CENTER CHARGES A COVERUP ON VIETNAM POW-MIA’S THAT SHOULD ‘DWARF WATERGATE’, URGES C-SPAN TO AIR SEN. SMITH’S BRIEFING

(Washington, D.C.): In a one-hour
television call-in program on the Vietnam
trade embargo transmitted by C-SPAN last
night, Center for Security Policy
director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. charged
the Clinton Administration with
perpetuating a scandal that
should “dwarf Watergate”: the
long-running cover-up by successive U.S.
administrations of evidence that Vietnam
held American servicemen many years after
the last POW was supposedly returned — and
may be doing so even today.

On the program, Gaffney contended
that, “This Administration and many
of its predecessors have covered up the
fact that we know a great deal about MIA
and POWs that has not yet been made
public. In fact, [that information] has
been systematically dismissed or
diminished” by the U.S. government.
This conclusion is powerfully underscored
by a two-hour briefing Gaffney, Ross
Perot and some forty other specialists
received last month from Senator Robert
Smith (R-NH), former Vice-Chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA
Affairs.⁽¹⁾

Interestingly, C-SPAN had been invited
to tape the original briefing but was
unable at the last minute to do so due to
scheduling conflicts. Gaffney urged that
“C-SPAN, ideally, or some other
vehicle” be utilized to make the
contents of that presentation available
to the American people at the earliest
possible moment.

In response to a caller’s question,
Gaffney elaborated:

“There is ample precedent,
and I think this is one of the things
that is so striking about the
briefing that Bob Smith has done —
his investigation in particular of
the experience with the Korean War,
but also it applies to the Second
World War, and it certainly, I
believe, applies to the Vietnam War
— that our communist
adversaries quite deliberately, quite
calculatedly held onto American
prisoners for the purposes of
euchring the United States into
making…principally financial
concessions.

“That [proposition] certainly
bears very vigorous examination
today. I honestly believe — I am not
a conspiracy theorist — but I
honestly believe that a cover-up has
been taking place in the United
States government under successive
[administrations] and it’s
time for it to come to a stop.”

Public scrutiny of Sen. Smith’s
briefing and the material it draws upon
is particularly important in Gaffney’s
view due to the aggressive push the
Clinton Administration seems to be making
to achieve an early lifting — in whole
or in further part — of the trade
embargo against Vietnam. Gaffney
characterized the impetus behind this
push as a function of “a race
against the clock”:

“The Administration has set
in train with…an announcement last
Memorial Day by the President…a
locomotive that is picking up speed.
It has committed to the
declassification of
information….[But] this
Administration is [also] determined
to lift the embargo. And at every
turn, [Assistant Secretary of State]
Win Lord and others are making the
argument that the Vietnamese are
cooperating to our satisfaction [on
accounting for missing Americans].

“The reality is going to come
out, sooner or later. They hope after
the embargo is lifted; I hope before
the embargo is lifted. Because when
the truth of the matter is known,
this Administration, particularly
with President Clinton’s record on
Vietnam, is going to have a very hard
time normalizing relations with a
regime that has been holding
prisoners for… decades….The
time is running out because of the
information that is coming out.”

Daniel O’Flaherty, Vice President of
the National Foreign Trade Council — an
organization representing some 500 major
U.S. corporations interested in seeing
the embargo lifted — responded by
saying:

“Mr. Gaffney has made a
rather sweeping and dramatic
allegation that there were coverups
under successive administrations of
different parties. That’s an
allegation that requires some
substantiation because the motivation
of successive administrations of
different parties would require
rationalization it seems to me….If
that were to be true, it would dwarf
Watergate.”

Gaffney also raised the possibility
that a special prosecutor may ultimately
be required to examine this “sordid
history” and related issues, notably
allegations that Secretary of Commerce
Ron Brown accepted some $700,000 from
Hanoi to get the embargo lifted:

“There is some concern that
there is diddling going on with the
grand jury investigation [into the
Brown matter]. For several months,
nothing was happening. Just
yesterday, I understand, the
principal individual making these
allegations was finally given an
opportunity to provide his testimony
to the grand jury. But I am
afraid we are going to need somebody independent
of the Clinton Administration and the
Justice Department to really look
into these allegation and the many
other allegations about what really
happened to the Vietnam[-era] POWs
and MIAs.”

In response to a comment by the other
participant, Anne Groer — a journalist
with the Orlando Sentinel who
recently returned from a visit to Vietnam
— about her feeling that the
“fairly large trade [all over
Vietnam] in what the vendors purport are
dog-tags of GIs, U.S. military
memorabilia” was
“macabre…really grim,
gruesome,” Gaffney observed:

“That is precisely what the
[Vietnamese] government has
been doing — it has been doing
precisely that kind of macabre
trading, not just in relics but in human
remains. And what troubles me so
much…about what I believe our
government has been doing, in
particular in recent years, is [that
it has been] saying, ‘Look, as long
as you give us remains — and we
don’t frankly care if they are animal
remains, non-Caucasian
remains, anything will do — and
what’s more we’ll send good, earnest
young American servicemen into these
miserable hell-holes to try to dig
out remains; but that’s the exclusive
focus of our concern. If we
can just make progress by
uncovering these remains, by gum,
we’ll be able to lift the embargo and
we won’t ask — and you don’t tell us
— whether there’s anybody alive
who’s still being held onto.’

“And I think [Dan’s]
absolutely right [on one point]: I have
made a very sweeping charge. And I
think that with each passing day,
quite literally, there is more and
more documentation that is becoming
available that will make it possible
for the American people and their
elected representatives to evaluate
this for themselves. And I am
confident — on the basis of my own
analysis and that of others that I
respect — that they’re going to come
up with a very different conclusion
than that their government has been
portraying to them, starting
with the Nixon Administration whose
reason [for dissembling about the men
left behind] was very clear: They
lost the war. They knew there
were people [left] there and they
couldn’t get them back.”

– 30 –

1. For more
information about Sen. Smith’s briefing
see the Center’s recent Decision
Brief entitled, What
About an ‘Operation Come Clean’ on
American POW/MIA’s Abandoned in
Indochina? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_01″>No. 94-D 01, 3
January 1994) .