Were POWs Left Behind?

The Free Lance-Star - Fredericksburg, VA, USA

"An Enormous Crime" raises the disturbing question of U.S. soldiers betrayed by their own country.

By Erik F. Nelson

Date published: 1/24/2009

"HOW DO you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" In 1971, a former Navy lieutenant named John Kerry rhetorically asked this question during an anti-war protest in Washington. Twenty years later, the same John Kerry, serving as a U.S. senator and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee (co-chaired by Sen. John McCain) answered that question by suppressing evidence that American prisoners of war remained alive in Southeast Asia.

Is a story like this credible? Research by Bill Hendon, a former Republican Congressman from North Carolina, who served on the POW/MIA Task Force in the 1980s, was the intelligence investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in the early 1990s. He has spent 25 years researching this matter, and makes clear that, sadly, it is. Furthermore, John Kerry and John McCain are just bit players in a story that has yet to be concluded.

Hendon begins his analysis in Cuba, following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs fiasco. President Kennedy ultimately negotiated the release of the captured, CIA-trained invasion force (1,179 Cubans with families in Florida), by sending farm equipment and aid to Castro's regime. The U.S. government, inadvertently, had revealed that it would pay dearly for captured fighting men. The North Vietnamese, confronting American military advisers in Southeast Asia, were paying attention.

As that distant war escalated, hundreds of Americans became prisoners in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The CIA learned that North Vietnam intended to hold them as hostages, so they could negotiate for reparations. North Vietnamese troops might execute wounded Americans on the battlefield, but live Americans had value and were systematically moved north.

During the years that Henry Kissinger negotiated with Le Duc Tho to end the war, the North Vietnamese consistently insisted on reparations to rebuild their bombed country. Kissinger finally handed over a letter from President Nixon, which pledged nearly $5 billion, but the Vietnamese were asked to keep it a secret. The secrecy was thought to be necessary in a politically divided America, but the North Vietnamese astutely hedged their bets. Even as they released nearly 500 prisoners of war in 1973, intelligence sources suggested that the North Vietnamese government was holding back hundreds of others.

The evidence of live Americans in Southeast Asia continued to accumulate. Classified distress signals were picked up by satellite imagery in 1975, 1988 and 1992. Refugees fleeing South Vietnam reported sightings of Americans after the war, when they (the defeated South Vietnamese) had been sent north to re-education camps.

Radio intercepts made reference to Americans. Robert Garwood, captured in Vietnam in 1965 and released in 1979, reported live sightings of Americans long after the war ended. A Secret Service agent overheard discussions between President Reagan, Vice President George Bush and CIA Director William Casey about paying $4 billion to obtain the release of the prisoners.

The evidence is overwhelming, but has been kept obscure, despite the occasional story in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. A KGB officer reported on Australian television that he had interviewed three U.S. prisoners in 1978. In 1993, a researcher in the newly opened Soviet archives found a copy of a speech by a North Vietnamese official describing that nation's policy of using captured prisoners to ensure postwar compensation, further noting that they (the North Vietnamese) held 1,097 prisoners (remember that not quite 500 were released in 1973).

It is apparently too embarrassing for any administration to both admit that the U.S. government knowingly left approximately 500 POWs behind in 1973 as well as to pay reparations to a small nation that won the war.

The Nixon letter promised aid for prisoners, but Watergate derailed his administration, and an unknowing Congress was in no mood to support any further effort in Vietnam. In 1975, however, a Congressional delegation in Hanoi was astonished to learn that the Nixon letter even existed. Each subsequent administration has faced this problem, but proved unable to effectively handle it.

Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) noted in 1992, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the POW issue had been mishandled since 1973. As the years passed, the problem compounded itself and became too embarrassing to pursue. Those who knew--including presidents, Cabinet members, national security advisers, the CIA--passed on the problem to the next administration. Even worse, the U.S. government began to discount live sightings in favor of very public efforts to recover remains.

The Vietnamese continue to raise the issue of reparations when U.S. delegations visit. Advocates for families of the POWs are still angry, but who cares anymore? This book makes clear that Americans in captivity are still waiting for their government to get them out.

The author presents the evidence systematically, year by year, in an analysis that builds its case carefully, but relentlessly. This is a disturbing book to read, though. Those who are unable to accept that their government would betray its fighting men will likely dismiss it all as a conspiracy theory. Those who follow the evidence will come away with a different conclusion.

Erik F. Nelson is a founding member of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and senior planner for the city of Fredericksburg. E-mail him in care of
Email: gwoolf@freelancestar.com.