Special Correspondence / An MIA Cover-Up?
Cony, John Kerry vs. John
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE An MIA Cover-Up? John Kerry vs. John Corry / n publishing John Corry's "article" on the work of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs in the February issue of The...
...As nearly as I can tell, most of the families distrust and dislike him...
...Hynds's sister, the pilot ID card that the Spectator asserted is on display in a museum in Vietnam does not belong to her brother, Col...
...And that source then admitted he had lied about his original story and had never seen an American in the first place...
...He says my "article"—cleverly putting the word in quotes—was about the work of his committee...
...I sympathize with Colonel Hynds's sister, but I must point out that the information I used came not from people who "do not know what they are talking about," but from the Vietnamese...
...Midway through the article, John Corry presents the case that the committee had information that a Col...
...This disappointment does not reflect a failure of the investigation, but rather a confrontation with reality...
...The senator has believed them in the past, and I think he should believe them now...
...Laos and some areas of Vietnam drew only a few...
...The live-sighting reports that have been resolved have not checked out...
...A MONT/11V IILVILW I 13111-0 N FIOMIT ITRX11.1The Men We Abandoned — John Corry on the MIA Cover-Up — Fred Barnes: What Health-Cost Crisis...
...He is unable to do so, and instead misrepresents what I wrote while implying I am a liar...
...The other members of the staff, though, were not charged with examining intelligence reports...
...In fact, there were six investigators—Kerry misleadingly refers to their "small number"—and they were the only members of the committee staff who were assigned to examine the intelligence reports on MIAs...
...She says Col...
...With the creation of this phony conclusion, it became evident that the purpose of this small group of staff in creating the document was either to force the full committee to adopt it—or to face the risk of being charged with a cover-up...
...I have no idea what motivates him, except, I suppose, a longtime determination to normalize relations with Vietnam, but his posturing now as a champion of MIA families verges on the offensive...
...Smith's request, of course, was also denied...
...She and her family are angry that bogus stories that her brother might be alive keep making their way into print due to the distortions of people who either do not know what they are talking about, or who are willingly misrepresenting the truth...
...POW/MIAs, those who are covered with it are the conspiracy theorists who attack the integrity and motives of those who continue to work to resolve these cases...
...Thomas Sowell on Edward Banfield from the magazine call me for a response, particularly in light of the seriousness of the allegations...
...They reasoned that a single man, even if he appeared to be a prisoner, might have been a deserter or straggler and not a POW...
...My story was well documented and well researched, and if it had any factual errors I am sure the senator would have pointed them out...
...It just isn't right," she said...
...Kerry is merely trying to discredit the investigators' findings...
...It was not...
...She told me a terrible story about traveling to Washington with her mother and sister to find out information about her father, and of being "belittled" by government officials...
...Contrary to their unscientific and contested assertions, detailed intelligence available to the committee, and now a part of the public record, showed these "clusters" of reports to be speculative at best...
...I noted, for example, that the Defense Intelligence Agency had received more than 15,000 live-sighting reports of American prisonThe American Spectator April/May 1994 45 ers, some 1,650 of them first-hand, but that it had never accepted a single report as proof that an MIA was still alive, or ever had been alive, in Southeast Asia...
...McCreary's memo, which is part of the public record, said, among other things, that an independent counsel was needed "to restore the integrity of the select committee...
...I do not doubt that he, or someone in his office, received a call from the sister of Col...
...government looked at the sixteen live-sighting reports from that area...
...The senator seems to suggest—his letter's wretched prose is unclear here—that the other members of the committee staff disagreed with the finding of the intelligence investigators, and that this was one reason the report was "secured...
...One copy of the document was retained for the record and placed in Senate security, until under our own declassification it was transferred to the National Archives, where, if you had taken the time, you could have read it...
...Senators do not do that kind of work...
...Ironically, the greatest contradiction of cover-up is the fact that the final report found that some Americans may have been left behind as of homecoming, but that there was no compelling evidence any were still alive today...
...My source for this stands by his story...
...The Gaines Report, which I quoted at length in my story, was an internal document in which the DIA, in a short-lived spasm of self-criticism, examined the ways in which it evaluated information it received about MIAs...
