Reed Irvine - Editor
The November 22 issues of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report clashed on one of the controversial issues of the day, and U.S. News put its rival to shame.
Newsweek ran an article by Colonel David H. Hackworth about a visit he had recently made to Vietnam. Colonel Hackworth, who is often described as America's most decorated living veteran, lamented the fact that we haven't "buried the hatchet" and normalized relations with Communist Vietnam. He blamed this primarily on the "emotion-laden issue of whether Hanoi was still holding prisoners of war." This, he said, packs "political wallop. but it's a bogus issue."
Colonel Hackworth said, "I have no doubt that POWs were held after 1973 and that some American officials knew this. I was told this repeatedly by insiders who also said that some prisoners, such as B-52 crewmen and electronic warfare specialists, were probably transferred to the Soviet Union and China because they knew America's nuclear capabilities." He had no estimate of how many POWs were abandoned, but he doubted that any bad survived the last 20 years in captivity.
Here's his explanation: "Members of our recovery teams have chased down every rumor. Most of them believe it highly unlikely that any living POWs remain in Southeast Asia. The same goes for every qualified military expert or jungle-wise American and Vietnamese veteran I have interviewed.... Only the obsessed, the profiteers and some of the unfortunate and manipulated MIA families are convinced that POWs remain. It is doubtful that Americans could survive decades of Asian-style imprisonment -- disease, malnutrition and insanity would have killed them long ago. Besides, said Bay Cao (a retired North Vietnamese colonel that Hackrworth met on his trip). 'Why should we keep POWs? We'd have to feed them.'"
The chances of any American POWs surviving 20 years in captivity have to be evaluated in terms of three things:
(1) the number not freed,
(2) why they were not freed and
(3) evidence of their survival. Colonel Hackworth provided no estimate of the number of POWs retained in Vietnam and Laos after March 1973, but implied that it was not large. He ignored the document Stephen Morris found in Soviet archives in January 1993 showing that the number was over 700. He quoted a Vietnamese who said they would have no motive for keeping POWs, ignoring both the evidence and the logic of their holding them as bargaining chips. He disregarded a wealth of information collected by the Pentagon over the years indicating that many POWs were being held in Vietnamese prisons.
In addition, Colonel Hackworth accepted without question assurances that "our recovery teams have chased down every rumor." The truth is that for many years the office of POW/ MIA Affairs in the Pentagon has been the target of criticism by senior military officials for its sloppy work, for its lack of follow-up, and, to quote Admiral Thomas Brooks, its "mindset to debunk" the evidence. Lt. General Eugene Tighe, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), made these points in a report in September 1986:
(1) There is evidence that Americans remain alive in Vietnamese custody against their will, even in the limited sample of reports we reviewed.
(2) An unresolved case, according to DIA, means we "haven't yet proved these reports are false."
(3) The greatest problem associated with the POW/ML& issue is the lack of professional analysis of the available intelligence. (4) The routine approach to each source has been "he's probably wrong."
Ken de Graffenreid. a member of the staff of the National Security Council. was assigned to investigate how well the search for our missing men was being conducted in 1983. He found that because the people responsible for this search didn't believe Hanoi had any motive for holding POWs, they discounted reports of their existence. He said this mentality was worse than a coverup: it was a systematic bias in the process. De Graffenreid said. "People working on that issue could not find a POW if a POW dropped on their head." [See The Men We Left Behind. by Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders, pp. 298-99 (D.C., National Press Books, 1993)]
Despite the criticisms leveled by Admiral Brooks, General Tighe, Colonel Kimball Gaines and Ken de Graffenreid, there has been no change in the "mindset to debunk" that has characterized the POW/MIA investigations. The official position since April 1975 has been that no men were abandoned.
Those who have been ultimately responsible for evaluating live sighting reports have sustained that position by labeling all evidence to the contrary, fabrications or dubious. As one Pentagon official confessed, if the document discovered by Stephen Morris showing that over 700 POWs were abandoned in Indochina is correct, everything the Pentagon has been saying on this subject since 1975 is a lie. That is why the Pentagon has grasped at straws to persuade us that the key revelation of this admittedly authentic document should not be believed.
