IN MEMORIAM: GEORGE CARVER’S PASSING ADDS URGENCY TO EFFORT TO ESTABLISH THE TRUTH ON POW-MIA’S

(Washington, D.C.): On June 26, a
genuine national treasure was lost with
the untimely passing of George Carver.
For 26 years, Dr. Carver served in highly
sensitive positions in the U.S.
intelligence community and, subsequent to
his retirement from the Central
Intelligence Agency, as a distinguished
member of numerous government committees
dealing with intelligence and national
security issues. He was also a valued
member of the Center for Security
Policy’s Board of Advisors.

Particularly noteworthy was Dr.
Carver’s service during his time at the
CIA as Special Assistant for Vietnamese
Affairs to three successive Directors of
Central Intelligence during most of the
Vietnam War. In this capacity, he was
intimately familiar with the vast
quantity and exceptionally high quality
of much of the intelligence related to
that conflict available to the U.S.
government.

What Went With Dr. Carver
to His Grave?

George Carver’s demise is all the more
tragic because in recent years he had
courageously brought this knowledge to
bear on behalf of efforts to ferret out
the truth about the hundreds of American
servicemen who were unaccounted for at
the end of the Vietnam War. In
congressional testimony, published
articles and various private initiatives,
he urged — on the basis of his personal
experience and first-hand insights —
that the U.S. government end its efforts
to conceal as-yet-unrevealed information
about POW-MIAs. Dr. Carver also demanded
that Hanoi be pressed to come clean about
the knowledge it continues to withhold on
this subject and warned that the Clinton
Administration’s policy of normalizing
relations with Vietnam would undercut,
not advance, that objective.

Fresh validation of Dr. Carver’s
complaints about the odious lack of
transparency in both Washington and Hanoi
has just been established by the U.S.
Veteran Dispatch newspaper. In its
17 June 1994 edition, the Dispatch
published a number of profoundly
upsetting photographs of what appear to
be dead American servicemen killed during
the Vietnam conflict. They are
part of a cache of some 4,800 such
photographs and 12,000 negatives relating
to U.S. POW-MIAs that were obtained in
1992 from Vietnam’s archives.

According to the newspaper:

“…Speaking on condition of
anonymity, a Defense Department
official identified…[the] source
[of these photos] as Gene Brown, a
‘walk-in’ who was employed by DIA for
a brief period during 1992 and 1993
under the code name ‘Druid Smoke.’
The photographs are currently held
secret by the U.S. government.”

“Hired on a fee-for-service
basis, Brown succeeded in bringing
some 4,500 photos out of Hanoi by the
simple expedient of buying them from
communist officials with money
supplied by DIA.”

“…The photographs
prove without a shadow of a doubt
[that] the Vietnamese have been lying
for years by saying it had no such
records. These
photographs…are proof that Vietnam
kept meticulous records pertaining to
U.S. prisoners of war and missing in
action — dead and alive.”

The Dispatch documents a
litany of changing — and ever more
torturous — public posturing about these
photographs on the part of American
officials under both the Bush and
Clinton Administrations. This litany
is in keeping with an odious, bipartisan
record of dissembling about Hanoi’s
lack of real “cooperation” in
getting to the bottom of the POW-MIA
story. It concludes that:

“The public disclosure of
these photographs proves that,
regardless of Vietnam’s lies and
deceit, U.S. government officials are
collaborating with Hanoi to exploit
the POW-MIA issue for the sake of
appeasing Vietnam and U.S. corporate
interests who want to do business
with communist Vietnam.”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy mourns
the loss of George Carver — one of the
most distinguished members of its Board
of Advisors. But the far greater
loss is to the Nation: It has been
deprived of a man of conscience and
character who tried, in his own way, to
ensure that his government revealed all
it knew about the Americans left behind
in Vietnam and to prevent his government
from rewarding the communist despots in
Hanoi for their murderous treachery and
other villainy. George Carver’s
last battle must be carried on by those
who survive him and most especially the
dwindling number of those who know — as
he did — the truth.