...I said the Pentagon had dismissed credible accounts of Americans held in captivity, and I provided evidence to prove it...
...Recently I received a call from the daughter of Major Henry M. Serex, an Air Force electronic warfare officer, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1972, and whom the Pentagon has listed as dead...
...Only one group of people could have been responsible for leaking titillating teasers about the false information they were about to present to a "secret" meeting of the committee...
...Senator Kerry tells this truth, however, only through innuendo, misdirection, and a calculated rearranging of facts...
...purported leads have come up empty...
...Wallace Hynds, who is certain he died in Vietnam in a plane crash...
...On investigation, it turned out that five of the six sources repeated a story told to them by the sixth person...
...It found, in effect, that the DIA bullied sources who came forth with information about MIAs, called an inordinate number of them liars, and sought to discredit reports of live sightings...
...then they dismissed the ones in which the source said he had seen only a single man who might have been a prisoner...
...This is exactly what is happening, despite the fact that nothing was ever covered up...
...He is blowing smoke when he mentions Dak Chung in Laos...
...She said that she and her family have always been certain her brother was killed, based on the intelligence information and testimony they reviewed...
...This is innuendo...
...Wallace Hynds was left behind, alive, in Vietnam, as a POW...
...In the Spectator's piece, there are examples, of both...
...He also says that the senators themselves examined the intelligence data on which the investigators based their finding, and found the data faulty...
...Claims that we engaged in a cover-up and have evidence of American POWs remaining alive in Vietnam are patent lies...
...It is very hard for me at a personal level to understand how anyone could believe that we sought anything but the truth concerning the fates of the men who failed to come back from Vietnam...
...Cambodia drew no pins...
...The American Spectator April/May 1994 47...
...and the cluster-mapping technique was used precisely because DIA analyses have been so faulty...
...No other investigators believed the information was accurate or significant, and no one else had an interest in hyping false information...
...The vast majority of senators on the committee had drawn no conclusions, and indeed had no opinion at this time...
...Wallace Hynds, but everything he says, or tries to say, about my reporting on Colonel Hynds is deceptive...
...All committee staffers were strongly warned not to leak any information, but never with the words or in the manner recounted...
...John Corry / n publishing John Corry's "article" on the work of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs in the February issue of The American Spectator ("The MIA Cover-Up"), you have done a disservice to the nation...
...The so-called "shredded document" was secured and given to Senate security until it was released to be sent to the National Archives along with thousands of other documents from the committee...
...The staff members looked at the 1,650 first-hand live-sighting reports the Defense Intelligence Agency had rejected...
...It was used during the Gulf War to plot the locations of Iraqi Scud missiles...
...John Corry replies: Senator Kerry's intemperate letter has almost nothing to do with anything I wrote...
...Kerry's citation of Dak Chung is meaningless...
...The charge is phony that members of the select committee destroyed all copies of an investigators' report concluding American POWs remained in captivity as late as 1989...
...For example, one area identified by the "cluster sightings" was near Dak Chung in Laos...
...She was disturbed that the account of her brother's loss put forth in the Spectator was entirely inaccurate...
...Either Corry's "anonymous sources," whoever they are, made it up, or he did...
...Apparently, what distresses him most is my reporting on a study by staff members of his own committee...
...None of this, of course, is news to Senator Kerry, although he gives no sign of it in his shrill letter...
...Unfortunately, our hopes have not been realized...
...It secured all copies of the document to prevent it from becoming the subject of scurrilous leaks that would misrepresent as fact the misleading conclusions of the minority staff...
...by James Ring Adams THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...They 46 The American Spectator April/ May 1994 said that "the conclusions of the Gaines Report in 1986 remained valid...
...This," I wrote, "defies the laws of probability...
...What an extraordinary tale...
...Hynds, but to someone else...
...and photographic intelligence has been inconclusive, at best...
...The initial first-hand report was an accurate description of an accounted-for American moving up the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...Because the conclusions were premature at the time, unsubstantiated by analysis and not yet passed on by the senators themselves, the committee decided, without dissent of any senator present, to protect the integrity of its work...
...I also wish to note the impact that deceptive articles like the one which appeared in the Spectator are having on the families of the victims—the very people that the Spectator claims as its own special charge...
...only the six investigators had that duty...
