‘YOU WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN’: HOW CAN THE V.F.W. HONOR A LEADER OF THE POW-MIA COVERUP?

(Washington, D.C.) Today in Las Vegas,
the annual convention of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars — and the memory of the
hundreds of American veterans who were
unaccounted for and apparently left
behind as prisoners of war and missing in
action at the end of the Vietnam war —
will be defiled by a controversial award
ceremony.

Unless prevented by the opposition of
the VFW’s rank-and-file, the leadership
of the organization intends to confer
upon Major General Thomas Needham, the
outgoing commander of Joint Task
Force-Full Accounting, one of its highest
awards: the VFW Armed Forces Award. For
an organization that has proudly served
as a pillar of the community of POW-MIA
activists — a community committed to the
proposition that those missing veterans
will never be forgotten — this action
represents a new and ignominious
betrayal.

General Shredder

Gen. Needham has, after all,
played a direct role in recent efforts to
make it more difficult, if not
impossible, to remember the unaccounted
for. Notably, between 24-29
March 1993 (which included a weekend),
then-Brigadier General Needham personally
shredded tens of thousands of primary
documents concerning U.S. POW/MIAs in
Indochina that were housed in
the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. In this
extraordinary mission, he was accompanied
by two other senior American officials —
the Commander-in-Chief Pacific’s
intelligence officer and a
Washington-based CIA official. The
exalted rank of the shredders was
astounding; evidently, the job was too
sensitive to be entrusted to the junior
enlisted personnel who would normally be
assigned such a menial and protracted
task.

The sensitivity was the result of the
important and irreplaceable nature of the
documents Gen. Needham and company
destroyed. They dated back to before
Operation Homecoming in 1973 and took up
some 30 linear feet of wall space in the
embassy. They included detailed
POW/MIA case histories, live-sighting
reports and vast information obtained
from refugees. Most importantly, they
contained some twenty years of
handwritten notes by U.S. field
investigators with comprehensive
cross-references to other documents.
Those who compiled this archive
considered it to contain “the most
important historical files in existence
on the POW-MIAs of Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia.”

The Bangkok records were destroyed by
Gen. Needham and his colleagues even
though these materials were
“one-of-a-kind” and
indispensable to present day
investigations on discrepancy cases. In
fact, it appears that that was
precisely why they were eliminated.
Incredibly, those records were destroyed
even though the U.S. Ambassador to
Thailand at the time, David Lambertson,
formally objected to the use of his
mission and its shredder for this
purpose. They were destroyed even though
an executive order had been issued
declassifying these and other documents
and despite the fact that they had been
subpoenaed by the Senate Select Committee
on POW-MIA Affairs.

When the then-Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell,
ordered an investigation of this bizarre
episode, the Pacific Command’s Inspector
General whitewashed the affair, claiming
that it involved nothing more than the
“routine shredding of duplicate
documents.” On the face of it, this
was an absurd misrepresentation given the
extraordinary nature of the timing,
circumstances and personnel involved in
the action. What is more, an internal
review subsequently determined that at
least 119 reports were now missing
after CINCPAC dispatched personnel to
Washington and Bangkok to try to locate
their non-existent
“duplicates.” The actual number
is certainly far higher but can no longer
be determined in the absence of the
originals.

The Bottom Line

This example of sabotage perpetrated
against the effort to achieve a genuine
“full accounting” for
Vietnam-era POW-MIAs is, unfortunately,
only one of those with which Gen. Needham
has been associated — albeit one in
which his personal and direct role is
indisputable. The Center for Security
Policy believes that it is a travesty for
an organization like the Veterans of
Foreign Wars to honor such a man and it
urges the VFW’s membership to prevent the
betrayal of the missing Vietnam veterans
and sullying of the organization’s honor
that would be involved in doing so.