The MIA Cover-Up
Corry, John
The MIA Cover-Up Seeking to normalize relations with Vietnam, President Clinton, along with supine politicians and a feckless press, would like the public to forget the MIA issue. But evidence...
...He also described the "tap code" that POWs used to pass messages from cell to cell...
...The distress signals—combinations of letters and numbers—appear in numerous photographs taken after, not before, Operation Homecoming...
...Sources were very young when they observed the event...
...There are, though, some salient facts...
...The only way Hanoi could account for them now would be to confess that it had lied in the past...
...no others are allowed: The American Spectator February 1994 31 4—This category represents an unresolved status...
...it had been assumed many would need medical attention...
...A full four years later, the Defense Department sent a team to investigate...
...T he DIA's abysmal record led the six staff members on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs who were charged with investigating intelligence reports to re-examine, in 1992, the 1,650 first-hand live-sighting reports...
...After six weeks, this wearing a bit thin...
...it is plainly evident that the emphasis is on the investigative side of the question in most cases, where the focus rests on debunking the source more than it does on the analysis of the information itself...
...It is reasoned," the report says, "that Hanoi was taking steps to thwart other possible SAR [search and rescue] efforts to rescue U.S...
...t is on the matter of a separate prison system that government orthodoxy about POWs begins to unravel completely...
...Quang said that North Vietnam was holding 1,205 American prisoners614 more than it released the next year...
...In the delirium of the time, some thirty Congress had walked away from the war...
...The Pentagon's word is not reassuring...
...Characteristically, the Vietnamese were trying to hide something...
...prisoners...
...Moreover, there was general agreement that the figure for Laos represented only a fraction of the real total...
...Of course it cannot...
...It said that in 1970, after American forces had raided the prison camp at Son Tay, only twenty-three miles from Hanoi, North Vietnam had dispersed POWs among other camps...
...Source saw the American lying down inside this room...
...But some reports are clear enough...
...a source says he has been told by someone else about an American, or many Americans, held in captivity...
...That Colonel Hynds was captured alive seems indisputable...
...Hanoi would be trusted to return all its prisoners...
...None of the aid was ever extended, and even the existence of the letter was not disclosed until years later...
...Frank Shields, the former head of the Pentagon's POW/MIA Task Force, to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs is instructive...
...therefore, the major could not have seen one, either...
...Aerial photography revealed that new gun emplacements were also constructed at the Cam Chu prison immediately after the Son Tay raid...
...The precedent was clear...
...It quoted a Vietnamese official as saying that Vietnam held 735 "American aviator POWs," although it had acknowledged holding only 368...
...When it did release 591 POWs, in Operation Homecoming in March 1973, however, it was apparent that something was wrong...
...7—This represents camp information only...
...Zwenig, who is now the executive assistant to United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright, also wants to normalize relations with Vietnam...
...And I think that maybe at that point in time he believed that we had what we had, and that was all we were going to get, and that there was no one there.in the register that was "pertinent to significant exhibit items they had been allowed to examine...
...In other words, the DIA bullied those who came forth with information about MIAs...
...If he passed the polygraph, of course, it would authenticate his story...
...Ambiguous language or not, the committee report confirms that satellite imagery has picked up the distress signals, and even the names, of downed American pilots on the ground...
...The DIA classifies live-sighting reports by category, ranging from lA through 9B...
...The investigators, who, for technical reasons, were using live-sighting reports that extended only through 1989, drew an obvious conclusion: "that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989...
...Nixon told Pham that the United States would "contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam," in an amount that would "fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over five years...
...Then they were allowed to examine the register itself...
...That means a source says he has actually seen an American held in captivity, or under conditions that cannot be easily explained...
...Other areas of Vietnam, however, drew pins in clumps or clusters...
...It said only that it could not vouch for the document's authenticity or accuracy, and that it had come "from the files of the GRU—Soviet military intelligence...
...The satellite pictures in themselves do not prove that anyone is still alive...
...If Hanoi kept a separate prison system for the POWs who were not returned, the POWs who did return would hardly be aware of it...
...Moreover, a 1969 study by the Rand Corporation had said that "a quid pro quo that the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] is likely to demand—and one that the United States may want to consider accepting—is the payment of reparations to North Vietnam in exchange for US...