...The Senate committee held hearings and meetings for more than a year...
...The American Spectator's choice to give credence to the distortions of the committee's work on the POW/MIA issue has left it taking on this moral stain as its own...
...In fact, when the investigators finished their presentation, only one senator was still in the room...
...I did not buy into any conspiracy theories, but I said instead that the early flawed estimates on the number of MIAs had calcified into official policy...
...Nonetheless, the minority staffers presented their opinion as if it were the conclusion of the committee itself...
...In the intelligence community he is highly respected...
...It is important to note that the committee was alerted to the inevitability of leaks because only days before the "secret" briefing, Time magazine wrote that the committee was poised to release stunning new information on the POW/MIA issue...
...I am also dismayed that at no time did anyone 44 The American Spectator April / May 1994 Whitewater Sociopaths...
...That left them with 929 first-hand live-sighting reports, all involving two or more men allegedly seen in conditions indicating they were prisoners...
...The whole purpose of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was to investigate all the allegations, and to try to sort truth from fantasy...
...In every place where there was a cluster, there was also a Vietnamese prison...
...I. also wrote that Frances Zwenig, the committee's staff director, ordered that all copies of the investigators' report be destroyed, and that their computer files be purged...
...This is more innuendo...
...For starters, there is Cony's report that I told staff investigators for the committee that if they leaked documents, they would wish "they had never been born...
...Confronted with these facts, the members of the committee rejected the conclusion that the clusters even came close to "proving" there were men still alive...
...He is blowing even more when he implies that the senators on the committee carefully examined all the intelligence reports, and then made a reasoned judgment...
...Kerry, however, says McCreary and his colleagues were only presenting their "personal opinions...
...McCreary's request, of course, was denied...
...More important, though, Kerry's characterization of the Dak Chung live-sightings is based on the analysis he received from the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...They plotted the 929 sightings on a map of Southeast Asia, using pins to mark each one...
...This finding...
...The source of the second first-hand report admitted lying...
...It is disturbing that the Spectator chose not to check its facts by reviewing the millions of pages that were declassified at the urging of our committee...
...It was about the methods used by government agencies, especially the Defense Intelligence Agency, to discredit reports that American MIAs had been abandoned in Southeast Asia...
...According to Col...
...Senators trooped in and out of the hearings and meetings at ratvlom...
...The majority found the evidence not even probative...
...Unfortunately, there are some people who over the years have developed a vested interest in conspiracy theories...
...It is these false conspiracy claims, and the direct-mail, telemarketing, and irresponsible journalistic industries which feed off them, which today impede the process of healing and completion that needs to take place for the families and friends of those lost...
...Senator Kerry is disingenuous from the start...
...Other areas of Vietnam, however, drew pins in clumps or clusters...
...John Kerry U.S...
...More important, in telling his truth the senator ignores the principal point of my story: that intelligence reports on MIAs, especially live-sighting reports, have been consistently mishandled...
...Senate Washington, D.C...
...the Pentagon, however, has always listed a Col...
...but we did not commit them, and I suggest that "lies, distortions and fabrications" are words that apply more appropriately to the senator's letter than to the Spectator story...
...The U.S...
...I noted in the Spectator story that in June 1992 a satellite had pickedup S-E-R-E-X etched on the ground near Dong Vai prison...
...Moreover, after the hearings had concluded, Senator Bob Smith, the committee's own vice-chairman, asked Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate possiblecriminal violations by ten current or former government officials who had testified at the hearings or been involved with MIA affairs...
...The underlying intelligence on which a vast number of reports on which the "clusters" were based had been proven to be false...
...Smith thought that at least some of the officials had lied, or, as he put it in his letter to Reno, offered "false testimony and statements...
...Whether the other staff members agreed or disagreed with them was irrelevant, and I have no idea what the senator means.by "scurrilous leaks...
...The committee 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...
...This isn't supposed to happen...
...John McCreary, who was generally considered to be the lead investigator, was a senior intelligence analyst, a GS-15, temporarily detached from the Department of Defense, wherehe had twenty-five years of experience...
...I wrote that Senator Kerry was unhappy with the investigators' report, and that he told one of the investigators that if thereport ever leaked out, "you'll wish you'd never been born" (not "they would wish they had never been born...
