Reed Irvine - Editor
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In December 1979, Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Teheran and held 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. The crisis loomed large in the news for the entire period. Jimmy Carter's failure to gain the Americans' freedom crippled his presidency and played a major role in Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 election. Reagan was to have his own hostage crisis later, stemming from his efforts to free five Americans held by Moslem extremists in Lebanon. Thanks in large part to saturation media coverage, there was an enormous outpouring of outrage over these kidnappings.
So why are our media silent about another hostage situation of even more serious proportions? We learned from a front-page story on April 12 in The New York Times that nearly 800 Americans were held hostage by the Vietnamese communists after they said they had returned all the POWs under their control in March 1973. That was 16 times as many hostages as were held by the Iranian radicals. This startling information was contained in a report by Lt. General Tran Van Quang, deputy chief of staff of North Vietnam's army. A Russian translation of the report was recently discovered in a Soviet archive in Moscow. It reveals that the Vietnamese deliberately lied when they claimed in March 1973 that the 591 prisoners released during Operation Homecoming were all they held.
On September 15, 1972, General Quang, reporting to the North Vietnamese politburo, said, "The total number of American POWs captured to date on the fronts of Indochina, in other words in North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia totals 1,205 people.... All of them are presently in prisons in North Vietnam." After giving a breakdown of the POWs by rank, branch of service, specialization and attitude ("progressive" or "reactionary"), the general said, "For now, we have officially published a list of only 368 POWs. The rest are not acknowledged. The U.S. government is aware of this, but they do not know the exact number....Therefore in accordance with the instructions from the politburo, we are keeping the number of POWs secret."
Quang explained the reason for this, saying that "Nixon must compensate North Vietnam for the great damage inflicted on it" and must agree to a cease fire and to the removal of President Nguyen Van Thieu. He said it was agreed unanimously that all the POWs would not be freed until "the American government resolves the political and military issues on all three fronts of Indochina."
North Vietnam captured an additional 60 airmen after Quang's September report and released three, bringing the total of military POWs they held to 1,262. In signing the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, they agreed to return all our POWs within 60 days, but of the 591 men returned, 547 were military who had been held in the North. In addition, they freed 19 military who had been held in the South and 25 civilians, three of whom had been held in the North.
This means that North Vietnam secretly held 715 American military POWs hostage after Operation Homecoming. In addition, we had reason to believe that as many as 80 of the 352 MIAs in Laos were being held captive either there or in North Vietnam. Only 9 were returned in Operation Homecoming by North Vietnam. The rest could also be considered hostages under Vietnamese control.
North Vietnam held at least 14 times as many American hostages as the Iranians took at our embassy in Teheran. They planned to use them to extort war reparations and to pressure Washington to pull the rug from under the South Vietnamese government and end the fighting on North Vietnam's terms.
Dr. Stephen J. Morris, a Harvard University researcher, found the Quang report in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party politburo while doing research for a book on the Vietnam War. He recognized that it was dynamite. The English translation runs 25 pages, of which six are devoted to the American POWs.
The rest deal with Hanoi's plans to woo senior South Vietnamese generals and officials and with a program called "Ba Be" for the "the physical extermination of the reactionary leaders of the Saigon administration." A memorandum from Pyotr Ivashutin, then head of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), summarized the report and transmitted it to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. The authenticity of these documents was certified by General Dmitri Volkogonov, the Russian military historian who represents Russia on the joint Russian-American commission created to search for MIAs and POWs in the former Soviet Union.
Morris informed the White House of the document last February, and a copy was sent to the White House prior to the April 3-4 meeting of Clinton and Yeltsin in Vancouver. Morris also gave a copy to The New York Times, which ran a story by Celeste Bohlen on its front page on April 12 under the headline, "Files Said to Show Hanoi Lied in '72 on Prisoner Totals." The story made all the network TV news programs that night. CNN, CBS and NBC aired good straightforward reports, but the treatment by ABC's World News Tonight was a precursor of much of the coverage that followed.