...unpublished report by Senate investigators, April 9, 1992 HANOI, Vietnam (Reuter)—US...
...The crash sites yield little or nothing...
...The investigators protested...
...Stockdale, who suffered severe torture and eventually inflicted a near fatal wound on himself to The American Spectator February 1994 29 convince his captors that he would never accede to their propaganda demands, was sure no POW was left behind after Operation Homecoming...
...Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, a senior member of the Hanoi Politburo, signed the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam war on January 23, 1973...
...The American was alone...
...In 1979, another Vietnamese Communist defector told the Defense Intelligence Agency that in the mid-1970s Vietnamese officials had talked about holding 700 American prisoners as "bargaining assets...
...the cemeteries could yield a great deal--evidence, perhaps, about men who were murdered...
...The inescapable conclusion is that MIA lists were flawed from the outset...
...You re-member that there were a lot of people at the time who wanted to declare victory, okay...
...Senator Kerry wants to normalize relations with Vietnam...
...on his reported live sightings until further notice...
...It is permissible now to wonder if the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever been seriously interested in uncovering the truth about our missing men, or whether it has always been an instrument in a cover-up...
...That left the investigators with 929 first-hand livesightings, all involving two or more men allegedly seen in conditions indicating they were prisoners...
...In their written report, the investigators say they were shown items from the museum's collection, and then given a two-page excerpt from the museum's register...
...it called it a "fabrication...
...Thus, even from the beginning, the POW issue was shrouded in ambiguity...
...A March 1973 memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, "There are approximately 350 U.S...
...stay on top of this for us...
...The lower categories apply to reports still being evaluated...
...prisoners of war (POWs) being held in Vietnam...
...As an intelligence estimate, it was worthless...
...T he 700 figure cannot be dismissed...
...concessions before releasing the majority of American prisoners...
...Moreover, "certain items of high interest" that were supposed to be in the museum were missing...
...Peter Matthes, who has been missing since 1969...
...The grotesque part, though, is that even the figure of 1,200—or 1,278—might have been too low...
...Source asked the American in English, "What is your name...
...the upper categories apply to the final evaluations...
...Indeed, the study found that this is exactly what six camps that were known to be holding American prisoners did...
...It's possible SIRO may simply conduct the poly without your input...
...Kimball M. Gaines, who was its principal author...
...The CIA document is handwritten, unsigned, and undated, al-though the content indicates that it was put together several years after Operation Homecoming in 1973...
...In the main, sources who volunteer information have no ulterior motive, especially those relocated to the U.S...
...A deposition given in 1992 by Dr...
...The Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum cited above says 1,303 men were still unaccounted for after Operation Homecoming, and that the debriefings of the returned POWs indicated that approximately 100 of them The American Spectator February 1994 27 were probably dead...
...Although the Vietnamese themselves talk about the pilots being captured alive, at least some of them were classified by the Pentagon as "presumptive finding of death," or "killed in action/body not recovered...
...The CIA station in Bangkok passed the major's story onto the DIA in Washington in August...
...Washington to Bangkok, November: Do not polygraph source...
...Bangkok to Washington, October.' Request your immediate attention to this case...
...No American, however, was repatriated from any of these camps during Operation Homecoming...
...When the briefing was over, Frances Zwenig, the committee's staff director, ordered that all copies of the investigators' report be destroyed...
...More important, it also found that seven camps that were not known to 30 The American Spectator February 1994 be holding prisoners—Tuyen Quang, Ba Vi, Ban Puoi, Xam Tang, Chom Lai, Coc Mi, and Xom Giong—reacted the same way...
...Not one of the cemeteries, however, has been excavated by any of the teams now looking for MIA remains...
...6B—Analytical evaluations reviewed and approved by management which are determined to describe an unidentified individual who is not an American PW-MIA...
...The reports are credible...
...ation than do the first-hand sighting reports...
...and neither U.S...
...Even before the arrival of the boat people, though, U.S...
...It is now certain that we left men behind in Southeast Asia—not merely the handful we now unofficially acknowledge in Laos, but in numbers reaching well into the hundreds in Vietnam...
...17 © 1994 The American Spectator All Rights Reserved 34 The American Spectator February 1994...
