U.S. Officials Accommodate Vietnamese and Laotian Communist Leaders While Denying American Families the Truth on POW/MIAs

U.S. Officials Accommodate Vietnamese and Laotian Communist Leaders While Denying American Families the Truth on POW/MIAs

U.S. Veteran Dispatch staff report
March/April/May 1997

This Spring has been a busy diplomatic time for White House, State Department and Defense Department officials traveling to China, Korea and Vietnam where they signed new trade and aid deals with the world's last professed communist regimes. Lost among the champagne toasts were the widely publicized reports of missing American servicemen still alive in North Korea, Hanoi's "unilateral knowledge" of the fates of more than 400 U.S. servicemen and servicemen from China's pivotal role in the holding and transport of American prisoners during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

In the midst of the diplomatic revelry, on March 26, 1997, Carol Hrdlicka wife of POW USAF Col. David Hrdlicka learned from private sources that on the following morning an informal hearing on reports pertaining to her husband's fate was to be held at the Defense POW/MIA Office (DPMO) headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia.

For more than a decade, the Defense Department and the Communist government of Laos has repeatedly attempted to write off Col. Hrdlicka as having died in captivity, without producing proof or a verifiable date of death. The last Pentagon/Pathet Lao claim that Col. Hrdlicka died in 1967 was disproved by a 1968 Soviet Union interview and eyewitness report of his being in good health while being detained in a Pathet Lao headquarters cave complex near the Vietnam border. Mrs. Hrdlicka traveled to Russia to meet with the wife of the Russian journalist. The woman confirmed that her husband had told her of his 1968 meeting with Col. Hrdlicka.

In late 1996, the DPMO leadership, still possessed with a "mindset to debunk," attempted to discredit the 1968 Russian report by dispatching an interview team to Israel to speak with another Russian journalist who was reported to be part of the Soviet media team that met Col. Hrdlicka. The March 27, 1997 internal briefing/hearing at DPMO headquarters was allegedly convened to discuss the Soviet journalists' past and current accounts of their meeting with Col. Hrdlicka.

Mrs. Hrdlicka was outraged by the DPMO's violation of U.S. Law under Section 1505 of the Missing Service Persons Act which specifies that upon receiving information related to the status or whereabouts of a missing person that the DPMO must immediately notify "the primary next of kin and any other designated person for the missing person of the existence of that information." As a result, on the morning of March 27, she wrote a letter to retired Air Force General James Wold, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the DPMO. She faxed two copies of the letter to his office and placed four phone calls attempting to receive information. As of April 14, 1997, Mrs. Hrdlicka told the U.S. VETERAN that she had still not received a response, verbal or written, from Mr. Wold or his DPMO aides.

The Pentagon and the Clinton Administration has increased its efforts to appease Hanoi while ignoring public law and Presidential Directives that requires the families of POW/MIAs to be kept fully informed.

On April 7, 1997 U.S. Commerce Secretary Robert Rubin was in Hanoi to sign new economic agreements with the communist regime. Celebrating the event, Lt. Colonel Jonathan Chase, of the Pentagon's Joint task Force for Full Accounting of POW/MIAs, told reporters that the Vietnamese regime is "giving a full effort," in assisting U.S. investigators. This shamelessly implausible statement ignores the fact that the Pentagon intelligence community's 1995 Comprehensive Review of POW/MIA cases shows that Hanoi has the ability to provide "unilateral" information to resolve at least 464 cases of missing service members, including men photographed alive or deceased under North Vietnamese control.

In addition, the regime has never provided U.S. investigators with the original documents of the military graves registration unit of the Hanoi "mortician," who has long considered a legitimate information source by the U.S. Government. The mortician passed numerous lie detector tests, stating that he helped to process the remains of more than 400 U.S. servicemen, which were subsequently warehoused by the Vietnamese government.

Mrs. Hrdlicka has requested the assistance of Congressman James Talent (Republican, Missouri) and his assistant Al Santoli, to obtain all DPMO information and interviews related to her husband. In a formal letter to Mr. Wold, Congressman Talent has requested that the DPMO deliver the information on Col. Hrdlicka and all materials related to internal DPMO briefings or hearings, to his office by not later than April 15, 1997.

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