Trần Kim Tuyến

When his prison term ended, Tuyến remained under house arrest after the brother of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu intervened. Tuyến's wife was allowed to teach in a high school and Tuyến was allowed to write political columns under an assumed name. In April 1975, as South Vietnam collapsed amid a communist onslaught, British intelligence arranged for Tuyến's wife and their three youngest children to leave for Cambridge, where their eldest son was studying. Tuyến was reluctant to leave, but did so on 29 April 1975, the day before the fall of Saigon. He departed on one of the last helicopters from 22 Gia Long Street and flew out of the besieged city with the help of Phạm Xuân Ẩn, a Time magazine correspondent and communist spy.

Time passed and Tuyến began to show displeasure at the increasing interference of Nhu's wife, Madame Nhu into politics; displeasure turned to offence and Nhu began to ignore Tuyến. In early 1963, Tuyến was ordered by Diệm to go home and rest because the latter thought the former had been too lenient with disillusioned military officers and politicians who were veering towards opposition. Tuyến was never recalled to work. Instead, Tuyến responded by dispatching his staff back to their former position they had held before they joined his department, leaving the intelligence bureau in a state of collapse. In May, when the Buddhist crisis erupted after Diệm's forces had banned Buddhists from flying the Buddhist flag to commemorate Vesak, and fatally fired on them, Diệm recalled Tuyến, hoping he could resolve the crisis.

Tuyến eventually began to plot against the Ngo family. He began meeting with Colonel Đỗ Mậu, the chief of military security and other colonels in key leadership positions in the marine and paratroop divisions around Saigon. He also used his contacts in the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious sects in plotting the coup. With growing displeasure among the populace against the Diệm regime, Tuyến targeted July 15 as the date for a coup, but was unable to recruit the generals required for his plan, since he was too closely associated with Nhu to gain their trust. In the end, Tuyến's old group ended up being led by Thảo, who was deliberately fomenting discord among the army in order to help the communists. Thảo's group did not lead the coup, as they were integrated into the main group led by Generals Dương Văn Minh and Trần Văn Đôn, which would depose and assassinate Diệm and Nhu on 2 November 1963.

After Diệm was overthrown in November 1963, Tuyến decided to return to Vietnam. His wife was pregnant and he reasoned that as he had no enemies in the military junta and had worked well with them in the past, he would be safe. However, he was arrested and tried by the junta for corruption and abuse of power, and sentenced to five years in prison. Tuyến believed he was jailed because the generals were afraid that he would claim they were corrupt puppets of Nhu.

In 1962, Nhu appointed Tuyến and Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, a communist double agent from a Catholic background, to oversee the Strategic Hamlet Program, which attempted to isolate the Viet Cong by barricading villagers inside fortified compounds, theoretically locking the communists out. Tuyến led the way in promoting the concept to the populace.

Due to Tuyen's profile in the regime's repression, US Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow suggested to Diem in 1960 that Tuyen be removed from public power and sent overseas in a suite of liberalisation measures, which Diem rejected.

Tuyen was a key figure in persuading undecided ARVN divisions to support Diệm and put down the 1960 South Vietnamese coup attempt.

Tuyen was involved in internal power struggles within the Diem regime's intelligence sector, overcoming the chairman of the National Revolutionary Movement, the regime's mass movement, Tran Chanh Thanh, who was removed in 1957 with Nhu’s assistance. He then sidelined Huynh Van Lang, a young Catholic who was the party's financial director and had grown the Can Lao's financial outlets. Tuyen convinced Nhu to reduce Lang's authority.

Nhu took Tuyến under his wing and asked him to draft the rules for the Cần Lao, a secret Catholic body founded by Nhu, which consisted of many small cells that were used to spy on South Vietnamese society at all levels, in order to detect and quash opposition. The Cần Lao was anti-communist but drew its totalitarian techniques from both Stalinist and Nazi models. SEPES, with Tuyen leading the way, was responsible to screening prospective members, fundraising and indoctrination of new recruits. In mid 1956, Nhu appointed Tuyến as his go-between with CIA agents stationed in South Vietnam. The U.S. ambassador Frederick Reinhardt arranged for Tuyến to work with CIA agents such as Philip Potter and William Colby, who later became the Director of CIA under President Richard Nixon. Nhu and Tuyến used SEPES to send men into North Vietnam to engage in sabotage and propaganda. Almost all were either imprisoned or killed. His methods led some CIA agents to refer to him as "Vietnam's Goebbels". Tuyến had an intelligence unit of 500 men, and was used by Nhu as a fixer, to arrange secret meetings with dissidents.

In 1955, Diem created the Service des Études Politiques et Sociales (Service for Political and Social Studies, SEPES), which for the surveillance of government officials, which according to the historian Edward Miller, 'would eventually become one of the most feared components of the Diem government’s security apparatus', and Tuyen was made its inaugural director. Tuyen developed SEPES into a complex body that oversaw secret anti-communist missions domestically and also Laos, but was mainly used to monitor public servants, military personnel, police and non-communist opposition politicians and activists through a network of regime informants throughout the civil and military apparatus.

In mid-1954, at the time the Geneva Conference had concluded, Tuyến had been working for the anti-communist Vietnamese National Army of the State of Vietnam in an outlying province, only travelling to Hanoi during the weekends. As a result of the discussions in Geneva, Vietnam was to be temporarily partitioned pending national reunification elections in 1956. In the meantime, the Vietminh controlled the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, and the State of Vietnam was handed the south. The agreements also allowed for the free passage of civilians between either side for 300 days, while military personnel were obliged to move to their respective zones. Tuyến had persuaded a substantial number of northern Catholics to leave their homes and move south. As a result, he later tried to persuade Diệm to maintain some contact with members of the communist regime in Hanoi in the hope of persuading them to defect.

However, his religious convictions caused him to spurn the Hồ Chí Minh-led Viet Minh independence movement, which was strongly atheist. Although he was ambitious, Tuyến was aware of his provincial accent and his manner of stumbling over long words, which was not considered to be consistent with the archetypal leader with a city accent. In 1946, while still a student, Tuyến came to know the Ngô family by chance. His future mentor Ngô Đình Nhu wanted to travel from Hanoi to a Catholic area near the border with Laos and needed a guide. A Catholic priest asked Tuyến to lead the way on a bicycle while Nhu followed in a covered cyclo to evade French colonial and Vietminh attention.

Dr. Trần Kim Tuyến (24 May 1925 – 23 July 1995) was the chief of intelligence of South Vietnam under its first President Ngô Đình Diệm from 1955 to 1963. As a Roman Catholic, he was trusted by the Ngô family, and was part of their inner circle. Tuyến was responsible for a variety of propaganda campaigns against communists, and was prominent in operating the secret Cần Lao party apparatus which maintained the Ngô family's rule. In the course of his work, Tuyến emulated the tactics of the communists. He eventually became disillusioned and plotted against the regime before being exiled. After Diệm was deposed, Tuyến returned to South Vietnam, but the military junta which had replaced the Ngô family jailed him for five years. He fled the country in 1975 as Saigon was falling.