...What happened then is detailed in the cable traffic between the defense attaché in the Bangkok Embassy and the DIA in Washington...
...We shall insist that North Vietnam comply with the agreement...
...This is our diplomatic step...
...He also said that North Vietnam could not have held 1,205 prisoners because that would have required it to have a separate prison system...
...The investigators were shown pre-selected items...
...In May, the Senate rejected a Republican amendment that would have allowed continued bombing if Nixon certified that North Vietnam was not trying to account for all the missing in action...
...2527 is the secret four-digit number of Air Force Col...
...The CIA analyst was only being cautious...
...The debriefer involved states source was very forthcoming, open, and seemed completely candid...
...Tan Lap, where the major was held, has another distinction as well...
...It is now known, for example, that on June 5, 1992, a satellite picked up S-E-R-E-X, etched on the ground near Dong Vai prison...
...Few seemed to hear what he said moments later: "There are still some problem areas...
...They found, for example, "a flag used to request food used by the American colonel pilot Hynds, Wallace G., and was captured at Ha Tinh," and "bandit pilot identification card number FR 15792 of Hynds, Wallace Gouley and was captured alive in Ha Tinh on 28-5-1965...
...Many of the reports, even the ones that are hearsay, are quite specific, with physical details, exact locations, and an abundance of certifiable facts...
...Our analysis did reveal some irregularities in the North Vietnamese prison system between 1970 and 1973...
...Reports from Communist defectors and other sources make it clear that the North Vietnamese were aware of the prisoners' tap code and could manipulate it as they chose, excising the names of some POWs and introducing false data about others...
...But the concessions, or aid programs, were not forthcoming...
...Wallace Gurley Hynds as killed in action...
...SIRO is very high on this source...
...The empty rhetoric about "healing" the wounds from Vietnam, spoken so shamelessly by press, politicians, and old peace activists, might have some meaning now if it were directed toward Stockdale and those like him...
...The committee's final report dutifully notes this, but without indicating that WRYE is any more than a random collection of letters...
...This led in 1986 to the Director's PW/MIA Task Force Report, or the Gaines Report, after Air Force Col...
...Both sets of POWs would have been held in separate places...
...Then they were shown not the register that listed all the items, but instead an excerpt from the register...
...And there is no actual proof that this class of report has any less potential for yielding some usable inform...
...They reasoned that a single man, even if he appeared to be a prisoner, might have been a deserter or a straggler and not a POW...
...Apparently, they insisted then on examining the entire register, and when they did, they discovered it was a fake...
...the aid had been extended, however, Vietnam might have returned all its prisoners...
...At the very least, they are further proof that a cover-up has been, and still is, in progress...
...He had a wound on his right ankle that was oozing blood and pus...
...Then they dismissed the reports in which the source said he had seen only a single man who might have been a prisoner...
...Laos and some areas of Vietnam drew only a few...
...by John Cony As shown by the enclosed Casualty Data Summary, a total of 1,303 American personnel remain officially unaccounted for after the completion of Operation Homecoming...
...The American replied, "Jackson...
...On the other hand, some of them may be new, and others perhaps are being carved out or etched into the ground even now...
...Obviously, there is a missing category: one that accepts a live-sighting report as accurate...
...He had brown hair and a thick beard...
...It said that former South Vietnamese commandos who had been in Tan Lap prison had never seen an American...
...15 have gone out already...
...Tran Van Quang in Communist Party archives in Moscow...
...The satellite imagery is compelling...
...When source saw Jackson's wound, source took six penicillin tablets which were hidden in the cuffs of his trousers and offered them to Jackson...
...they were really theweakest of quibbles—that the 1,205 prisoners, for example, included both American POWs and South Vietnamese commandos...
...Request major provide a complete and detailed description again of how these events ensued...
...More likely, they will insist on awaiting concrete evidence of US...
...it called an "inordinate" number of them liars...
...Approximately 1,650 of the reports are first-hand...
...The CIA study was made during the mid- or late 1970s...
...POWs survived, but neither is there proof that all of those who did not return had died...
...some of the distress signals may have been made years ago...
...Washington to Bangkok, October: Regret delay in response...
