Hanoi and Washington Officials Reneging on Promises of Joint POW/MIA Cooperation

Hanoi and Washington Officials Reneging on Promises of Joint POW/MIA Cooperation

Pentagon's Top POW/MIA Official Shirks Sworn Duty and Refuses to Investigate Live Sightings of Americans Still Being Held Captive By Vietnam

February/March 1995 Issue
U.S. Veteran Dispatch Staff and Wire Report

Former Congressman Bill Hendon told the U.S. Veteran Dispatch by telephone from Bangkok March 18 he has no choice but to return to the United States without securing the release of U.S. prisoners of war still being held captive in Vietnam.
Hendon, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina considered by many in the POW/MIA movement to be America's leading expert on POW/MIA intelligence, said he had exhausted all possible avenues in his effort to take U.S. government experts "to the exact location where U.S. prisoners of war are currently held by the Vietnamese government." Hendon, who has made over 30 trips to Southeast Asia investigating POW/MIA related evidence, said Hanoi had refused to grant visas to himself and fellow activists Elizabeth Stewart, daughter of a missing Air Force pilot and chairperson of the Washington, D.C.-based POW Publicity Fund; Michael Milne, executive director of Veterans of the Vietnam War Inc.; and Lamont Gaston, immediate past president of Vietnow, a national Vietnam veterans organization.
During their 2 1/2 month stay in Thailand, Hendon said he and his associates had quietly applied for visas to Vietnam after picking up "information that is absolutely irrefutable about living American prisoners of war held by the Vietnamese government in captivity in Vietnam." Hendon told the press at a February 28 news conference in Bangkok, Thailand, they had planned to enter Vietnam and appeal to the newly opened U.S. liaison office in Hanoi to accompany them to sites where the prisoners are held. "We can take U.S. experts tomorrow, if we had visas (for Vietnam), to the exact site where American prisoners are held right now," Hendon said.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman said Hendon should take his information to an office in the Bangkok mission -- the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting -- which is responsible for handling prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) affairs.
"If he has information about POW issues he should provide that information to that office. We have asked him to do that and he has declined," the spokesman said.
Hendon criticized the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, accusing it of failing "to lift a finger" to help get the visas. He made public a Feb. 20 letter to U.S. Ambassador David Lambertson, in which Hendon accused the U.S. government of not trying to find missing U.S. servicemen. "I must regrettably conclude that sharing the information I now possess with U.S. authorities will not yield any honest attempt to liberate the American prisoners currently held in Vietnam," Hendon said in his letter, copies of which he gave to reporters.
"The only prudent course of action is for me to physically accompany . . . experts to the sites in Vietnam where the Americans are currently being held. I insist on doing this," he said in the letter to Lambertson. Hendon, on Mar. 5, made a further appeal to retired Air Force Gen. James Wold, deputy assistant secretary of defense, prior to Wold beginning a Mar. 9 tour of Indochinese countries. Wold, the Pentagon's top official on POW/MIA affairs, was in Southeast Asia to discuss the POW/MIA issue with senior government officials in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Even though Wold's trip was routed through Bangkok, he refused to meet with Hendon. "At this time, I have no plans to change my trip routing to meet you in Bangkok. I would, however, like to reiterate Ambassador Lambertson's request that you turn over any evidence you may have uncovered to my Office so that my analysts can immediately review it," Wold told Hendon in a Mar. 6 fax. Prior to leaving Bangkok, Hendon faxed Wold, again asking him to divert his trip to Vietnam, where Hendon pledged to take him to the location where the U.S. POWs are being held.
"Your refusal to accompany me to Vietnam," Hendon told Wold, "is one of the most obscene, unconscionable, and shameful acts by a U.S. government official that I have ever witnessed." "Even the egregious nature of your refusal to liberate these prisoners, however, pales in comparison to the alternative you suggested (i.e. that I turn over the information to your experts so that they might investigate the case). If I did as you requested, General, I fear I would be consigning my source to immediate imprisonment or death because of your policy of turning over sensitive intelligence sources to Vietnamese government officials. "US cable traffic shows that in the course of your 'live sighting investigations' (LSI's), you have repeatedly exposed sensitive intelligence sources to the Vietnamese authorities," Hendon wrote.
