Macneil-Lehrer Post-Mortem: If Clinton Wants The Truth On Vietnam, He Better Not Look To Winston Lord

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The odious character of the Clinton Administration’s policy toward Vietnam were laid bare on the 17 September 1993 edition of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. In the course of a discussion of Washington’s recent steps toward lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi, a key architect of that policy under past and present governments — Assistant Secretary of State for Asian and Pacific Affairs Winston Lord — made a number of statements that are demonstrably false, seriously misleading or both.(1)

The following examples illustrate why Secretary Lord should immediately recuse himself from further participation in the development of American policy toward Vietnam and why he should not, in any event, continue to be relied upon by President Clinton in connection with such policy:

‘Present at the Creation’ of the POW/MIA Coverup

According to his former boss and mentor, Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord played a central role in the earliest official misrepresentations about the status of unaccounted-for American servicemen from the Vietnam war. In The White House Years, Dr. Kissinger reveals how Mr. Lord — who was then serving as his special assistant on the National Security Council staff — helped draft the patently dishonest 1970 statement that "No American stationed in Laos has ever been killed in ground combat operations."(2) He did so even though Mr. Lord knew and had told Dr. Kissinger that there had indeed been "some casualties among American reconnaissance teams — code-named Prairie Fire — on special operations over the [Laotian] border."(3)

From this critical distortion flowed a series of subsequent mischaracterizations of the status of American POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia. Ultimately, they gave rise to notorious State and Defense Department declarations to the effect that there were no U.S. POWs left behind following Operation Homecoming.(4)

Given his own personal involvement in concealing the truth about unaccounted-for Americans, it should come as no surprise that Secretary Lord is now vigorously disputing charges that such a coverup ever took place — let alone that it is continuing today.

The Coverup Continues

On the MacNeil-Lehrer program, Secretary Lord also denied that the Clinton Administration is so determined to achieve an early lifting of the embargo and normalization of relations that it is actually intensifying the POW/MIA coverup. Specifically, Mr. Lord claimed that there had been no slackening of U.S. efforts to get to the bottom of outstanding POW/MIA cases. In doing so, he went so far as to assert that:

 

"…We have the best possible people at considerable risk in the field….These people are still on the job. They’re just doing it in a different way, and they’re in Indochina as much as they were before."

 

In fact, as reported on 9 September 1993 in a Center for Security Policy Decision Brief entitled Lifting Embargo Under Present Circumstances Will Produce New Vietnam Quagmire for Clinton(No. 93-D 76), the most experienced field investigators are effectively being taken off the case through reassignment to Hawaii — or, as in the case of the most senior and experienced investigator, Garnett "Bill" Bell, through forced early retirement.

A Case in Point

Bill Bell’s retirement is very early indeed as he is only fifty-two years old. A fluent Vietnamese and Laotian linguist who has been a military POW/MIA investigator since 1968, Mr. Bell was removed as director of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTFFA) Hanoi investigation office after he testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that, in his expert opinion, U.S. prisoners in fact remained in captivity in Southeast Asia after Operation Homecoming.

Mr. Bell was further ostracized in January and early March 1993 when his oral history interviews of former senior North Vietnamese military officers confirmed rumors of wartime prisoner exchanges between the U.S. government and Hanoi.(5) These exchanges set a precedent for North Vietnam to hold back prisoners after the war as bargaining chips for reparations, prisoner exchanges and non-interference with their conquest of neighboring countries. (The danger that such interviews might produce additional explosive information is now being minimized by giving responsibility for eliciting these statements to 21-25 year-old soldiers who have no previous professional oral history or POW/MIA investigation experience.)

The coup de grâce for Mr. Bell, however, came later in March 1993 when he attempted to stop his superior from JTFFA headquarters, Major General Thomas Needham, from destroying thousands of POW/MIA historical records heretofore stored in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. This willful elimination of irreplaceable documents was probably carried out under the orders of Gen. Needham’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General Harold Fields, at CINCPAC.

Worse yet, as also reported in the Center’s 9 September Decision Brief, investigators of Bill Bell’s experience and caliber are being replaced with individuals manifestly lacking in required skills. For example, the newly installed commander of the JTFFA detachment in Hanoi, Lieutenant Colonel John Cray, is an infantry officer with no prior experience in Southeast Asia, no intelligence training, no investigative experience, and no command of Vietnamese.

LTC Cray is, in short, entirely unqualified to claim — as Reuter reports he did on 15 September — that efforts to account for U.S. servicemen still missing from the Vietnam war are going better than ever. Under the circumstances, it is an insult to the American people’s intelligence to claim, in Secretary Lord’s words, that the "best possible personnel are in the field."

What ‘Progress’?

Secretary Lord was no less disingenuous in describing the Vietnamese as "very cooperative" on the POW/MIA front, giving rise to "concrete progress" in resolving outstanding cases. In fact, by any objective measure, Hanoi is actually continuing its past practice of dribbling out documentation and providing minimal useful assistance to on-site investigators. According to a 16 June 1993 assessment issued by the National League of Families:

 

"…The last two or three years have been the worst since 1981 in terms of accounting for our missing loved ones…The number of unaccounted-for Americans has been reduced by only ten in 1992 and only one in 1993. This lack of results is due to Vietnam’s failure."

 

Even Mr. Lord’s principal basis for claiming "concrete progress" — Vietnam’s turning over of 50 sets of remains — seems laughable. According to the JTFFA itself, of 99 sets of previous remains Hanoi has released since January 1991, only 14 have proven to be American. The remainder were either ethnic Asians or from animals. Contrast that dubious record of "helpfulness" with, for example, discoveries by JTFFA representatives in recent weeks of numerous U.S. military identification cards in Vietnamese museums, cards belonging to men of whom Hanoi has previously denied any knowledge. Vietnam has yet to provide any explanation for these discrepancies.