...During this process, it was noted that a number of items mentioned in the register excerpt did not appear in the register...
...The indications that a large number of men were left 28 The American Spectator February 1994 behind after 1973 have become compelling...
...He also said that "other forms of aid . . . could fall in the range of 1 to 1.5 billion dollars...
...The irregularities do not provide conclusive evidence of American presence at other camps...
...Major Henry M. Serex, an Air Force electronic warfare officer, was shot down over Vietnam on April 2, 1972...
...Morris replied that Vietnamese Communist documents always drew a distinction between American and South Vietnamese troops...
...Stony Beach is intelligence jargon for the DIA...
...through the tap code and other means, he said, the POWs were able to keep track of one another, thus assuring that none would be lost, murdered, or spirited away without their comrades' knowledge...
...The team also noted that certain items of high interest that appeared in the register were not available for examination...
...Here are the categories for the final evaluations...
...On the other hand, the Quang report that Morris had found in Moscow attracted a good deal of attention, and the Defense Department reacted accordingly...
...Of the 1,303 personnel, the debriefs of the returnees contain information that approximately 100 of them are probably dead...
...There are six other men whose names were found in that one provincial museum who were all listed as being captured alive, although the Pentagon had declared them all dead...
...But evidence continues to emerge that far more men were left behind than has been reported—and that some may be alive today...
...This defies the laws of probability...
...She also said she wanted their computer files purged...
...And he said: You didn't hear what I said...
...The Pentagon lists him as dead...
...Burroughs, who was brought in by the committee as a consultant, also found other, previously unidentified, distress signals among the satellite images...
...In fact, Capt...
...a Defense Department report, dated July 26, 1971, adds another camp to the list of places where North Vietnam probably held prisoners...
...The document begins: In response to recent human source reporting on American POWs still in North Vietnam, we conducted a photographic study of selected prison/detention facilities in the northern portion of the country...
...Last September, the Pentagon itself released the translation of an account of a Vietnamese Communist Party meeting held in late 1970 or early 1971...
...The boat people who fled Vietnam in the 1980s brought with them information about a prison system that was larger and more complex than we had known...
...Most were classified as KIA/BNR, or killed in action/body not recovered...
...And I said: I don't believe that you could say that . . I told him that he could not say that...
...And I thought he was probably going to fire me .. . QUESTION: What did you interpret that to mean, "you didn't hear me" ? DR...
...The study went on to say that the United States could avoid the appearance of paying reparations if it publicly labeled them "part of the US...
...Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said Tuesday as conclusively as anyone can, that there are no U.S...
...The Son Tay raiders—Special Forces troopers, Army Rangers, and Air Force volunteers—had swooped in by helicopter on Son Tay, only twenty-three miles from Hanoi, in an attempt to rescue prisoners...
...however, this possibility cannot be disregarded, and precludes drawing a firm conclusion that all the camps which held American POWs have been identified...
...When extracts from the document were published in the press, the Pentagon attempted to have the full document classified...
...The study concluded as follows: It would be unduly optimistic to believe that the DRV and the Vietcong will release all US...
...The National Security Agency has correlated the transcripts with the names of the pilots...
...He also described the American...
...6—This category shows analytical evaluations reviewed and approved by senior level management which have been correlated to a known individual or incident...
...prisoners immediately after conclusion of an agreement in the expectation that the United States will meet its military, political or monetary commitments...
...They dismissed the reports that seemed least plausible...
...Intentional or not, it was the beginning of the cover-up, and it would have a far-reaching effect...
...If senators had even called for unilateral withdrawal from Southeast Asia, without the imposition of any conditions on North Vietnam...
...The DIA also said the man the major described could not have been wearing a red-striped shirt because "red-striped uniforms went out of use circa 1970...
...n the appalling history 1 of POW-MIA policy, though, nothing is more scandalous than the issue of live sightings...
...It is equally certain that American officials ignored evidence of this at the time...
...The Pentagon immediately classified the Gaines Report...
...It must also be noted now that Admiral James Stockdale, testifying before respectful senators at the POW/MIA hearings in 1992, also dismissed the idea of a separate prison system...
...Furthermore, the DIA asserted: A computer-assisted search of all missing personnel reveals only one unaccounted for individual whose first, middle or last name is Jackson...
