On January 8, 2008, Ambassador Michael Michalak of the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, sent a cable to the State Department in Washington titled "Vietnam Adoptions: A Trail of Corruption." In it, Michalak outlined in step-by-step detail the systemic adoption fraud and corruption that his investigating officers had found in Vietnam.
The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism received this cable, and hundreds of pages of other internal documents, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In total, we received hundreds of pages of documents revealing how State Department insiders discussed the problems they found and how their understanding of the crisis -- and efforts to stem it -- developed.
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We are posting the "Trail of Corruption" cable as a whole because it offers a fair summary of what the embassy's investigations uncovered "throughout all regions of the country." As the cable puts it, "The trail begins with [adoption agencies] passing out large sums of money to orphanage directors and ends with infant children, often of unknown origin, in the arms of unsuspecting adoptive parents." Read the cable here.
The rest of the documents are posted here, arranged in chronological order and by source. Click on any subject line in this table of contents to open the pdf file of the scanned document. A list of selected quotations from the documents is compiled here.
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