Contemptible Mistreatment of POW/MIA Families

Two other recent developments reinforce the suspicion that the Clinton Administration will not allow Hanoi’s abiding refusal to account fully for U.S. POWs and MIAs to thwart its campaign to normalize relations with Vietnam:

First, a mid-1993 visit to Hanoi by Dr. Patricia O’Grady, daughter of U.S. Air Force Major John O’Grady, revealed that information contained in a field investigation of her father’s case was erroneous. Contrary to the official report of that investigation, the site of his capture had not been visited by JTFFA representatives and eyewitnesses had not be interviewed. When they were interviewed by Dr. O’Grady and journalist Sidney Schanberg, moreover, these eyewitnesses claimed — contrary to Vietnamese government statements and the official U.S. report — that Major O’Grady was taken prisoner alive and handed over to North Vietnamese army personnel. The Clinton Administration has declined to meet with Dr. O’Grady to review her evidence.

Second, the Clinton Administration has started using the flimsiest of evidence to reach determinations that some POW/MIAs were actually killed-in-action. For example, it has started using the recovery of a single tooth as proof of death despite the fact that, in 1992, the director of the JTFFA’s Central Identification Laboratory, Dr. Ellis Kerley — a renowned forensic scientist — was removed for calling such a practice indefensible. (As in Bill Bell’s case, Dr. Kerley’s successor was vastly less qualified than the man he replaced, but apparently suitably pliable.)

The application of this new policy gave rise to a shocking case reported in the 18 September 1993 edition of the Washington Times. Against the express wishes of family members, a coffin containing just a single tooth — said to belong to an airman, Warrant Officer Gregory Crandall, who has been listed as missing in action since 1971 — was interred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. The family’s pained protests to Administration officials that "a single tooth did not a death make" were to no avail.

What Does the U.S. Government Really Know?

Following a direct challenge by Mr. Gaffney about the Clinton Administration’s stated policy of "openness" with regard to declassifying information that may bear on the POW/MIA issue, Mr. Lord professed to have seen "all the [relevant] documents." Mr. Gaffney offered to test that proposition by bringing today to Secretary Lord’s office copies of profoundly troubling documents that he may not have seen.(6)

Alteratively, if Mr. Lord has seen them, he must be aware that they strongly challenge his denials of a "systematic coverup" concerning the status of perhaps as many as hundreds of missing Americans. Such documents include the following:

  • A 3 December 1968 CIA memo reporting on "estimated enemy prison facilities in Laos" from 15 October 1967-15 October 1968. The size and character of this Indochinese "gulag" are described as well as the treatment of POWs incarcerated in it. Map coordinates in Laos are listed for at least five camps "confirmed" to be holding "American prisoners."
  •  

  • A 9 November 1972 Department of the Navy memo which had been used to circulate a "secret index of geographic coordinates for Laos POW camps."
  •  

  • A 21 March 1987 memorandum of conversation concerning a phone call between then-Vice President Bush’s office and then-Deputy National Security Advisor Colin Powell. Thememcon deals with independent efforts being made at the time by Ross Perot to establish whether any Americans were still being held by Hanoi and, if so, to secure their release. It says, in part:
  •  

    "After 14 years, [the Vietnamese] have denied [holding] live Americans…If they were to produce live people, can you imagine what will be asked for? Our policy interests [are] not served by Mr. Perot’s interests at the moment."

     

  • A 7 January 1988 cable from the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (the predecessor of JTFFA) which reveals that the Vietnamese were considering in August 1987 releasing three American prisoners to special presidential envoy Gen. John Vessey during his visit that month to Hanoi. The cable reports that "Vessey was not as forthcoming as [the Vietnamese] had hoped and so no prisoners were turned over."

 

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that the President and the Nation are being badly served in connection with the formulation of U.S. policy toward Vietnam by individuals like Winston Lord who seem to have a vested interest in burying — rather than exhuming — the truth. At the very least, Mr. Lord and Gens. Needham, Fields and Vessey, who appear in various ways to have impeded a full accounting of U.S. POW/MIAs, should recuse themselves from any further involvement in developing American positions with regard to lifting the trade embargo on Vietnam or otherwise normalizing bilateral relations.

In addition, a thorough congressional examination of documents now coming to light and associated hearings are clearly in order. If Secretary Lord’s protestations about the Clinton commitment to being "the most open Administration on this question since the war ended" are to be taken seriously, the Administration can do nothing other than throw its support behind such a vigorous investigation.

Finally, a credible legal appeal process is needed to permit families like the Crandalls and the O’Gradys to challenge the official case determinations on missing men — especially those who were known to have been alive in captivity. Anything less would add further insult to the grievous injury already suffered by these Americans and their unaccounted-for loved ones.

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1. Other participants in the discussion were Center for Security Policy director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. and Alan Tonelson of the Economic Strategy Institute.

2. Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years (Little, Brown and Co., 1979) p. 456.

3. The Ravens by C. Robbins, (Crown Publishers, 1987), p. 228. Also see Tragic Mountains by Dr. J. Hamilton-Meritt, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 240-1.

4. For example, see Pentagon POW Task Force chief Roger Shields’ statement of 14 April 1973: "There are probably no more live American soldiers anywhere in Indochina."

5. Bill Bell interview of Senior Colonel Pham Van Ban, January 1993; Bill Bell interview of Senior Colonel Nguyen Cong Trung, March 1993, respectively. At this writing, these interviews are being made available by the Pentagon only to Members of Congress and others with appropriate security clearances.

6. Following the program, Secretary Lord told Mr. Gaffney that he would be unavailable today due to travel plans but that "his door was always open" to discuss these issues.

Center for Security Policy

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