Efforts To Defuse The Dynamite
Peter Jennings introduced the report, saying the document "called into question for some people" the POW issue and said it "supposedly" was written by a "top North Vietnamese official" and that it "suggests" that Americans were held behind. After Dr. Morris was shown brandishing the document and saying, "This is the first smoking gun that has been found on the Vietnam War," correspondent Bob Zelnick said, "But privately, Pentagon sources say they doubt that 600 Americans could have been left behind without having been seen by their fellow POWs." These unnamed sources said the document might have counted South Vietnamese commandos captured while working for the Americans. Zelnick stated that "an exhaustive Senate study" had concluded that "at the most, only a few dozen" POWs were not returned when the war ended. Zelnick reiterated that his Pentagon sources "doubted" that any Americans had been left behind.
This debate was continued on Nightline that night, with Morris pitted against Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on MIA/POW Affairs, whose exhaustive study was cited by Zelnick. Senator Bob Smith, vice chairman of the committee, was also on the program, siding more with Morris than Kerry. Kerry's personal conclusion was that while the committee found evidence that "a small number of Americans may have survived in captivity after Operation Homecoming (March 1973), there is, in my view, no reason to believe that any Americans remain alive today." He added, "Yes, the possibility exists that a prisoner or prisoners could be held deep within a jungle or behind a locked door under conditions of greatest security. But there is no evidence of that, and it is hard to conceive of a reason for it." (Select Committee on MIA/ POW Affairs Report, p. 451-2)
The Quang report was very embarrassing to Senator Kerry. It revealed that over 700 prisoners had been held behind locked doors after Operation Homecoming; it provided a very logical motive for this; and it switched the burden of proof to those who claim that none of them remains alive. On April 8, 1992, the Kerry committee's intelligence investigators briefed the committee members on their analysis, introducing their report with this statement: "The intelligence indicates that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remained in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989." That so angered Senator Kerry and Senator John McCain that all copies of the document were ordered shredded and the computer disk from which it was printed erased. Senator Kerry has explained that this was done to prevent misinformation from reaching the public.
This is why Senator Kerry tried to cast doubt on the validity of the Quang report on Nightline by nitpicking it. The next evening, April 13, Peter Jennings reported Hanoi had called the document "an ill-intentioned fabrication." That was the last mention of the greatest hostage taking in American history on the network evening news programs. There was no rush by either the electronic or print media to check the intelligence information that had led the Kerry committee investigators to conclude that 200 to 800 POWs held captive in North Vietnam and Laos after Operation Homecoming may have been alive as late as 1989. That was the range of the estimates of five intelligence investigators, estimates that they were precluded from getting into the record.
The intelligence that the Kerry committee investigators found persuasive, but which the media have ignored, include a 1979 interview of a defector named Le Dinh, the patterns seen in hundreds of reports of live sightings and a score of aerial or satellite photos of ground markings of secret codes given to military personnel who were instructed in escape and evasion procedures (E&E).
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) interview of Le Dinh, a People's Army intelligence officer who defected to France in 1978, is particularly interesting in light of the Quang report. When interviewed in November 1979, Le Dinh convinced DIA agents that he had been assigned to an intelligence unit named "C-14" in the Vietnamese general staff and thus had access to information on many topics, including POWs and MIAs both before and after Operation Homecoming. His most important disclosure was one that his DIA interroga- tors did not believe. He told them that he had heard generals say at staff meetings that over 700 American POWs were being held by Vietnam as a "strategic reserve." They believed the POWs could be used to force the U.S. to pay reparations or might even be ransomed by their families.
Le Dinh said he personally saw 33 POWs in December 1974. They were held at a former military compound on the outskirts of Hanoi. All were "progressives," meaning they had been successfully indoctrinated by the communists. He said they were being trained to be sent back to the United States to work with the Communist Party. Le Dinh claimed to have spoken to three of them, a white Marine captain and two Marine NCOs, one black and one Hispanic, all of whom were captured near Khe Sanh in 1968. He provided information about a number of prisons where he said POWs were being held. Le Dinh told the DIA interviewers that he was holding some information back for a book he planned to write.