...This suggests that the register viewed by the team was not original as claimed by the museum staff, but in fact had been selectively recopied from an original at some time in the past...
...Their report continues: The entire register was then reviewed for entries concerning additional items of interest...
...SIRO refers to the CIA: Bangkok to Washington, September: SIRO has transferred this case to Stony Beach, and strongly urges that source be polygraphed as soon as possible...
...their briefing was supposed to be closed to outsiders...
...In addition, there were numerous gaps in the register where items that had been examined by the team were not included...
...In April, the DIA issued its official evaluation of the major's story...
...Nixon would soon be undone by Watergate, and Congress wanted no more of the war...
...Cambodia drew no pins...
...While we cannot preclude this individual from consideration, based on the above, it is likely that the source has fabricated his story...
...Jackson then said, "You will stay here a long time...
...He also found the letters WRYE...
...They had shown that American forces could strike within reach of downtown Hanoi...
...Moreover, while Stockdale and the other POWs in Hanoi thought they knew the names and locations of all the American prisoners, it is obvious they did not...
...Nixon's letter, of course, offered just such a contribution...
...it indicates that someone in the CIA wanted to make certain information part of the permanent record, but did not want to attract much attention when he did...
...The implications of this are obvious to the casual observer, but do not seem to be appreciated by the experts...
...All three are classified as "KIA/body not recovered," and surely one of them is the man the major saw...
...It should be noted with trepidation that there are some 600 hearsay reports of live sightings backlogged . . . which have not had any evaluation...
...John Vessey, the presidential emissary to Vietnam on POW-MIA affairs, said he had spoken to General Quang and that Quang denied he had made the report...
...and, in many cases, the sighting was a fleeting one...
...A CIA document, only recently declassified, suggests that POWs were held in camps other than the ones identified during the war...
...According to the CIA report on the debriefing: Source [the major] and the American were on the first floor...
...All of our American POWs are on their way home...
...Last April, Stephen J. Morris, a Harvard scholar, disclosed that he had found the Russian translation of a 1972 report by Lieut...
...Since 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency has received more than 15,000 live-sighting reports about American prisoners in Southeast Asia...
...the Pentagon, however, has always listed a Col...
...The American wore some sort of military trousers and a dirty, tattered red and white striped shirt...
...Ironically, much of the evidence about this is now coming from the Vietnamese...
...they also dismissed the ones that had been correlated with known individuals, the Marine Robert Garwood, for example, who returned from Vietnam in 1979...
...In 1988, the CIA discovered a large "USA" etched in a rice paddy in northern Laos, along with what appeared to be the letter "K," a symbol used by downed pilots...
...SHIELDS: That I was fighting the problem...
...The Pentagon says that the GX2527, which showed up on the ground near Vietnam's Dong Vai prison in a photograph taken in June 1992, was not a manmade distress signal but a photographic anomaly...
...In the deposition, Shields describes an April 1973 meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Clements, who had summoned him to his office to discuss the Pentagon's public posture on men missing in action: DR...
...SHIELDS: He [Clements] indicated to me that he believed that there were no Americans alive in Indochina...
...Therefore, sources should not be badgered when they volunteer information they do not recall well . . otherwise word gets around the refugee community and information dries up...
...5—This category is used only by managerial personnel and indicates difficulties exist in follow-up...
...The analytical evaluation has been reviewed and approved by senior level management—no correlation or further action is possible...
...The Defense Department did not try to discredit the Vietnamese document, perhaps because it attracted so little attention in the press...
...More men were left alive than we thought...
...This meant that even though there was no evidence to prove that some 1,200 men—or, to use the exact figure, 1,278 men—were dead, the Pentagon would assume they were...
...The provisions of the agreement requiring an accounting for all missing in action .. . have not been complied with...
...Reinforcing the mindset is the investigative audit trail, which has confirmed an inordinate number of originally promising sources to be fabricators...
...Blair C. Wrye of the Air Force, shot down over North Vietnam on August 12, 1966, is an MIA...
...In fact, the errors were not errors...
...There is evidence, moreover, that indicates The American Spectator February 1994 33 the possibility of survival, at least for a small number, after Operation Homecoming...
