

Navy Times July 1992

POWs: Decades of Lost Opportunity By William Matthews

WASHINGTON--It was April 1973. Americans were sick of war in
Vietnam, the Nixom administration was slowly sinking in the
quagmire of Watergate and the military was demoralized by
its only defeat in war.

Few were in the mood to question President Nixon's
pronouncement that, with Operation Homecoming, all American
prisoners of war were safely home.

But many knew better.

Top Defense Department officials were dismayed when the
Vietnamese turned over only 591 Americans April 12. They
expected at least 244 more. Weeks earlier, Adm. Thomas
Moorer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent
Nixon's top aids a memo saying he was very concerned that a
prisoner exchange was being completed before the United
States received a prisoner list from Laos. Moorer advised
halting U.S. troop withdrawals from Southeast Asia until
Laos accounted for hundreds of U.S. pilots, air crewmen,
intelligence troops and others who had disappeared there.

Almost 20 years later, Moorer says he was "overruled by my
superiors." Moorer and others who held key Defense
Department jobs at the war's end told a Senate committee
June 25 that top military officials believed 244 Americans
may have been alive and in captivity in Vietnam when Nixon
administration officials declared that all prisoners were
home and the nation's most unpopular war was over. After
debriefing the POWs who returned, the Defense Department
concluded that 111 POWs had died in captivity. But that left
133 American servicemen the Pentagon believed should have
come home alive. The public was never told of the missing
POWs, and few people ever asked. "In the '70x, there never
was a public demand that we have to have an accounting for
those people," said Sen. John

Kerry, chairman of the Senate Select Commmittee on POW/MIA
Affairs. "The climate of the "70s may have contributed to
the attitude that accepted the unwillingness to ask tough
questions and face reality," said the Massachusetts
Democrat.

FAMILIES MISLED

In the process, families of service members from the war
were misled, Kerry said. He charged that defense officils
were "knowingly wrong" in asserting in April 1973 that there
was no reason to believe Americans remained behind after the
release of U.S. prisoners of war. Recently declassified
government document show that as many as 133 U.S. servicemen
may have been left alive in Vietnam and Laos after the
Pentagon asserted it knew of none left behind.

"There were some real lost opportunities in the '70s," Kerry
said.

In recent years, concern for the fate of men missing from
the war in Vietnam and the covert wars in Laos and Cambodia
has intensified. A lack of solid information from the
government and steady flow of tantalizing but vague
evidence from Southeast Asia has prompted charges of a grand
cover-up to hide information on POWs in Vietnam from their
families and the public.

But current and former officials involved in the POW search
dismissed the notion that for two decades the federal
government has conspired to hide information.

"It would be almost impossible to have a conspiracy," said
retired Gen. John Vessey, another former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs and now a special presidential envoy to Vietnam
on POW and MIA matters. "It is hard enough to keep
operational secrets" long enough to surprise an enemy, he
said.

SECRET TOO BIG TOO KEEP

There is virtually no possibility of keeping secret a
conspiracy involving hundreds of people over the course of
two decades, he said. It is more likely that knowledge - and
perhaps POWs - were lost because the nation lacked the will
to discover the truth. "The nation was ecstatic that the
conflict was over," said Rober Shields, former deputy
assistant defense secretary in charge of POW and MIA
affairs. America was "very happy to have back the people who
came back," but there was little enthusiasm for probing the
fate of unaccounted-for MIAs, he said. Shortly after
Operation Homecoming on April 12, "we knew of men who had
been alive in captivity at one time, but we did not have
evidence that they were still alive," Shields said. He
brought the matter to the attention of his boss,
then-Assistant Defense Secretary William Clements. As
Shields recalls it, Clements said all the POWs who hadn't
returned home were dead. "You can't say that," Shields
responded, citing lack of evidence that they had died. "You
didn't hear me," Clements replied. "They're all dead." But
even as the White House and the Defense Department were
publicly declaring unaccounted-for POWs and MIAs dead, the
Defense Department was trying to convince Vietnam to turn
over information on at least 80 MIAs believed to have been
captured alive but not returned during Operations
Homecoming, a recently declassified message shows.

