The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

56 JULY-AUGUST 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL country.” At first, he didn’t see any reason to be too concerned. “I was pretty casual about it. I was drinking beer and going to girly bars. I went to ‘Luau Night’ at the embassy. I really bought the bank’s story that eventually the embassy was going to help us.” On his first full day in Saigon, April 15, 1975, White made his initial visit to the U.S. embassy. Termijn and John Linker, the Chase senior executive for Asia, went with the young banker to introduce him to the relevant U.S. diplomats. First, White met James “Jim” Ashida, the commercial attaché. When White asked about his banking counterparts, Ashida said both the Bank of America and First National City Bank had already pulled their Ameri- can staff. “Not a comforting thought to be the last American banker in Saigon,” White later noted. Next, White met Shepard “Shep” Lowman, the embassy’s political attaché. Both Termijn and Linker made it clear to Low- man that Chase wanted its Saigon branch to remain open as long as possible and didn’t want their employees to leave yet. They supported the ambassador’s position on this. They needed assurance, however, that the U.S. embassy would help evacuate their top banking officers, all Vietnamese nationals, when the time came. Lowman was direct: The embassy could not promise them that the U.S. government would help their Vietnamese Chase staff leave the country. “I wondered what was going on. I didn’t quite understand,” says White. “Cor and Linker took it in stride, so I didn’t make a fuss. … At some point it became clear that the U.S. embassy was not going to be our friend. Ambassador GrahamMartin and Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann were both dead set against (a) the bank closing and (b) evacuating unrelated Vietnamese.” Because the Chase staff were “unrelated” Vietnamese—not married to or dependents of Americans—they did not qualify for the exit visas their government required to leave the country. Both Ambassador Martin and DCM Lehmann insisted on com- plying with South Vietnam’s stance on exit visas. However, as Lowman revealed, there were exceptions: Unrelated Vietnamese who were considered intelligence assets were being taken out of the country on CIA transports. “If all they [Martin and Lehmann] did was slavishly adhere to the host country’s exit visa law, then they have a prima facie defense,” White explains. “The problem with this is they failed to recognize that the war was irretrievably lost, making early no-doc escape essential for all Vietnamese vulnerable to reprisal for their employ- ment by Americans. They didn’t really care about those people who were intelligence assets. They cared about what they would reveal under torture.” Stumbling upon a Secret What White still did not know was that Shep Lowman, whose wife was Vietnam- ese, was running a clandestine program to help evacuate her family and the embassy’s doctor and 20 members of the doctor’s Viet- namese wife’s family—and who knows who else. “Why didn’t Lowman tell me? Well, if you’re running a secret evacuation operation under the nose of your ambassador, who refuses to face the reality that the war is over and there’s a need for evacuations, that’s not something you reveal to someone on first meeting. I eventually stumbled upon the clandestine operation when I started looking for ways to get Chase staff out,” says White. Two days after his initial visit to the embassy, White had a message that Lucien Kinsolving, a first secretary, would like to speak to him. White went straight to the embassy. “Have you met Ken Moorefield?” Kinsolving asked. Moorefield, an aide to Ambassador Martin, headed up the new Evacuation Control Center (ECC) at Tan Son Nhat Airport. Every couple of hours, a C-130 would land to fly out Americans and their dependents as well as Vietnamese. The next day, White shared a taxi to the airport with Cor Termijn, who was leaving on a Pan Am flight from the civil aviation terminal. White let Termijn assume he rode along as a last chance to speak to the departing country manager. But he had another stop in mind, as well. White was tasked with keeping the Chase Saigon branch open for as long as possible and to close it only if necessary. Shepard “Shep” Lowman. 1953HARVARDLAWSCHOOLYEARBOOK