Presswatch/The MIA Sellout

...There are exceptions—Sydney Schanberg, a 1979 Pulitzer Prize—winner for his coverage of the fall of Cambodia, for example—but mostly the MIA story leaves the press cold...

...whether the Vietnamese still hold live Americans, it has become increasingly hard to deny that Americans were left behind when the United States withdrew from Vietnam...

...Despite his scholarly credentials, Morris was a well-known anti-Communist...

...There is no evidence the senator was influenced by this in any way, although almost certainly the Vietnamese government thought he might be...

...They made their minds up long ago, and invested their intellectual capital in a particular point of view...

...According to the AP, most of the POWs were Air Force fliers...

...Coincidentally, a few weeks before the AP story • appeared, the Pentagon released the translation of an account of a Vietnamese Communist party meeting held in either late 1970 or early 1971...

...The Times identified Franklin as "a professor of English and American studies at Rutgers University, who has written a book in which he asserts that the Vietnamese do not still hold American prisoners of war...

...Morris's disclosure was page-one news, but it also aroused press skepticism...

...Sejna, who now works for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he knew of as many as ninety POWs who were passed on this way from Southeast Asia to Moscow...

...No one in Washington or in Hanoi is being held accountable for the abandoned men...

...The press is not comfortable with the MIA story, and reporters have always held it at arm's length...

...This transfer was mainly politically motivated, with the intent of holding them as political hostages, subjects for intelligence exploitation and skilled labor within the camp system...

...It quoted a Compunist official as saying that Vietnam held 735 "American aviator POWs," although it had admitted to holding only 368...

...A single paragraph on page 426, for example, says that Jan Sejna, once a major general in the Czech army, "testified in a deposition and stated in interviews that American POWs were transported to the Soviet Union, transiting Prague...

...Nonetheless, while reasonable people may disagree on John Corry is a former New York Times reporter and media critic and the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade, forthcoming in January from Putnam...

...It noted that Morris was "under criticism as a partisan who ardently opposes normalizing relations with Vietnam...

...For a time, the gambit worked brilliantly...

...A recent page-one story in the Times, for example, said that in hustling, bustling Hanoi the only victims of the trade embargo were American businessmen...

...In peace as in war, when an opportunity arises they take it...

...Franklin's paper trail has been considerable...

...T he Vietminh, the North Vietnamese's predecessors, held back thousands of prisoners after the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the French withdrawal from Indochina...

...Franklin's identification, however, left out a great deal...

...Later he wrote an admiring introduction to a collection of Stalin's writings...

...Korean War POWs to the USSR and did not repatriate them...

...It was covered at length by the press, but not always to good effect...

...Last April, Stephen J. Moms, a Harvard researcher, disclosed that he had found a Russian translation of a 1972 Vietnamese report in the archives of the old Soviet Central Committee in Moscow...

...There is also the report of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs that was released early this year...

...They may believe in an Irangate conspiracy, say, or the so-called October Surprise, but they are unwilling to acknowledge Communist duplicity...

...Yet the evidence is substantial, and indeed it continues to grow...

...As an unbiased source Franklin was suspect, although he also turned up on CNN and elsewhere to denounce the Morris document...

...Sheehan was frozen in time, like so many other old Vietnamese reporters...

...Senator John McCain, a POW himself for five terrible years, says he thinks they are all dead...

...Then, in a stunning display of illogic, he attacked Richard Nixon: The POW-MIA myth had its origin during the war, as a political gambit by Richard Nixon...

...Neil Sheehan, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a UPI reporter in Vietnam, and later passed on Daniel Ellsberg's stolen copy of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, called the release of the Morris document "bizarre...

...It ignored any evidence that prisoners were left behind, other than, perhaps, "a few downed airmen in Laos...

...Meanwhile, a Washington Post editorial declares that "American businessmen have now joined the many citizens" who want to end the Vietnamese trade embargo...

...American airmen, apparently, were prized in the Communist bloc for their technical knowledge...

...C ertainly the coverage has changed...

...It was wholly in character for the North Vietnamese to keep prisoners behind, and then lie about it...

...The only odd thing is how difficult it is for prominent journalists to admit it...