The DIA report called Le Dinh "intelligent, self-confident, eloquent, politically aware and fervently idealistic." The interrogators expressed "reservations" about total acceptance of his story, and they were especially skeptical of his claim that 700 POWs were being held. They felt him worthy of further questioning, but there is no record in his file in the National Archives of any contact with him later than 1980.
What the DIA viewed with the greatest skepticism in 1979 has now been confirmed by General Tran Van Quang's secret 1972 report. Le Dinh's account confirms the validity of the Quang report. Independently, they both put the number of American POWs that were held as hostages at over 700. Le Dinh provided important additional information--that the prisoners were still alive in 1975, when his assignment to C-14 came to an end. He also provided additional information about plans to obtain ransom for the POWs, plans which we now know resulted in approaches to our government which were rejected.
Information about the DIA's Le Dinh interview was faxed to many newspapers soon after the stories about General Quang's report were published, but a data-base search has turned up only three publications that used Le Dinh's story to back up the Quang report. They were The Washington Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune and U.S. News & World Report. The media showed far more interest in those who were trying to debunk the Quang report than in the evidence that proved its authenticity.
As part of their Escape & Evasion (E&E) training, American pilots and special forces troops were instructed to mark distress signals on the ground for rescue teams. The signal included a secret "authenticator number" to verify the person's identity so that rescuers wouldn't be lured into a Vietcong trap. The numbers could be made in a variety of ways-- sticks, rocks or disturbed soil, or even stomped into tall grass. According to information received by the Kerry committee, but essentially dismissed, in the post-1973 period analysts "correlated 19 of these authenticator numbers with numbers assigned to Americans still missing in Southeast Asia."
Dateline NBC, the program that had disgraced itself with its segment on GM pickup trucks, distinguished itself on April 27 with an excellent program about sightings of these distress signals. It showed a photo taken in June 1992 of a field near the Dong Mang prison, one which our investigators have never been permitted to visit. "GX 2527" scratched into the ground was clearly visible even on television. Retired Air Force Colonel Larry Burrows, who did photo interpretation for 28 years, said on Dateline NBC that he was "100 percent certain" this was a man- made number. Another analyst, one still employed by an intelligence agency, looked at the same photo and said it was his opinion that the letters and numbers were not man- made at all. They were just a natural phenomenon caused by variations in the color of the vegetation or some such thing. The Kerry report accepted the skeptical appraisal and said the numbers "appeared to be too haphazard and ill-defined to be man-made distress signals."
This and another photo of a distress signal taken at the same time near Dong Mang prison had been discussed on CNN's Larry King Live on April 15. Former Congressman Billy Hendon, for a time an investigator for the Kerry committee, revealed that GX 2527 was the code assigned to Peter Mathis, who was shot down November 24, 1969 and was declared missing in action. Hendon also revealed that "SEREX" and the code "72 TA 88" were photographed in another field nearby at the same time. Hendon said this was the authenticator code of Major Henry M. Serex, an Air Force officer whose plane had been shot down on April 2, 1972. Serex had "written" in the grass not only his code but his last name. Congressman Hendon said, "They've got 'em. There's no doubt they've got 'em." He said we should tell Hanoi, "We know you've got them. We hold you responsible for their safety. Don't harm these men, but give us Major Serex and Major Mathis."
That was not the message most of the media were even mentioning, much less pushing. Even Billy Hendon's bold disclosure of the names of the officers who were pleading to be rescued was not treated as news. Nor did the media find anything newsworthy in the disclosure by Dateline NBC that the Air Force was the only service that has preserved its lists of authenticator numbers. Nor was it considered news that neither the DIA nor the two CIA branches which analyze satellite and other aerial photos--the Office of Imagery Analysis and the National Photo Imagery Center (NPIC)--were aware of the distress signal program until the Kerry committee called it to their attention. There is no telling how many distress signals they completely overlooked.