...It is a mark of many good men who went to Vietnam and upheld the highest standards of courage, honor, and decency that they are unwilling to believe their country might have abandoned other good men...
...others were in dire straits as a result of the war...
...may have forced our polygraph hand on this source...
...John Kerry, the committee chairman, told one of the investigators that if the report ever leaked out, "you'll wish you'd never been born...
...The Vietminh guerrillas of the 1950s had held back an unknown number of French soldiers after the fall of Dien Bien Phu...
...The ambiguous language moves the cover-up to a higher plane...
...On the morning the investigators were scheduled to present their report to the senators, one senator's aide let the Pentagon know what the investigators intended to say...
...he was also sure there was no separate prison system...
...The gunners talk of American planes being brought down, and of their pilots being captured by soldiers or villagers...
...Bangkok to Washington, October: Can someone...
...Stockdale, though, was wrong...
...In fact, the Defense Department had speculated along these same lines before the CIA did...
...More important, they also suggest that American prisoners are still crying out in Vietnam...
...Hundreds of hospital beds had been set aside for the returnees...
...for one thing, we had no "leverage" to do so...
...This penchant has overridden the seeking of the corroborative data necessary to support the sighting...
...Bangkok to Washington, February, 1988: Please advise status our request to polygraph source...
...December 14, 1993 A terrible truth is now emerging: Recently declassified documents and other sources show that America's MIA-POW policy has been disfigured by denials, half-truths, and evasions...
...In August 1987, a former South Vietnamese major turned up in Bangkok after being interned in Communist prisons, and was debriefed by the CIA...
...neither can the idea of bargaining assets...
...One week later, however, President Nixon sent a secret letter to Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam, reflecting an unpublicized understanding reached by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho...
...In a remarkable display of bad judgment, however, the senators voted, 7 to 2, to allow the DIA to attend the briefing...
...The investigators and the team from DIA shouted at each other...
...The total number of American aviators in the SRV [Vietnam] is 735," the official declared...
...Liaison obligation...
...In Hanoi, meanwhile, Gen...
...intelligence agencies suspected that Hanoi had held POWs outside the known prisoner system...
...And: There exists a mindset to debunk...
...Quang could hardly admit that North Vietnam had held more prisoners than it had ever acknowledged...
...Whatever the merits of the rest of the DIA's argument, the assertion that only one Jackson was missing was, if not a careless mistake, then certainly an outright lie...
...Vessey said this could not be correct...
...Meanwhile, new information about the satellite imagery has come to light...
...The possibility that they were alive, however, was ignored, and even misrepresented...
...At any time, the management can place a case in this category...
...By all accounts, what followed was contentious...
...Over the years, however, a growing body of evidence has cast those early KIA/BNR figures in doubt...
...It is reasonable to believe that the most afflicted POWs either remained in Vietnam, or were murdered...
...The major described the room and the building in which it was located precisely...
...In its 1,123-page final report on the hearings, the committee reached an evasive conclusion: "We acknowledge that there is no proof that U.S...
...Besides the unfortunate Marine lost under unusual circumstances, three other Jacksons are missing in action...
...The Casualty Data Summary mentioned in the Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum at the top of this story, for example, notes that, besides the 1,200 or so men whose fate was unknown after Operation Homecoming, 65 were still held as prisoners: 29 in North Vietnam, 27 in South Vietnam, five in Cambodia, and four in Laos...
...They took notes on information The investigators, however, listed in their report the items they were able to see, literally translating the museum's own descriptions...
...Jackson took only four...
...9—This category indicates the analytical evaluation is approved as a fabrication...
...We have been told that no American prisoners are held in Cambodia," Kissinger told reporters the next day...
...Characteristically, though, the Pentagon says they are not distress signals at all...
...Nonetheless, no questions were publicly raised about this or, indeed, any other substantive matter, and on March 29 President Nixon addressed the nation on television...
...The owner of the rice paddy, it reported, said his son had "made the USA symbol by copying it from an envelope because he liked the shape of the letters...
...As I have already said, we have published the names of 368 aviators...
...The investigators then plotted the 929 sightings on a map of Southeast Asia, using pins to mark each one...
