Gen. Vessey: ‘No Reason To Disbelieve’ Vietnam’s Denials On US P.O.W.S — What About 25 Years Of Lies?

Gen. John Vessey, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential special envoy to Vietnam, returns tomorrow to debrief President Clinton on the results of his just-concluded trip to Hanoi. The latest Vessey mission occurred in the wake of the disclosure of an explosive report discovered in January and attributed to the former Soviet Union’s military intelligence organization, the GRU: a transcription of a detailed, secret 1972 presentation by Gen. Tran Van Quang, a top North Vietnamese military commander, to his country’s Communist Party Politburo. It revealed the exact number of American prisoners of war held at that time — a figure three times larger than the number claimed at the time by Hanoi.

Just Going Through the Motions on POW-MIA Issues?

The Clinton-Vessey meeting in the Oval Office tomorrow ought to be a short one. For one thing, Gen. Vessey has already expressed before the international press what amounts to an endorsement of Vietnam’s claim that the GRU document is a "fabrication." According to the Washington Post, the general announced at a news conference in Hanoi that "he had no reason to disbelieve" Gen. Quang when the latter conveniently (and predictably) denied having made the report attributed to him.

For another, neither Gen. Vessey nor President Clinton seem willing to allow progress toward normalizing bilateral relations to be derailed even by fresh evidence that Vietnam has yet to come clean concerning all U.S. POW-MIA cases. In a word, whitewash does not take long to apply.

Hard Questions That Require Honest Answers

Fortunately, the Vessey mission has only served to intensify concerns about the Quang report’s revelations and added to the list of questions that must be resolved before the POW-MIA issue can remotely be considered resolved. A number of these concerns and questions are enumerated in an excellent op.ed. article appearing in today’s Washington Times by Al Santoli, a member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors. (A copy of the Santoli article is attached.)

Among the issues about which Gen. Vessey and Adm. Charles Larson, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific who will be testifying tomorrow morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee, should be queried are:

• Is it appropriate to send on a sensitive fact-finding mission a presidential emissary who has already concluded that "the Vietnamese can now make the case that they’ve shown us that they are not holding live Americans"? According to a 31 March 1993 letter to President Clinton from Sen. Robert Smith (R-NH), this was the view expressed last month by Gen. Vessey in a briefing to a Hanoi-bound delegation sponsored by the Center for National Policy.

   

• Is it appropriate to include as the translator for such a presidential mission Andre Savageot, a paid lobbyist for General Electric — a company aggressively promoting normalization of economic and diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam?

 

• Is it responsible to include in that mission Maj. Gen. Thomas Needham, commander of the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting [of U.S. POW-MIAs]. After all, it was Gen. Needham who in March 1993 personally directed the wholesale destruction in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok of some 30 linear feet of files containing detailed notes compiled by field investigators’ throughout Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five years.

 

• Gen. Needham claims that CINCPAC authorized his destruction of the Embassy Bangkok files. Did Admiral Larson do so? If so, on what grounds? If not, who did — and why?

Will the U.S. Facilitate Renewed IMF Lending to Vietnam?

In the face of these troubling questions and those raised by Al Santoli — to say nothing of the serious issues of principle, integrity and accountability that they suggest — an immediate policy issue looms: Will the Clinton Administration mount a major effort to block a $140 million bridge loan to clean up Vietnam’s debt arrearages to the Fund slated to be granted to Vietnam at the 30 April-1 May meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington? Doing so would permit Hanoi to borrow hundreds of millions from the newly established IMF funding facility available to countries ostensibly in transition from command to market economies.

Or will the United States quietly encourage Japan to cast the decisive vote in favor of such life-support for Hanoi’s tottering communist regime — so that U.S. representative can oppose it without effect in much the same way that Iran recently secured hundreds of millions from the World Bank?

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy firmly believes that full and honest accounting for U.S. POW-MIAs in Vietnam is a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for normalization of ties with Hanoi. It calls upon the Clinton Administration to insist on nothing less but also to live up to the commitment to freedom in Vietnam and elsewhere implicit in Candidate Clinton’s campaign rhetoric:

"No foreign policy can long succeed if it does not reflect the enduring values of the American people….The fact is that democracy abroad also protects our own concrete economic and security interests here at home….Democracies make more reliable partners in diplomacy, in trade, in protecting the environment…." (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1 October 1992.)