Unlike Hackworth, U.S. News reporter Peter Cary studied the evidence that the North Vietnamese did not return all the POWs they were holding in March 1973. Cary cited seven sources, including the Morris document. This was a report given by a North Vietnamese general to the Vietnamese Politburo in September 1972 in which he said they were holding 1,205 American military POWs. They were publicly saying they held only 368. Another was an earlier report, also found in former Soviet archives, in which Hoang Anh, secretary to the Communist Party Central Committee, said that in December 1970 they were holding 735 American aviators prisoner.
Cary also cited statements by three former North Vietnamese officials (Dang Tan, Le Dinh and Le Quang Khai); British labor leader Clive Jenkins' report on what officials told him in Hanoi; and a Japanese monk, Iwanobu Yoshida. freed from a Vietnamese prison in 1989-- all supporting the claim that North Vietnam held several hundred more American POWs than it publicly acknowledged or freed. He buttressed these with statements by respected high-ranking U.S. intelligence officers--Lt. General Tighe and George Carver, a former special assistant for Vietnam affairs to the Director of Central Intelligence--both of whom believe, on the basis of evidence they have seen, that hundreds of POWs were left behind after Operation Homecoming in March 1973.
Cary also reported the claim of intelligence officer Barry Toll, who recalls a cable that he says is "seared in his memory." It concluded that 290 to 340 of our men in Laos would have to be abandoned. Laos was of great concern because we had evidence there were over 350 POW/MIAs in Laos, but we had not been able to get either numbers or names from the Pathet Lao. They acknowledged holding POWs, but they released none. The nine who came home from Laos were all held by the North Vietnamese.
The day before President Nixon announced on TV that all the POWs were on their way home, Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson sent a memo to the White House recommending that North Vieroam and Eaos be threatened with renewed military action "to demonstrate that the U.S. will no longer play games with the POW issue in Laos." That was out of the question once the President announced that all had been freed.
Cary's article dealt briefly with the motives of the Vietnamese in holding back POWs. It reported statements from defectors who have said that the main motive was to use the POWs as leverage to obtain the war reparations Nixon had promised in order to get them to sign the Paris Peace accords.
Cary discussed only the hopes of those who think some, perhaps many. POWs may have survived the rigors of 20 years in Vietnamese and Laotian prisons. It would have taken a longer article to do justice to the evidence that fuels those hopes, but it is unfortunate that this was omitted, since the possibility that many of these men are alive gives this issue great urgency.
Cary did not mention this in his article, but there is reason to believe that two of the defectors he cited were sent by Hanoi to deliver the message that Vieroam was holding hundreds of POWS for use as bargaining chips. A number of such feelers have been reported over the years, but these two have not previously been identified as such.
First, there is Le Dinh, who turned up in France in 1978 with some stories obviously designed to attract attention in the French press, some of which he readily acknowledged were fabricated when questioned by the DIA in 1979. Nevertheless, Le Dinh convinced the DIA of his bonafides by proving he had information about the POWs that was not generally known. He claimed to have been assigned to a sensitive intelligence unit in the North Vietnamese army GHQ in 1971, where he had access to POW information. His most sensational revelation was his claim that he had heard from generals that Vietnam held over 700 American POWs and that they regarded them as a "strategic asset"' that could be used to obtain reparations payments from the United States.
U.S. News found Le Dinh in Nice, France, where he now runs a restaurant. They learned that he had been back to Vietnam several times in recent years, and he claims that he stiff is connected with their military intelligence. That is tantamount to saying he was not a gennine defector, which explains the odd reason he gave for leaving Vietnam: He told the DIA that he left because the Le Duan government had betrayed the ideals of Ho Chi Minh. He also refused to take a lie detector test. All this leads to the conclusion that he was sent to convey the message that Hanoi was holding hundreds of our men and was prepared to bargain for their freedom. This would suggest that most of the hundreds of POWs who were not freed were still alive in 1979. The DIA didn't want to accept that, and there is nothing in the Le Dinh file to indicate that his message ever got to the White House. It got no publicity in this country.
