to Huynh Buu Son, who had once worked as a controller for the Thieu government.
In an article for Tuoi Tre newspaper, published in 2006, Buu Son wrote:
“In just one morning, we finished counting the number of banknotes in reserve.
Evaluating the gold took more time because we had to count each gold bar one by one to see if the weight, gold purity and serial number matched the books.
“Once the job was done, everyone was happy to see that the amount of gold in the inventory matched the existing records down to the smallest detail,” Buu Son added. “This demonstrated that those who had worked for the old national bank had maintained a disciplined management style.”
Based on all the existing evidence, including Buu Son’s report, it is clear that Thieu did not, and could not have left with the gold reserves when he fled the country on April 25, 1975, Snepp told the BBC.
“The man I escorted to Tan Son Nhut that night displayed extraordinary dignity, dignity and courage,” Snepp added.
“Many Vietnamese here and abroad are still haunted by rumors about the gold. The lie that Thieu took some of it only fuels a fiction that tarnishes the honor of the old republic.”