...was unanimously agreed to, by twelve senators spanning the political spectrum, including the Republican ranking member, Bob Smith...
...He says that "a small number of investigators for the committee minority presented their personal opinions," and that they relied on "so-called cluster mapping...
...We would have recommended the use of all available resources to respond to such evidence if it had been found, for nothing would have been more rewarding than to have been able to re-unite a long-captive American with family and country...
...their staffs do...
...I also identified, by name, the cemeteries where I thought some were buried...
...Meanwhile, the senator must also be responded to on his lachrymose assertion "abou,t how very hard it is for me at a personal level to understand how anyone could believe that we sought anything but the truth concerning the fates of the men who failed to come back from Vietnam...
...While the committee hearings were still in progress, John McCreary, the senior intelligence analyst, asked Senator Kerry to appoint an independent counsel to investigate improper contacts between the committee and the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...If either The American Spectator or I had committed the crimes he describes, we certainly would have done "a disservice" to our country...
...Actually, it is an inconsequential point...
...The investigators made that clear in their soon-to-be-"secured" report...
...And finally, there are so many questions about our MIAs that are still not answered, either by Washington or Hanoi...
...It is filled with lies, distortions, and fabrications which serve only to manipulate and exploit the very families of POW-MIAs it purports to inform...
...The Pentagon classified the Gaines Report as soon as it was released...
...In addition it should be noted that the small number of staff, contrary to the opinion of other staff, had drawn these conclusions prior to the senators on the committee ever analyzing the intelligence, checking the underlying data with any agency whatsoever, or signing off in any way on those conclusions...
...If there is "an ever-widening moral stain" that still exists in connection with U.S...
...While the committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivityin Southeast Asia...
...I identified, by name, the Vietnamese prisons where I thought our MIAs had been held...
...Thus, there was not a "cluster" of six but a "cluster" of just one source...
...Hynds was not captured alive, but was killed when his plane was shot down and exploded on impact...
...There was no heavy clustering in Laos...
...Moreover, cluster mapping is an established intelligence technique...
...Six of the hearsay reports recounted the same story, and seemed to corroborate each other...
...Inevitably, the theories are based on distortions of reality, and in some cases, on outright fabrications...
...To prevent "scurrilous leaks," he insists, the committee then "secured" all copies of the investigators' report...
...This should not be that difficult for him to understand...
...The truth of this incident, which was readily available to you, is as follows: In April 1992, a small number of "investigators" for the committee minority presented their personal opinions to the members of the committee that so-called "cluster mapping," which looks at concentrations of POW/MIA reports,proved that Americans remained in captivity in Vietnam...
...She says she was having a meal with her brother in their hometown prior to his departure for Vietnam on the very date Corry reports her brother last seenalive in Vietnam...
...alleged pictures of POWs have proven false...
...To believe in the conspiracy to cover up is to believe that every president, every senator who served his country, every general, admiral, colonel, captain, and so on who has ever touched this issue has somehow joined the cover-up, betrayed his country, and kept silent all these years...
...Senator Kerry rejects my account of this, and then purports to tell the "truth" of what really happened...
...Wallace Gurley [sic] Hynds as killed in action...
...After reviewing tens of thousands of pages of testimony and hundreds of thousands of documents, we unanimously concluded: As much as we would hope that no American has had to endure twenty years of captivity, if one or more were, in fact doing so, there is nothing the Members of the Committee would have liked more, than to be able to prove this fact...
...the significant areas were all in what once was North Vietnam...
...Two were first-hand reports that had nothing in common with the other fourteen hearsay reports...
...He also refers to the "so-called cluster mapping," and puts quotes on "cluster mapping," implying it is a bogus technique...
...They dismissed the reports that seemed the least plausible...
...Last week, I received a call from the sister of Col...
...Kerry, referring to the meeting at which the intelligence investigators presented their report, says magisterially that "the committee decided, without dissent of any senator present, to protect the integrity of its work...
...Corry asserts, "That Colonel Hynds was captured alive seems indisputable...
...The senator, to begin with, puts the word "investigators" in quotes, implying they were not investigators at all, but instead irresponsible partisans, presumably pushing a conspiracy theory...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