Despite this unforgivable sloppiness, since 1973 some 19 signals have been spotted that matched codes assigned to missing military personnel. But experts, like the one who insisted that "GX 2527" was not man-made, could always be found to say that the letters and numbers could have been caused by "unintentional phenomena of man, nature or the photo process." So the Kerry committee report said it could not conclude that any of these signals were made by POWs. The DIA seemed to prefer any explanation, no matter how bizarre, to the possibility that POWs were doing what they were told to do to try to effect their rescue.
Debunking Mindset Infects Media
The tendency of the DIA and others in the government to look for reasons to reject evidence that POWs were being held hostage by Vietnam is rooted in the conviction that very few of our men were abandoned and none of them survived for long. This attitude spread to the media as well. The families and others who kept insisting that the men were alive were dismissed as being driven by hope rather than factual evidence. To deaden their hope, information such as the distress signals had to be kept secret. This was ostensibly to protect the men if they were alive, but the actual result was to squelch any action to obtain their freedom. Billy Hendon broke the rules and named two of the signallers on Larry King Live. He felt this was the only way to get some action to save them, citing earlier cases where we obtained the release of prisoners held by the communists only because we demanded their release by name.
The Quang report should have demolished the conviction that underlies the debunking mindset, since it said that hundreds of prisoners were held and kept alive because the communists considered them to be valuable pawns. The Hanoi regime, politicians, government officials and others who have derided claims that Hanoi has held POWs set out to discredit the report.
ABC news started this ball rolling on April 12. It took the print media a little longer, but after the first few days, the debunking stories dominated the newspaper coverage. Even The New York Times tried to undermine its own scoop by attacking its source, Stephen Morris. In a story on April 16, Steven A. Holmes wrote that "questions have .... been raised now about the document itself" and that Morris has "come under criticism as a partisan who ardently opposed normalizing relations with Vietnam." That is both untrue and irrelevant. Morris didn't write the report, he found it.
Holmes quoted H. Bruce Franklin, of Rutgers University, who attacked the Quang report as "a clumsy fabrication," adding, "There is just about no fact in the documents that correlates with the historical reality." Quoting Franklin is akin to quoting Hanoi. He was known as a Maoist and ardent admirer of the Vietnamese communists when he was teaching at Stanford in the late 1960s. Fired by Stanford, he moved to Rutgers and, with a six-figure grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, settled in to write a book on the revolutionary movement in the U.S. One of his books tries to prove that Vietnam holds no American POWs. The Quang report obviously is a threat to his reputation.
That is also true of Sedgewick Tourison, another authority Holmes quoted. Tourison told Holmes that the "extra" POWs mentioned in the Morris document most likely were South Vietnamese commandos captured during operations run by the U.S. Tourison has also written a book in which he said that he has long believed that there were no live POWs left in Southeast Asia after March 1973. (He was nevertheless hired by the Kerry committee to work on the numbers of MIAs and POWs.) Having neglected to point out the biases of Franklin and Tourison, Holmes pointed out that "Morris is to be paid for producing a report on his work." We understand that Steven Holmes is also paid by the Times for his work.
Retired General John W. Vessey, the man President Bush sent to Vietnam to settle the POW/MIA matter and pave the way for normalization of relations, had scheduled a return visit to Vietnam as Clinton's envoy when the Quang report story broke. He had been taken in by General Quang himself during his first visit, and now he was to see him again. Would he demand the immediate release of our men and access to the Vietnamese archives to check their records? No, after hearing General Quang deny that he had written the report, claiming that he was not even deputy chief of staff at the time, General Vessey held a news conference at which he said, "I don't think one can draw a conclusion about the document based simply on General Quang's statements, but I would say that what General Quang has told us is not inconsistent with what we know about General Quang. I have no reason to disbelieve General Quang."!!!!
With that naive statement, General Vessey gave credibility to General Quang's new lies and prolonged the ordeal of our abandoned POWs. Senator Bob Smith, vice chairman of the Kerry committee, says that our intelligence confirms that Quang was indeed deputy chief of staff when the report was delivered. Those who have rushed to exonerate General Quang and his co-conspirators in this foul war crime should bear in mind that there are more documents in those Russian archives. It is expected that before long additional shoes will drop.
