The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

58 JULY-AUGUST 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL staff out via the clandestine program. “There was new urgency as Xuan Loc had fallen, and the North Vietnamese Army was expected to enter Saigon in a matter of days,” he explains. White’s quest led him to Colonel WilliamMadison, head of the political section in the defense attaché office. Madison told White he would need military buses to get his people past the airport checkpoints. His advice was to get them on buses and into the airport, then shelter them at the ECC until exit poli- cies were changed, which he expected would be soon. Madison warned White to be discreet about this, as Lowman was putting himself on the line. On April 24, 1975, White got the call from Jim Ashida. He had 70 seats on a bus to the airport for Chase people leaving that night. Even though White needed more seats, 70 would cover the priority list Cuong had drawn up. He told Cuong, then followed procedure to close down Chase Saigon. White himself also needed to be on that bus because Pan Am was flying its last commercial flight out of Saigon that very day. Once on the air base, White found a shady place for the Chase staff to wait and went into the ECC gymnasium. He got in a line for people without papers. The line ended at a table labeled “Vice Consul.” White knew that evacuating employees was impossible, so he told the vice consul they were his fam- ily. The vice consul asked if White was willing to take financial responsibility and make them his wards. White said yes, and the vice consul asked him how many. When White said 68, the vice consul handed him a stack of papers. White filled out a form for each Chase staff member. “Ken Moorefield, standing behind the consul, took respon- sibility for the unconventional adoption,” says White. “I’ve received recognition for the rescue of my employees, but without Ken Moorefield’s ‘flexible’ interpretation of the regulations, they could all have been executed.” Leaving the gymnasium, White ran into Ashida, who had another bus for the next day that could fit 70 more. Was White interested? He was. He left a bank officer in charge of the group at the airport and went back to Saigon. The remaining employees were notified they would leave the next day. At the ECC, White would do it again, filling out a form for each staff member. All in all, the 27-year-old adopted 113 people. After spending a night sleeping on the ground, White and the second group left on April 26, 1975. On April 28, 1975, Tan Son Nhat Airport was bombed. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. b After Saigon, FSO Shep Lowman worked with Vietnam- ese resettlement and became the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Refugee Programs. He passed away in 2013. Ken Moorefield remained in the Foreign Service, rising in rank to become our ambassador to Gabon (2002-2004). From December 2005 to 2007, Moorefield served as senior State Department representative on the Iraq/Afghanistan Transition Planning Group. He subsequently joined the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General as Deputy General Inspec- tor for Special Plans and Operations. In May 2022, Ralph White nominated Moorefield for a Presidential Medal of Freedom. n I n addition to Lowman and Moorefield in Saigon, to save at-risk Vietnamese, a small group of FSOs also operated outside normal working channels at the State Department. In his 2015 piece for the Foreign Service Journal , “Mobilizing for South Vietnam’s Last Days, ”Ambassador (ret.) Parker W. Borg detailed this under-the-radar effort. According to Borg: “The core group included, Frank Wisner (Director for Management in Public Affairs), Paul Hare (Deputy Director of Press Relations), Craig Johnstone (Director of the Secretariat Staff), Lionel Rosenblatt (on the Deputy Secretary’s staff), Jim Bullington (who worked on the Vietnam desk and could keep us informed about desk-level actions) and myself (who had been working on Secretary Kissinger’s staff).” Remarkably, two members of this group, Lionel Rosen- blatt and Craig Johnstone, even flew to Saigon on their own to help save former colleagues. Borg says the men “stashed some 200 Vietnamese former work colleagues in vehicles, slipped them past Vietnamese security and pushed them aboard departing aircraft.” The FSJ ’s April 2015 special edition on the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon spotlights “The Foreign Service in Vietnam” and contains first-person accounts of the unofficial evacuation effort and other reflections from diplomats on the ground. Read here: https://bit.ly/FSJ-April2015. —The Editors The Foreign Service in Vietnam