>> isabel: john riordan. >> riordon: you even know my last name!han i know. >> stahl: john riordan was as far from rambo and "mission: impossible" as you could get. back in 1975, he was a young banker, handsome and unattached, working as the assistant manager of citibank in saigon. they gave you a villa. >> riordon: they gave me a villa. >> stahl: and you lived well. >> riordon: i lived well, yes. >> stahl: he hosted barbecues at the villa for the bank's 34 vietnamese employees-- tellers, secretaries, accountants. they were like a family, tying their future to american banking. but that april, communist tanks were barreling toward saigon. hundreds of thousands were leaving, or trying to. three weeks before saigon fell, john got an order from citibank in new york-- burn everything important and get out. >> riordon: they said, "john, we've chartered a 747 pan am that's coming in. and we want you to take all of your staff and leave the bank and get out to this plane." >> stahl: by this point, it dawns on you what would happen to those people if you di

as the war in vietnam was ending and saigon was falling, john riordan, an american banker there, flednscience soon sent him back. he wanted to rescue more than 100 of his vietnamese employees- - but he still needed a plan. >> reporter: nothing was working until a c.i.a. agent told him the only way out now is on u.s. military cargo planes that are evacuating americans and their dependents. >> he says, the evacuation has begun. take your family and go out to the airport and process them through. and i said "well, i don't have a family." and he said "just create a wife and children no matter who they are and go out there and sign the documents." >> reporter: and this is the first time you've heard this idea? >> yes, yes. >> reporter: try and pass off his vietnamese colleagues, their spouses and children as his family? there were 105 of them! do you say to him "are you kidding me?" you don't say -- >> no, no. because there had been so much mania before that, this was the time to jump on anything that looked like it was going to float. >> reporter: you were at the end of your rope. >> abso