In the same message, the Defense Department also sought
permission to mount air and ground searches of 588 crash
sites considered most likely to yeild MIA remains. Missing
servicemen in Vietnam were only part of the problem.

But early 1973, Laos had become "a black hole" for American
air crews and intelligence personnel, said Sen. Bob Smith,
R-N.H., vice chairman of the POW/MIA committee. An estimated
580 Americans were shot down over Laos, but just 13 were
ever acknowledged by Laos as prisoners of war and only eight
were returned alive, he said.

Americans were still being shot down in the covert air war
over Laos as preparations for Operation Homecoming were
being completed, Smith said. In February, for example, an
EC-47A reconnaissance plane with eight men aboard was shot
down. Four men were believed to have died in the incident,
but the other four were thought to have survived, he said.

But until May 1973, documents show, the Defense Department
refused to acknowledge that U.S. personnel were being lost
in Laos or Cambodia.

As the mid-April date for the return of prisoners from
Vietnam approached, Moorer said he and others feared it was
"highly likely that there were POWs held by the Pathet Lao
that would not be released by Operation Homecoming. Because
of politics, there was little we could do about it," he
said.

Politics also hindered the United States efforts to recover
prisoners from Vietnam, Moorer said. In 1972, Congress
passed the 1973 defense budget, including an explicit
prohibition on the use of any money to continue the war in
Vietnam, he said.

FULL-FLEDGED COMBAT

When the Vietnamese learned of the prohibition, they knew
they could disregard agreements to account for prisoners and
MIAs, Moorer said. The ban on fighting eliminated any
possibility of threatening Vietnam with military action if
prisoners were not released, he said. To get all U.S.
prisoners of war back "would have required returning to
full-fledged combat. There would have been a revolution in
the United States" if anyone had attempted that, Moorer
said. With the 591 home and the public declaration that
there were no more Americans in captivity, the nation turned
its back on Vietnam.

ROADBLOCKS TO THE TRUTH by William Matthews

WASHINGTON - A commission that worked inside the Pentagon
reviewing the Defense Department's POW and MIA search
efforts had its telephones bugged, its members harassed and
received almost no support from the military, a former
member disclosed.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe said the treatment
given the commission he headed at the Pentagon in 1985 and
1986 was "extraordinary".

Most extraordinary was the bugging of the commission's
telephones, he told a special Senate Committee investigating
the fate of American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War.

Tighe, who was director of the Defense Intelligency Agency
from 1977 to 1981, said he and members of his commission
suspected their phones were buffed and confirmed it by
planting information in their phone conversations.

The information turned up among people who weren't supposed
to have it, Tighe said. The commission ruled out the
possibility that the information was leaked by commission
members. Tighe declined to discuss who did the bugging or
why he thought it wa done. But members of the Senate Select
Committee on POW and MIA Affairs said they will ask the
Defense Department to identify who planted the listening
devices.

The Tighe Commission was established in 1985 by the Defense
Intelligene Agency to examine the process the agency used to
evaluate intelligence about POWs and MIAs and suggest
improvements or corrections to mistakes that were being
made, Tighe said.

The commission's most important conclusion was that there
was no government conspiracy to hide information about
living POWs left behind in Vietnam, Tighe said. But the
commission did recommend improvements in investigative
procedures. During the commission's probe, DIA investigators
"verbally attacked me and the commission" for questioning
the agency's procedures, Tighe said.

Tighe said the treatment his commission received compared
poorly with the four-star treatment the Defense Department
afforded another commission he served on, which investigated
the 1983 bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

The Tighe Commission criticized the DIA for not trying hard
enough to investigate live-sighting reports and other
information it received. Instead, the DIA worked hard to
discredit all such reports, he said.

[PROVIDED BY THE FORGET ME NOT'S POW/MIA BBS 908-787-8383]
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