...Any number of POWs might have passed through Prague later...

...Meanwhile, Senator Robert J. Smith, the vice chairman of the Senate committee, says he is sure some of the POWs are still alive...

...He declared this to be an "absolute fact—undeniable...

...This second document did not attract nearly as much press 'attention as the one Morris found, even though it corroborated the implications that the Vietnamese held back American prisoners...

...To buy time and divert attention from the fact that instead of ending the war he was trying to win it through the strategy of Vietnamization .. . Nixon launched a campaign to focus public hatred on the Vietnamese for holding American prisoners...

...Moreover, on a recent documentary on the Discovery cable channel, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general, said it was "obvious that Americans were kept in Vietnam after the war was over...

...One week after John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate committee on the POWs, visited Hanoi last December, Vietnam awarded Colliers International of Boston an exclusive world-wide contract to broker its commercial real estate deals...

...Indeed, the Associated Press reported in September on a confidential government study that said: "The Soviets transferred several hundred U.S...

...While teaching at Stanford in 1971, Franklin helped found the Venceremos brigade...

...Another Times story asserted that growing prosperity even threatened Hanoi's colonial-era charm...

...It seemed to be a warning...

...The most sweeping, and apparently scholarly, denunciation of the document, however, appeared in the New Yorker...

...Only the fear of offending MIA families, the Post says, keeps the embargo in place...

...Most of the prisoners were South Vietnamese, but at least some were French...

...Moststories about his find identified him that way...

...A New York Times story about American business leaders meeting with a high Vietnamese official—"They gave him several standing ovations"—also notes that veterans groups picketed the hotel where the meeting was held...

...It seems likely that the Vietnamese are onto a good thing, and they know it...

...It said that North Vietnam held 1,205 American prisoners in 1972, 700 more than it released the next year after the signing of the Paris peace accord...

...Well, perhaps, but that still may be irrelevant...

...Colliers's CEO, Stuart Forbes, is Kerry's cousin...

...You may read stories with Hanoi datelines now that never mention past unpleasantness...

...Sheehan's accusation was astonishing as well as nasty...

...As Schanberg wrote in his column in Newsday: "By and large, the press—certainly the Washington press corps—continues to accept the ridiculous official line, purveyed in Hanoi as well as Washington, that there is no evidence of unreturned prisoners...

...The Clinton administration appears to be moving toward lifting the embargo, and the press, for the most part, agrees with Sheehan, who ended his piece in the New Yorker by saying the United States must "break free of the last fantasy of thewar"—that POWs were left behind in Southeast Asia...

...Our mutual enemy is not in Hanoi, he is in Washington...

...Time magazine, examining the charge that Ron Brown asked for $700,000 to help lift the embargo, ties in the "extremist fringes of the POW-MIA movement," as well as an "archconservative" veterans coalition, and a "far-right newsletter affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche...

...So determined are lunatic veterans to prevent a rapprochement with Vietnam, it seems, they will even spread lies about Ron Brown...

...Our great news organizations, though, show little interest in this...

...In his 1975 autobiography, he proudly quoted a speech he once gave at a Vietnamese-American Independence Day celebration in Paris: "What I propose is that we declare the government of the United States of America in 1967 to be the enemy of mankind, the number-one criminal of the world, wanted dead or alive...

...It should be pointed out now that Sejna defected from Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Vietnam war still had years to go...

...A generation of journalists who despised the Vietnam war has now risen to senior management, while their younger colleagues see the war as arid, dead history...

...Eventually, they were quietly ransomed back by the French government...

...In a way, the matter is academic...

...Some of the public seemed to be under the impression that the President was prosecuting the war solely to free the POWs, rather than adding to their numbers, lengthening their detention and getting 21,000 additional Americans killed by prolonging the conflict...

...Buried in its 1,223 pages are unnoticed bits and pieces...

...Then it quoted H. Bruce Franklin, who denounced the Morris document as a "clumsy fabrication...

...It is another Vietnam story the press has missed...

...A New York Times story was typical...

...They still find it easier to slander Nixon than to denounce Ho Chi Minh...

...Moreover, it has been known for some time that American POWs from the Korean War were secretly sent to the Soviet Union...