The other probable defector-messenger is Le Quang Khai, a former Vietnamese diplomat who defected in 1992. His message, as reported in U.S. News, was that the release of POWs in 1973 was the result of a compromise between the hardliners who wanted to release none and liberals who wanted to release them all to improve Vietnam's image. Khai, who was not in government at the time and could not speak from personal knowledge, said Vietnam believed the Pads peace talks marked the beginning, not the end, of negotiations with Washington. He said that after our declaration that there were no POWs alive in Indochina and after Nixon's resignation, there were no negotiations and no framework to return the POWs. Persons who know Khai well find the idea that he was sent to deliver this message quite plausible. Again this indicates that the Vietnamese are still hoping to cash in a large number of their "bargaining chips."
Finally, it appears probable that the Japanese monk, Iwanobu Yoshida, was released on January 19, 1989 to send a message to the incoming Bush administration. Yoshida, jailed since 1975, came out with this message: He had recently shared a cell in Bang Liet Prison with three American POWs and had seen 50 or 60 others doing forced labor. He was told by a prison official that about 700 American POWs were still imprisoned in Vietnam. If Hanoi's intention was to send a message to President Bush, it didn't work. Yoshida was so weak when he was released that he didn't talk to the press for six months.
Our media mostly ignored the Yoshida story. The Washing- ton Post ran a story on June 10,1989, reporting his claim that he had shared a cell with American POWs and his statement that he had seen many American prisoners. The Post said, incorrectly, "If true, Yoshida's revelations would mark the first actual sightings of American POWs in Vietnam." Yoshida's assertion that he had heard from officials that there were 700 POWs in captivity was reported by The National Enquirer in its August 1, 1989 issue. This was confirmed by government investigators. The TV networks and The New York Times carried nothing about him.
The Pentagon said the Americans in the cell with Yoshida were two American yachtsmen who had been imprisoned by the Vietnamese. True, he had once shared a cell with them, but they had been freed much earlier. Then the word was put out that Yoshida was batty. Billy Hendon, a former Congressman from North Carolina who has taken a deep interest in the POWs for well over a decade, went to Hokkaido and interviewed Yoshida. with the monk's daughter interpreting. Hendon said he was not always lucid, but he found him to be very credible. What he said was corroborated by other intelligence information Hendon had.
Hendon says there are numerous other reports from persons who said they saw American POWs at Bang Liet POW Camp N-125 (also known as Ton Liet and Fish Pond Camp by the Vietnamese and Skid Row by the Americans held there during the war). Here are some examples from the late 1980s that Hendon discussed in a briefing he recently gave Accuracy in Media.
"In November 1988, an informer for the Ministry of Interior said, I was at Bang Liet and brought water to American prisoners twice a day while cleaning out the cells. The two men I can tell you about were 47, totally gray hair, stubble beards, wore gray two-piece uniforms....They were very thin, very tall and very sorrowful. Every time I saw them out in the courtyard, they would make this gesture. I believe it was an expression of their religious belief. [He made the sign of the cross.] I only saw two, but the cadre...told me there are eleven others separately incarcerated there. They are, I am certain, American pilots. I was told there were thirteen total. Also in addition to the American pilots, there is a 70-year-old Japanese Buddhist monk hem there.'
"In October 1988 a source said, 'I was confined to cell 7 in Ku- B.... An inmate known as__ brought food to my cell and told me two American pilots had escaped and gone over the wall, gone along the To Lich River and were recaptured by prison guards and returned to the prison.' A woman is working on road construction in October 1988, right down the To Lich River. She says, 'I was walking along the road where it intersects with the To Lich, and I noticed two white men walking. I thought they were Soviets, but a student approached the two men and talked to them in an unknown language, and then he turned to the small crowed of onlookers and said, "These are American pilots. They just escaped from the Fish Pond Camp." Soon thereafter a police vehicle came up with public security, put the men in and off they went.'
"Here you have a boat person who came out of Vietnam and said he had been told in October 1988 that two American pilots had escaped from Bang Liet Prison Camp and gone down the river. Independently a woman tells of seeing two American pilots who had escaped from the prison camp captured down the river. In November, a Vietnamese who worked at the prison tells of seeing two Americans at this prison and of hearing that there were a total of thirteen as well as a Japanese monk. The monk comes out in January 1989, saying he shared a cell with American POWs, saw others and was told by officials that they were holding over 700 Americans."