"General, I will play no role whatsoever in exposing confidential sources to a hostile foreign power," Hendon wrote, "thus I refuse to turn any of my information over to your investigators." Hendon told Wold he would, upon his return to the United States, request a congressional investigation into Wold's "shameful and immoral practice" of turning sensitive sources of POW intelligence over to the enemy.
Hendon also said U.S. officials repeatedly deny to informants the existence of a $2.5 million reward which private groups in the United States are willing to pay for the return of live Americans. Hendon said the denials discouraged informants from coming forward or following up reported sightings of U.S. servicemen.
Although the Pentagon and State Department publicly claim they have never offered rewards for information or remains of servicemen, believing to do so would trigger a flood of hoax claims, the U.S. government has secretly paid millions of dollars to Hanoi for rights to mine crash sights for human bone fragments.
Hendon's request for visas to enter Vietnam to search for American servicemen is based on a promise Vietnamese officials made in 1992 to Senators John Kerry, (D-Mass.), Hank Brown, (R-Col.), and Tom Daschle, (D-SD).
Vietnamese officials told the senators that in exchange for the United States lifting of the U.S.-imposed trade embargo against Vietnam and movement toward full diplomatic relations, POW/MIA activists, even the "skeptics," would be welcomed to Vietnam to see the records and search for themselves. Last December, Vietnamese officials refused to issue visas to U.S. Veteran Dispatch publisher, Ted Sampley, and two colleagues, who had requested permission to enter Vietnam in January to visit the U.S. Joint Task Force for Full Accounting office in Hanoi.
Sampley, a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret, had requested permission to go to Vietnam to look into the case of his father-in-law, SFC Robert D. Owen, missing in action since 1968. The Pentagon had notified Sampley early last year that JTF-FA planned to investigate SFC Owen's case in January 1995 and that they had a Vietnamese witness.
After it was apparent that Hanoi was not going to issue visas to Sampley and his group, Sampley appealed through Sens. Jesse Helms, (R-NC), and Lauch Faircloth, (R-NC), asking the senators to pressure the Vietnamese to live up to their promise. Sen. Helms' office did not respond and Sen. Faircloth's office told Sampley there was nothing the senator could do.
A State Department spokeswoman told the Kinston Free Press, "This is not a bargain deal," and "it is their [the Vietnamese] sovereign right to determine who they allow into their country." She said the United States cannot force Vietnam to allow Sampley in if they do not want him in their country. Sampley said the so-called government cooperation is a fraud being committed upon the American people and the families of America's unaccounted for servicemen. He said, "The Vietnamese made an agreement with the American people through three U.S. senators that if the United States would lift the trade embargo and pursue normalized relations, then they, in return, would cooperate by letting in anyone who wished to make their own MIA inquiry."
Sampley said it was like a flashback to 1973 when the Hanoi communists signed the Paris Peace Accords, only to violate the entire agreement after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. Hanoi marched south and took all of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Last April, Vietnamese officials prevented Hendon and a group of MIA family members from visiting a prison where Hendon's research proved Americans had been held during and after the Vietnam War. Hendon and the MIA relatives were not allowed to meet with Vietnamese witnesses who claim to have seen living and dead servicemen at the prison after the war. Hendon said declassified U.S. intelligence documents show the prison in Vinh Phu province held 200 American POWs in 1972. None of those prisoners at that site, which he described as an underground prison, was repatriated in 1973 under terms of the Paris Peace Accord between Washington and Hanoi, he said.
He said that what apparently was the same facility turned up in a December 1984 document in which, he said, a Vietnamese captain reported 300 American POWs were being kept in a secret underground prison.
During that trip, the Vietnamese government also refused a request by Hendon's group to interview Hoang Dinh My, a jailed freedom fighter who claims to have seen 30 live Americans and 50 dead ones in 1980 near a prison compound in Thanh Hoa province 120 miles south of Hanoi. The Clinton administration insists that full normalized relations with communist Vietnam depends upon Vietnam's cooperation on the POW/MIA issue.

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