Perot Makes Clinton ‘An Offer He Can’t Refuse’: Get the Facts on POW/Mia’s Before Okaying New Imf Loans To Vietnam

Overlooked in today’s news stories about the latest U.S. mission to Hanoi led by Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, was an extraordinary, related development in Washington: Yesterday, the proverbial 800-pound gorilla joined the debate over U.S. policy toward communist Vietnam — and that debate is likely never to be the same again. With characteristic scrappiness, Ross Perot served notice on the Clinton White House, the IMF and Hanoi: He will commit his considerable energy and resources and those of his supporters across the country to the task of recovering and otherwise accounting for live Americans left behind after the end of the Vietnam War.

At a press conference in Washington organized by concerned family members and veterans organizations, Perot promised to transform this issue, raising it from one about which a small number of Americans care intensely to "the level of principle" — a point at which "every hardworking American will be with you." The principle, simply put, is this: The United States must make every effort and utilize fully all its leverage to recover those servicemen who are still alive and remain against their will in Indochina or elsewhere.

Explosive Evidence

The case that there were such servicemen left behind after all U.S. POWs were supposed to have been repatriated in early 1973 was powerfully made by other participants in yesterday’s press conference. For example:

• A Vietnamese defector, Le Quang Khai, said that in Hanoi’s Foreign Ministry, where he served for eleven years, it was "common knowledge" that all captive Americans were not returned in "Operation Homecoming."
• Testimony from former Czech Major General Jan Sejna, the most senior Warsaw Pact officer ever to defect to the United States, was cited to the effect that a substantial number of U.S. servicemen were secretly transferred from Vietnam to Russia via Czechoslovakia for heinous experiments with chemical, biological, radiological warfare and mind-altering drugs.
• Michael Benge, a former POW held in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam, reported seeing in the course of his incarceration "upwards of a dozen" American prisoners who were never returned.
• Vaughn Taylor, who has long represented Robert Garwood — an American serviceman in Vietnam who collaborated with his captors in order to survive his incarceration which continued until 1979, emphasized that Garwood has consistently reported having seen hundreds of other U.S. prisoners held against their will by Hanoi.
• Sen. Robert Smith (R-NH) described his recent trip to Vietnam in which he was accompanied by Bobby Garwood. He recounted how Garwood’s information and other data concerning "live sightings" of American personnel checked out — notwithstanding insistent reports from U.S. intelligence to the contrary.

Mr. Perot added a number of anecdotes from his own considerable experience in dealing with this issue for over twenty years. These included:

• briefings he received in the 1970s from the U.S. embassy in Thailand about camps in Laos where hundreds of American servicemen were believed held prisoner — but from which only nine returned;
• recently declassified documents from the then-Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson saying after Operation Homecoming that bombing of North Vietnam would have to be resumed to get the rest of the POWs back;
• a statement by Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe upon his retirement as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to the effect that he believed men had been left behind; and
• a 1986 memo from Craig Fuller, chief of staff to then-Vice President Bush, to Colin Powell, who was serving as the Deputy NSC Advisor, which pointedly worried how it would look if Ross Perot managed to get an American out of Vietnam alive after all these years.

Inescapable Conclusions

The Perot anecdotes underscored the press conference’s two inescapable conclusions: 1) There is compelling evidence that Americans taken prisoner during the Vietnam War have been — and may well still be — held against their will by Vietnam and its allies. And 2) U.S. intelligence has systematically concentrated on "debunking" such evidence, rather than focussing on how it might be validated.

Validated by House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing

Interestingly, these points were also much in evidence in congressional testimony provided the day before by four experts in the area: Dr. Stephen Morris, the Harvard researcher who discovered in Moscow earlier this year a secret 1972 transcript of a report to the Vietnamese leadership that called into serious doubt past official statements about U.S. POW/MIAs; Dr. George Carver, a former top CIA official responsible for intelligence on Vietnam during the war; Al Santoli, a former congressional investigator on POW/MIA matters and author of three major histories of the Vietnam war; and Jim Sanders, co-author of the rivetting new book The Men We Left Behind: The Abandonment and Betrayal of American POWs After the Vietnam War.

So compelling were these experts’ revelations that Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), chairman of the Asia and Pacific Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took an extraordinary step: He promised to hold more hearings into the matter and invited the public to let the subcommittee know the names of additional witnesses who may be able to shed light on the status of Americans left behind and precisely what the U.S. and Vietnamese governments know about them.

The Bottom Line

Out of the past two days’ events has come a clear message: President Clinton has enormously reduced America’s leverage for resolving the status of Americans unaccounted for at war’s end by agreeing to a French and Japanese proposal to "clean up" Vietnam’s $140 million in bad debts to the International Monetary Fund. Were this regrettable action now to be compounded by U.S. acquiescence to new IMF loans to Hanoi — involving for the first time U.S. taxpayer money — it would create irresistible pressures for an end to the trade embargo and full normalization of relations. This in turn would eviscerate whatever hope remains of obtaining a complete accounting would surely vanish.

Ross Perot has, accordingly, made President Clinton what amounts to an "offer he can’t refuse": Mr. Clinton must acquaint himself with the facts concerning Americans left behind at the end of the Vietnam War — facts he assuredly is not getting from his intelligence community and policy advisors, but which are nonetheless available from Perot and these experts — before giving U.S. approval for new IMF loans to Hanoi.

Should the President decline to do so, he risks not only further embroiling himself in an issue that has already proved politically explosive for him. He will, moreover, be in jeopardy of doing so with someone who has demonstrated an unsurpassed ability to take his case to — and to mobilize — the American people.