EXCERPTS FROM “THE MIA COVER-UP” BY JOHN CORRY

February 1994

(Emphasis Added
Throughout)

A March 1973 memo to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff says, “There are
approximately 350 U.S. military and
civilian POW/MIAs in Laos.” An
earlier memo to Henry Kissinger says that
some 215 of the 350 “were lost under
circumstances that the enemy probably has
information regarding their fate.”
No information was ever forthcoming,
however, and only twelve prisoners
returned from Laos….Therefore,
some 1,200 might still have been alive.
(A later Pentagon document gives a
precise number of 1,278.) The possibility
that they were alive, however, was
ignored, and even misrepresented.

* * *

[T]he Vietnamese were trying to hide
something. [U.S. field] investigators
were shown pre-selected items.
They were shown not the register that
listed all the items, but
instead an excerpt from the register.
Apparently, they insisted then on
examining the entire register, and when
they did, they discovered it was
a fake. Moreover, “certain items of
high interest” that were supposed to
be in the museum were missing.

The investigators, however, listed in
their report the items they were able to
see, literally translating the museum’s
own descriptions. They found, for
example, “a flag used to request
food used by the American colonel pilot
Hynds, Wallace G., and was captured at Ha
Tinh, and “bandit pilot
identification card number FR 15792 of
Hynds, Wallace Gouley and was captured
alive in Ha Tinh on 28-5-1965.”

That Colonel Hynds was
captured alive seems indisputable; the
Pentagon, however, has always listed a
Col. Wallace Gurley Hynds as killed in
action. There are six other men whose
names were found in that one provincial
museum who were all listed as being
captured alive, although the Pentagon had
declared them all dead.

* * *

A North Vietnamese military
doctor, who defected to the South in
1971, told American officials that Hanoi
was holding hundreds more prisoners than
it had acknowledged. In 1979, another
Vietnamese Communist defector told the
Defense Intelligence Agency that in the
mid-1970s Vietnamese officials had talked
about holding 700 American prisoners as
“bargaining assets….

* * *

In Hanoi, meanwhile, Gen. John Vessey,
the presidential emissary to Vietnam on
POW-MIA affairs, said he had spoken to
General Quang and that Quang denied he
had made the report…. Vessey was making
a strange argument. If Hanoi kept a
separate prison system for the POWs who
were not returned, the POWs who did
return would hardly be aware of it….Even
before the arrival of the boat people,
though, U.S. intelligence agencies
suspected that Hanoi had help POWs
outside the known prisoner system….
Some reports are clear enough. A CIA
document only recently declassified,
suggests that POWs were held in camps
other than the ones identified during the
war….[T]he CIA again said cautiously, “the
possibility of a second prison system for
the detention of American POWs cannot be
disregarded”….[T]he
Defense Department had speculated along
these same lines before the CIA did.

* * *

In the appalling history of
POW-MIA policy, though, nothing is more
scandalous than the issue of live
sightings. Since 1975, the
Defense Intelligence Agency has received
more than 15,000 live-sighting reports
about American prisoners in Southeast
Asia. Approximately 1,650 of the reports
are first-hand. That means a source says
he has actually seen an American held in
captivity, or under conditions that
cannot be easily explained….No
live-sighting reporting, however, has
every been accepted as proof by the
Defense Intelligence Agency that an MIA
is still alive, or ever has been alive,
in Southeast Asia. This defies the
laws of probability. It
also moves us into the area of culpable
negligence. It is
permissible now to wonder if the Defense
Intelligence Agency has ever been
seriously interested in uncovering the
truth about our missing men, or whether
it has always been an instrument in a
cover-up.

* * *

This led in 1986 to the Director’s
POW/MIA Task Force Report, or the Gaines
Report, after Air Force Col. Kimball M.
Gaines who was its principal author.
Consider the following excerpts… “There
exists a mindset to debunk….Within
POW/MIA Division it has evolved over time
as an investigative technique, whereby
intense effort is initially focused on
veracity of sources with a view
toward discrediting them.”…In
other words, the DIA bullied those who
came forth with information about MIAs:
it called an “inordinate”
number of them liars; it sought to
discredit reports of live sightings. The
Pentagon immediately classified the
Gaines Report.

* * *

The DIA is programmed to discredit the
possibility that anyone was left behind
in Southeast Asia, or that anyone remains
there now. Its intellectual
dishonesty has been stunning, and its
investigative process a fraud. On
occasion, it has seemed criminal.

* * *

Tan Lap, where the major was held, has
another distinction as well. It is one of
five Vietnamese prisons — the other are
Quyet Tien, Yen Bai, Ha Son Binh, and
Thanh Hoa — where, according to reports
from the boat people and others, POWs
were buried in cemeteries in the late
1970s and 1980s. The reports are
credible; some are from former Vietnamese
prisoners who say they dug the grave. Not
one of the cemeteries, however, has been
excavated by any of the teams now looking
for MIA remains. Instead, the
teams dig up old crash sites. The crash
sites yield little or nothing; the
cemeteries could yield a great deal — evidence,
perhaps, about men who were murdered.
It seems, though that the Defense
Department does not want to know.

* * *

[S]ix staff members on the Senate
Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs who
were charged with investigating
intelligence reports…drew an obvious
conclusion: “that American prisoners
of war have been held continuously after
Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in
captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as
1989.” [The investigators were for
technical reasons using live-sighting
reports that extended only through 1989.]

The conclusion, however, was not
welcomed by the DIA, or even by most
members of the Senate Committee….John
Kerry, the committee chairman, told one
of the investigators that if the report
every leaked out, “you’ll wish you’d
never been born.” Senator
Kerry wants to normalize relations with
Vietnam. When the briefing was over,
Frances Zwenig, the committee staff
director, ordered that all copies of the
investigators’ report be destroyed, She
also said she wanted the computer files
purged. Zwenig, who is now the executive
assistant to United Nations Ambassador
Madeleine Albright, also wants to
normalize relations with Vietnam.

* * *

[S]ome of the distress signals may
have been made years ago. On the other
hand, some of them may be new….At the
very least, they are further
proof that a cover-up has been, and
still is, in progress. We
have broken faith with men who fought for
their country, and we are being blighted
by an ever-widening moral stain.