...Recently declassified transcripts of the conversations of Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners, monitored by the National Security Agency, reinforce the conclusion...
...Its intellectual dishonesty has been stunning, and its investigative process a fraud...
...Henceforth, all official figures on POWs and MIAs would be suspect...
...He was Caucasian, between 170 and 180 centimeters tall and weighing about 70 kilograms...
...The conclusion, however, was not welcomed by the DIA, or even by most members of the Senate committee...
...A North Vietnamese military doctor, who defected to the South in 1971, told American officials that Hanoi was holding hundreds more prisoners than it had acknowledged...
...some are from former Vietnamese prisoners who say they dug the graves...
...Within PW/MIA Division it has evolved over time as an investigative technique, whereby intense effort is initially focused on veracity of sources with a view toward discrediting them...
...If this is unacceptable . please advise by immediate message, and if possible, provide a rationale for not polygraphing source which can be provided to SIRO...
...An earlier memo to Henry Kissinger says that some 215 of the 350 "were lost under circumstances that the enemy probably has information regarding their fate...
...The purpose of our study was to determine if any signatures of American presence could be found at these other camps...
...These live-sighting reports have come from many sources—refugees, defectors, diplomats, and travelers—with the preponderance from refugees...
...If the Americans agree to the withdrawal of all their troops from South Vietnam, we will, as a start, return these 368 people...
...After Son Tay, he insisted, POWs were not dispersed among other camps, but instead were concentrated in fewer camps...
...Judging from this reaction "and the fact that several reports have been received recently stating that Americans are still being held in North Vietnam," the CIA again said cautiously, "the possibility of a second prison system for the detention of American POWs cannot be disregarded...
...On occasion it has seemed criminal...
...For the first time in twelve years, no American military forces are in Vietnam," he declared...
...V essey was making a strange argument...
...Unfortunately, the prisoners had been moved to another camp, although the raid itself was a victory...
...In 1991, American investigators from the Joint Casualty Resolution Commission were allowed to visit a Vietnamese military museum in Vinh City in Nghe Tinh province...
...The GX in GX2527, for instance, are distress letters...
...A team from the DIA immediately showed up to rebut their presentation...
...The remainder of the reports are hearsay...
...K eep in mind now what the report called the "mindset to debunk...
...Putnam's Sons...
...Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements, May 22, 1973 The intelligence indicates that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989...
...26 The American Spectator February 1994 from incontrovertible facts, and a failure of national resolve...
...There has never been evidence uncovered of someone being held alive," he told a news conference after talks with Vietnamese officials...
...9B—This category indicates the analytical findings are approved by management as a possible fabrication...
...Several senators shouted, too...
...The American, he said, was lying down in a room near the camp dispensary where injured or sick prisoners were taken to rest...
...he was lost on 21 32 The American Spectator February 1994 September 1969 under unusual circumstances from a medical treatment room within a hospital cantonment area in the 3d Marine Division area of South Vietnam...
...The major said that in December 1978, five years after Operation Homecoming, he had encountered an American in the Tan Lap prison in northern Vietnam...
...Nine men captured in Laos spent years in the Hanoi prison system, separated from other POWs only by the width of stone walls, without the other POWs knowing they were there...
...Several declassified documents suggest the number should have been in the hundreds...
...Consider the following excerpts, both dealing with live sightings: When a case is being worked...
...Jackson added that "there were 16 of us...
...It means an unwillingness to believe, and in the eight years since the Gaines Report, it has calcified into official policy...
...Bangkok to Washington, October: We have been queried several times by SIRO on the status of this case...
...His answers were consistent when interviewed over a three-day period...
...One difficulty in tracking information about them is that a camp, or prison, may be referred to one way in a DIA report, say, and another in a POW debriefing...
...However, Larry Burroughs, a retired Air Force colonel who once headed the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the government's main imagery laboratory, insists it was manmade...
...The known system consisted of thirteen camps—eight outside of Hanoi and five within the city...
...In every place where there was a cluster, there was also a Vietnamese prison...
...Rather, it insists, they are combinations of lights, shadows, and vegetation that only appear to form GX2527, say, or 72TA88...
...hat was because in addition to the 1,278 MIAs T about whom the Pentagon had no firm information, an almost equal number of MIAs had been declared dead...