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
I DON'T RECALL ANY STORY THAT OUR MEDIA HAVE COVERED AS INADEQUATELY and badly relative to its importance as the discovery in Russian archives of the secret report of Lt. Gen. Tran Van Quang on Sept. 15, 1972 on the number of American POWs held in North Vietnam's prisons. This was essentially a one day story on the evening television news programs, without any mention on the morning shows the next day. The story held the attention of the print media longer mainly because of the efforts to discredit the authenticity or accuracy of the document that scholar Stephen J. Morris discovered in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow. As we show in this report, the discovery raises grave questions about the treatment of the evidence that many POWs have been held hostage by the Vietnamese Communists for 20 years. Rather than try to discredit Morris's find, the authenticity of which has been attested to by both Russian and American experts, the media should now take another look at the evidence that many, probably most, of these men are still alive and demand that efforts be made to find and free them.
THE ONE PROMINENT NATIONALLY SYNDICATED COLUMNIST WHO HAS NOT ONLY made this demand but has used his column to fight doggedly for the men we abandoned is Sydney Schanberg. Schanberg covered Cambodia for The New York Times in the early 1970s and remained there to cover the Khmer Rouge takeover, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. I have criticized him severely for having underestimated the brutality and insanity of the Khmer Rouge, predicting that life would be better for most once the Americans were out of Indochina and peace reigned. But I now want to take off my hat to Sydney Schanberg for having persistently used his syndicated column, beginning last July, to show that there is good evidence that we abandoned several hundred of our men in Indochina and then collectively closed our eyes to the evidence that many of them were being held hostage by the Vietnamese. Last July, he wrote: "One of the reasons why the truth has never been pried loose about Vietnam MIAs--many of whom were knowingly left behind by Washington and some of whom are very likely still alive today--has to do with the failure of the nation's key media organizations to make the missing men a major issue." He charged that they had largely bought into the coverup and had aided and abetted those behind it. He was hopeful that the release of classified documents to the Kerry committee would change this. He said, "Maybe now the national press, heretofore either lazy or cowed, will finally stand up and make a commitment to dig out this story." The sad thing is that even Steve Morris's bombshell has not prompted them to do it. Having sided for years with those who debunked the evidence that the MIAs and POWs are still alive, they set out to debunk the Quang report.
IT IS SELF-EVIDENT THAT THE QUANG REPORT IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. I AM told by a source involved in the official investigation that the Russians have other documents that will prove the authenticity of the Quang report, and it is hoped that they will soon make these available to us. I hope this is true. I was very upset to learn that Stephen Morris had been banned from continuing his research in the Communist Party archives and that the archivist who let him have the Quang report had been fired. I have written to President Nixon asking him to use his influence with Yeltsin to have all the relevant files made public. It would help bring this about if our influential media were to join in bringing pressure on the Russians and the Vietnamese to open up the archives not only of the party but the intelligence agencies as well.
IF THAT HAPPENS, THOSE TRYING TO DISCREDIT THE QUANG REPORT SHOULD BE silenced, but in the meantime they have had some success in raising doubts about the accuracy of some of the things it says, if not its authenticity. Some of the criticisms don't stand up, but there are discrepancies between some of Quang's statements and what returned POWs have reported. Here are some examples of both.
1. Critics' Claim (CC): Lt. Gen. Quang was not deputy chief of the general staff of the North Vietnamese army on Sept. 15, 1972, as the document asserts. He held another position, commander of Military Region Four. Comment: Sen. Bob Smith tells me that he has seen the U.S. govemment's top secret biographical file on Gen. Quang, and it shows that he was deputy chief of staff and commander of Military Region Four concurrently.