Hendon's briefing gave meaning to the "mindset to debunk" that Admiral Brooks said prevailed in DIA for many years. Hendon said the claims of Yoshida and others who corroborated his story that American POWs were held at Bang Liet Prison in the late 1980s didn't impress Robert J. DeStaat, the Pentagon official responsible for the final evaluation of such reports. DeStaat told Congress, "We looked at Ton Liet (a.k.a. Bang Liet). It's one of the prisons used during the war to confine American prisoners. We have no evidence to sustain a belief that prisoners were placed there after the war."'
Hendon says DeStaat's boss, Joseph Schlatter, told the American Legion in 1989. "This stuff about the Japanese monk who claimed to have seen American POWs has proven to be absolute non- sense." Gamett Bell, senior investigator for POW/MIA affairs in Southeast Asia from 1980 to 1990 says that is simply a lie.
Hendon also cited the handling of a live-sighting report from a former South Vietnamese major in August 1987. The major said that in December 1978 he met a POW named Jackson in a special detention facility at Tan Lap Pbu To prison. He said Jackson, who was lying on a bunk with one leg shackled to an iron bar, told him that 15 other POWs had recently been moved out, Soon afterward, Jackson was also taken away. The major described the detention facility and made a detailed drawing of the camp. Both the DIA and CIA agents in Bangkok rated him "completely honest." They asked DIA for permission have him polygraphed to verify that impression.
Three requests over a period of months brought no reply from Washington. Finally they telephoned and were told that the major's story, was contradictory "even given a smooth tape." meaning that they wouldn't believe him even if he passed the polygraph. So the agents in the field questioned the major again. were satisfied, and notified Washington they were going to polypapr him unless ordered not to. That brought a prompt response: "Do not polygraph until further notice."
In February 1989, they inquired about the status of their request, asking two other agencies to bring pressure on DIA to respond. That brought this reply from Robert DeStaat: "This is an unnecessary and meaningless roll of the dice. Polygraph is not required. Data base holdings show he could not have made the sighting he alleges and is clearly fabricating. We've checked our fries. He couldn't have seen them there. There- fore we need further examination, but don't polygraph. His response is going to be unclear if you polygraph him yourself. We've concluded that the local CLA agent, Bangkok, may have better substantive areas in which to test this source, and we have discussed those areas with the analysts at Langley (CIA headquarters), and they concur with this message."
Hendon said that means, "We have gone to Langley and we have stopped you cold, boys." He added, "On April 14, 1988, the major was ruled a fabricator for the following reasons: 'We have talked to other people who have been in that prison, and there is no special holding facility, no lock-up: and further, we have checked our records and there is only one Jackson.'"
Only one Jackson? There are four Jacksons missing. Two of them are pilots missing since 1972. No special holding facility? Hendon says that until be visited the Tan Lap Phu To prison last summer, no free American had ever been there. He has photos of the facility, the bunk and the iron bar to which Jackson was said to have been shackled. It was exactly as described by the major. Hendon says Robert DeSmat, the man who rejected the repeated urgent requests that the major be polygraphed also made sure that no American team visited Tan Lap Phu to verify the major's story.
Our "Expendable" Military Personnel
On July 2, 1993, President Clinton was told that there are no live- sighting cases requiring further investigation in Vietnam. That disposed of the men who shared the cell with Yoshida. It disposed of Jackson and scores of other POWs, most of them nameless, who were seen over the years by credible witnesses.
It disposed of Lt. Peter Mattres and Major Henry Serex. In June 1992, analysts spotted GX 2527, in a satellite photo of a field outside Dong Mang Prison. They found that was the secret number Lt. Mattres had been given 20 years earlier to signal for rescue if captured. They also spotted the letters SEREX and 72 IA 88 in the same field. TA was a distress code given to some pilots, including Major Serex, in 1972, the year Serex was shot down. They concluded that two POWs in that prison were sending a message, as they had been taught to do.