...Buried in the 1,123 pages—and in thousands more pages of unpublished depositions—are pieces of information that sit like time bombs...
...Museum officials claimed that these items were not available because they had been lost, destroyed or lent to other museums...
...Bangkok to Washington, November: Source answered all questions in a direct manner...
...Criticism of the DIA, much of it from MIA family members, became so harsh and insistent in the 1980s that theagency assigned a team to investigate itself...
...Washington to Bangkok, March: . . . This source does not sustain the minimum level of plausibility that requires testing by polygraph...
...We have broken faith with men who fought for their country, and we are being blighted by an ever-widening moral stain...
...The DIA is programmed to discredit the possibility that anyone was left behind in Southeast Asia, or that anyone remains there now...
...8—This represents no PW-MIA information...
...Bangkok to Washington, October: Source has expressed his willingness to be polygraphed...
...military and civilian PW/MIAs in Laos...
...More men were captured alive than anyone thought...
...There was no possibility they ever could be...
...The 591 returnees, though, included no amputees or burn cases...
...For two decades, a cover-up has been in progress, sustained not so much by conspiracy as by government ineptitude, a bureaucratic unwillingness to draw obvious conclusions John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Hundreds of North Vietnamese regulars were killed, while not a single raider was lost or injured, and all returned home safely...
...Vessey also attempted to discredit the document itself...
...A later Pentagon document gives a precise number of 1,278...
...there was no one maimed, disfigured, or blind...
...The tacit assumption that the men were dead would harden into official policy...
...Certainly, there already was evidence that men had been left behind...
...A vehicle came to the front of this rest area the same evening and Jackson was taken away...
...But we did not insist...
...It seems, though, that the Defense Department does not want to know...
...Stockdale, who survived seven years as a prisoner, thought that after the Son Tay raid, all POWs were brought into the camps in Hanoi...
...American prisoners held in North Vietnam and Laos will be returned to us in Hanoi...
...No information was ever forthcoming, however, and only twelve prisoners returned from Laos...
...contribution to a postwar recovery program...
...the only reasonable explanation of why the Vietnamese would have fortified the camps that way is that they were used to hold prisoners...
...The CIA study made the reasonable assumption that camps holding POWs would react to the Son Tay raid by immediately shoring up their defenses against the possibility of a similar helicopter attack—with new anti-aircraft gun positions, trenches, foxholes, and so on...
...Therefore, some 1,200 might still have been alive...
...Eventually it said that "while portions of the document are plausible, evidence in support of its claims to be an accurate summary of the POW situation in 1972 are far outweighed by errors, omissions and propaganda that detract from its credibility...
...And I said: You can't say that...
...France quietly ransomed them back with government aid...
...it sought to discredit reports of live sightings...
...No live-sighting reporting, however, has ever been accepted as proof by the Defense Intelligence Agency that an MIA is still alive, or ever has been alive, in Southeast Asia...
...It also moves us into the area of culpable negligence...
...In each case we have replied we are awaiting guidance from our headquarters...
...It is one of five Vietnamese prisons—the others are Quyet Tien, Yen Bai, Ha Son Binh, Sand Thanh Hoa—where, according to reports from the boat people and others, POWs were buried in cemeteries in the late 1970s and early 1980s...
...intelligence nor the POWs who returned from Vietnam, he said, were aware of such a system...
...Following bureaucratic protocol, it also asked the DIA for permission to polygraph the major...
...To understand the moral catastrophe we must go back twenty-one years...
...I have no reason to disbelieve him," Vessey said, although he had no reason to believe him, either, and indeed one excellent reason to think Quang was lying...
...That it is handwritten is suggestive...
...Our study concentrated on comparing known American POW camps with various other detention camps...
...Instead, the teams dig up old crash sites...
...He had gone back to look at old photographs to determine how many camps had reacted to the Son Tay raid in 1970 "by constructing new defensive positions such as AAA [antiaircraft artillery] sites, AW [automatic weapon] positions, trenching and/or foxholes...
...Xom Aplo, or Xom Ap Lo N-51, for instance, may be called Bat Bat, after a nearby village, or Briarpatch, or even Tic Tac Toe, which refers to the configuration of some of its buildings...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