2. CC: The report says "special prisons" were dedicated for senior officers, one for colonels, one for it. colonels, two for majors and others for captains and below. Returned POWs deny that there were separate prisons for these ranks. Comment: It is true that a prison such as Hoa Lo (the "Hanoi Hilton") held POWs of different ranks. An intelligence debriefing report dated June 1, 1970, was based on the interrogation of a Vietcong defector who formerly commanded "a prison for U.S. company-grade aircrew officer PW's in Ha Tay Province, North Vietnam." "Beginning in mid-1965," the report stated, "U.S. aircrew PW's in the grade of Captain or below were transferred to the Ba Vi prison." The report continued that the Ba Vi camp had room for "approx. 100-150 U.S. PW's," all "company-grade aircrew officers" (i. e, captain or below). John G. Hubbell in his book, P.O.W., tells how in February 1971, the ten most senior POWs, all colonels or Navy captains, were put together in the same building in the Hanoi Hilton.
3. CC: The Quang report says that the POWs were kept in 11 different camps, but some of the POWs say that after the unsuccessful effort to free the prisoners held at Son Tay in 1970, the POWs were all incarcerated in only four prisons in Hanoi. Gen. John W. Vessey was one of those who discounted the possibility that the Vietnamese kept two sets of books and operated a second, secret prison system. Comment: Admiral Jerry Tuttle, a former deputy director of the DIA, gave the Kerry committee four reasons why he believed there was a separate prison system for POWs who were not freed in Operation Homecoming: no amputees were returned; no returnees had been interrogated by Soviets; no returnees had been debriefed about nuclear weapons: and no returnees had been confined in caves, although considerable intelligence data existed about POWs being held in caves in both North Vietnam and Laos. Le Dinh told DIA in 1979 of prisons not known to returned POWs.
4. CC: The Quang report said 16 full colonels and Navy captains had been captured and were being held together. This is greater than the number of full colonels and Navy captains captured. Comment: In fact, captured American pilots often inflated their rank in hopes of better treatment.
5. CC: If the POWs were being held as bargaining chips or for ransom as the Quang report suggests, why haven't the Vietnamese tried to use them in that way? Comment: There is some evidence that they have. Sen. Bob Smith has identified four separate feelers. In January 1977 the CIA reported that an Indonesian diplomat said he had been told by Vietnam's vice foreign minister that Vietnam was holding POWs who would be freed in exchange for U.S. aid. In January 1981, according to John Syphrit, a former secret service agent, President Reagan, Vice President Bush, CIA director William J. Casey and National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen were overheard discussing an offer to trade 57 POWs for the $4 billion in aid that Nixon had secretly promised in 1973. In 1989 there was said to be another feeler via Indonesia and the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations was said to have been involved in another feeler in 1989/90. The Kerry committee could not agree on the validity of any of these, but there is some question as to how hard it tried. John Syphrit, who still works for Treasury, but not as a secret service agent, would testify only if subpoenaed and the committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him. Richard Allen was the only one of the four men involved in the alleged discussion who was questioned by the committee. He recalled hearing about the offer, but after checking his records he informed the committee in writing that he heard the story from a group of POW activists in 1986 and that he had no records or recollection of any discussion of it in 1981. Patricia O'Grady Parsels, who recently went to Vietnam searching for information about her missing father, told us that her conversations with Vietnamese officials left her with the impression that they were holding hostages and wanted to make a deal for them. She said the attitude was that we reneged on the $4 billion-plus of aid promised by Nixon in 1973 and they wouldn't return all the POWs (even though they have said they had done so) until we delivered the promised aid.
WHILE THE PARIS PEACE ACCORDS DID NOT LINK THE RETURN OF THE POWS TO American aid, Kissinger says Hanoi would not have signed if we had not promised aid. Nixon gave them a secret letter saying that studies indicated that grant aid in the range of $3.25 billion and other aid in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion would be appropriate. The president could not make a binding commitment, and our government subsequently took the position that Hanoi had violated the accords by not giving a full accounting for all the MIAs and by violating the cease fire. Congress denied the president the power to use force to try to get that full accounting.
THE IMPORTANT THING RIGHT NOW IS TO GET THE MEDIA TO FOCUS ON THE evidence that there are hostages being held in Vietnam, wondering why their countrymen have abandoned them. That is why we are enclosing a card for you to send to editors or columnists and commentators of your choice. Among those who have done less on this subject than one would expect are Rush Limbaugh, The Wall Street Journal and most of the conservative columnists.