"Nonsense." said those who are the POW/MIA affairs office. Colonel Lawrence Burroughs, the former director of the National Photo Interpretation Center, said he was 100 percent certain the GX 2527 was man-made, but DIA said it was "vegetation and shadows." The letters "SEREX" were less distinct, but Senator Bob Smith (R, NH) and two investigators for the Kerry Commit- tee had no trouble seeing them in the photo. The DIA says they aren't there. As a clincher, they say that one of their investigators visited the site 11 months later and couldn't find any names or symbols on the ground.
In 1985, The Wall Street Journal quoted General Eugene Tighe as sang, "Some people involved in this U.S. effort have been disclaiming good reports about remaining American captives so long it has become habit-forming. I continue to run into civilians in the U.S. government associated with this issue who tend to think militau-personnel are expendable."
Hendon says General Tigre told him he was referring to Robert DeStaat. On September 7, Senator Bob Smith asked Attorney General Reno to investigate DeStaat and nine other senior officials who have had responsibility for POW/MIA affairs for possible improper and criminal conduct, including perjury.
Send the enclosed card or your own card or letter to Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief, U.S. News & World Report, commending him for the U.S. News story on the POWs and urging him to follow up with a story on the coverup of the evidence that many POWs have survived.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc.. 4455 Connecticut Avenue. N.W., Washington. DC 20008. and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The ALM REPORT is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $22.95 a year and 1st class to those contributing $32.95 a year or more. Non-member subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail}.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
THE MEDIA HAVE OBSCURED THE ROLE THAT BLACK RACISM PLAYED IN THE MURDER of six people and the wounding of 17 others on the Long Island Railroad commuter train by a white-hating black, Colin Ferguson, on December 7. The first reports of the massacre avoided any mention of Ferguson's race. Only after his scribblings about his hatred of whites and Orientals were released by the police did his motivation became known. A week after the slaughter, the authorities had still not revealed what additional evidence of Ferguson's racist hatred was found in his room. As a result. we still don't know on what meat that hatred fed, but I suspect that it was nurtured by black hate mongers who have for years been blaming all the problems of blacks on whites and Asians. These include rabble-rousers who have attracted national publicity such as Al Sharpton and Vernon Mason, who helped promote the Tawana Brawley hoax a few years ago, and Sonny Carson, who led the notorious prolonged boycott of a Korean grocery store.
THERE ARE OTHERS, SUCH AS DR. LEONARD JEFFRIES OF THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEWT York, who teaches that blacks are superior to whites because of their skin pigment. Rap artist Sister Souljah perhaps influenced Colin Ferguson when she said blacks should take a week off from killing each other and kill whites. WLIB, a black radio station in New York, regularly airs black racist extremists, and the city's leading black newspaper panders to them.
WHEN RACE HATE CRIMES OCCUR IT IS COMMON AND SENSIBLE TO EXPOSE THE INSTIGATORS of the hatred in addition to attacking the perpetrator of the crime. The idea behind hate crime legislation is to discourage hatred. The very day that Ferguson went on his rampage, WBLS-FM in New York City announced that it was banning songs that advocate violence or have lyrics that are profane or hateful toward women or homosexuals. This followed a similar action by KACE-FM of Los Angeles, a popular black-owned station. This is a recognition that song lyrics may promote violent behavior. But if the journalists and editorial writers recognized that Ferguson's conduct might have been influenced by what he read and heard, they' refrained from bringing it up. Instead, along with authorities from President Clinton on down, they did their best to focus attention on guns, not on what drove the killer. The New York Times, for example, concluded its Dec. 10 editorial, "Mass Murder on the 5:33," with these words, "The message of the mass murder in New York is clear: We need to get handguns off the street."
RADIO TALK SHOW HOST RUSH LIMBAUGH WAS ONE OF THE FEW WHO GOT IT RIGHT. On his Dec. 9 radio program he said: "They're taking young American kids...blacks, and they're filling them with rage, hatred and negativity. Every day these kids...are told they have no chance in America...they have no opportunity whatsoever because they are minorities and because other people live exclusively to keep them down. And who is filing these people's heads?....It is those who are self-appointed leaders and saviors of these people who constantly pummel them day in and day out with this negativity....They grow up resenting achievement. They grow up resenting success, while they have not been taught how to find it themselves."
LIMBAUGH PREDICTED ON THAT SAME SHOW THAT FERGUSON'S CRIME WOULD END UP being blamed on white racism. That very night the CBS Evening News came close to doing just that. Correspondent Giselle Fernandez described Ferguson's conduct as that of a "true madman." She said, "In his handwritten notes, Ferguson paints a self-portrait of a paranoid loner who felt persecuted by a racist society. These are the reasons for the massacre, he wrote. It is racism by Caucasians and Uncle Tom negroes. He listed Chinese racists as well as corrupt black attorneys. Among several institutions he listed the racism of the Legal Aid Society where Ferguson sought help when he was arrested for harassing a woman on a train. Ferguson, whose victims were all white or Oriental, also listed the racism of the Workmen's Compensation Board where he was dissatisfied with a settlement and made frequent calls." After showing a criminologist saying that Ferguson's notes "suggested that this was a well-planned effort to get even, to get even with whites, Asians, conservative blacks, institutions -- everyone who had things, things he didn't have," Fernandez concluded: "Criminologists say there are thousands of people fed up and frustrated with the system. They admit it's almost impossible to target. much less prevent, those at a breaking point who may be ready to turn anger into deadly action against innocent people."
WE PRESENTED A GOOD TV PROGRAM ON DEC. 8, ON THE NET NETWORK. IT WAS THE best discussion ever presented on a national TV network of the case that we abandoned a large number of POWs in Vietnam and Laos. Unfortunately, the program was marred by some technical flaws, and NET decided not to re-air it at the times scheduled. We decided to do it again on Dec. 15, hoping the equipment would work better. On Dec. 22, we will air a program with Joe Goulden, Cliff Kincaid and me discussing our new book, The News Manipulators. In this AIM Report we present the case that was made on our first program -- that there is very good evidence that a large number of POWs were not freed by North Vietnam and Laos. that they had a motive for keeping them, that our government has had good evidence that many American POWs were being held in Viemamese prisons throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and that there has been a systematic effort to discredit all such intelligence and to conceal it from the relatives of the POWs and the public.
SINCE PEOPLE HAVE TROUBLE BELIEVING THAT ANYONE IN GOVERNMENT WOULD DO such a thing, we prepared the wax, by citing other things that are true that people have been conditioned not to believe by bad reporting. One was the fact that asbestos is not as dangerous as many people think. We pointed out that there had been a "disaster" on the San Francisco Bay Bridge on Dec. 7 when several bags containing asbestos-contaminated waste material fell onto the bridge from a truck at 6:40 A.M. The bridge was promptly closed to traffic while the authorities tried to decide what to do. All lanes remained closed for eight hours, and two lanes were not opened until after midnight. This caused one of the worst traffic jams in memory.
A REPORTER CALLED AN ASBESTOS EXPERT IN WASHINGTON AND ASKED WHAT HE would advise be done. He recommended hosing down the bridge, washing the material into the bay. 'What would cause cancer!" the reporter protested. The expert explained that the rocks underlying and surrounding San Francisco Bay are rich in asbestos and that any additional amount washed off the bridge would not make the slightest difference. That advice was not followed, because, like the asbestosphobic school authorities in New York City who needlessly kept many schools closed for two weeks last September, the city authorities in San Francisco think that any exposure to asbestos is going to cause lung cancer and kill people. Far more lives were endangered, lost or shortened by the hundreds of thousands of additional miles that had to be driven. by the extreme stress caused by the traffic jam, missed work and appointments, than could have been put at risk by exposure to those few bags of asbestos waste.
I HAVE RECEIVED A LOVELY LETTER FROM MRS. WALT DISNEY. SHE HAS RECEIVED nearly 4,000 cards and letters from those who read the AIM Report on her late husband. She thanks all of you and says, "I am very grateful to Accuracy in Media for its efforts on behalf of Walt Disney. AIM came to my aid without being asked. I was not even aware that such an organization existed nor of all the good work it was doing." If you appreciate what AIM is doing, please remember us at this gift-giving season. A tax-deductible contribution will be deeply appreciated. MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR.