WHAT ABOUT AN ‘OPERATION COMING CLEAN’ ON AMERICAN POW/MIA’S ABANDONED IN INDOCHINA?
(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton
Administration’s dubious priorities could
not be more clearly displayed than by its
sharply contrasting attitudes toward two
groups of Americans: (1) the score or so
citizens who are believed to have been
exposed four decades ago to radiation
testing without informed consent and (2)
possibly hundreds of servicemen who were
left behind alive in Indochina when the
Vietnam war ended.
It scarcely needs to be said that the
former have, in recent days, become the cause
célèbre of Secretary of Energy
Hazel O’Leary, the centerpiece of her
“Operation Coming Clean.”
Indeed, Mrs. O’Leary has seen fit to
issue a veritable torrent of sweeping,
alarming and, in important respects,
ill-informed statements about these
experiments.(1)
As a direct result: telephone
hot-lines have been hastily established
to handle the large volume of calls from
understandably concerned citizens;
Administration officials have glibly
endorsed the Secretary’s seemingly
open-ended notion of compensating
“victims” of radiation testing;
with great fanfare, a presidentially
sponsored interagency task force has been
established to examine these tests and to
recommend next steps; and congressional
investigations into the matter have been
encouraged.
What About the POW/MIAs?
In stark contrast to the zeal the
Clinton Administration is showing in
“coming clean” where doing so
might advance its agenda of
“de-nuclearizing” the United
States, it is evincing negligible
interest in coming clean about facts that
might impede another cherished
agenda item: normalization of economic
and diplomatic relations with communist
Vietnam.
Presumably, an Administration that
believes revealing the Department of
Energy’s secrets is an essential
prerequisite for restoring public faith
in that agency could not be opposed to
full disclosure of what successive U.S.
governments have known — or had strong
reason to believe — was the fate of
Americans left incarcerated in Vietnam
and Laos after 1973. Yet, the Clinton
Administration seems to be terrified by
such a prospect.
The likely explanation: Such
revelations would provoke a vehement
public reaction against a regime in Hanoi
that has cruelly brutalized and
manipulated U.S. military personnel,
perhaps for decades. American
policy-makers understand full well that
such a reaction would spike normalization
of relations with Vietnam indefinitely.
‘See No Evil…’
Consequently, the Clinton
Administration (building upon the Bush
Administration’s sorry record in this
area) has made the virtually exclusive
focus of its highly publicized joint
“full accounting” efforts with
Vietnam a search for remains —
rather than the recovery of live human
beings. In fact, early last summer, the
President announced that all live
sighting investigations were being
wrapped up.
This narrow focus has allowed the
Administration to give Hanoi credit for
“cooperating” and “making
good progress” on joint accounting
as long as it serves up a steady stream
of remains — even those ultimately
determined to be from animals or
non-Caucasians!
So desperate has the Administration
become to close out POW/MIA cases at all
costs that it has taken to declaring the
recovery of a single tooth
proof-positive that a missing serviceman
is dead. Burials with full military
honors of caskets holding only the
recovered tooth have been held at
Arlington National Cemetery over the
strenuous objections of family members.
The Clinton team had not reckoned on
one thing, though. Before it was able to
effect full normalization of relations
with Vietnam, proverbial chickens from
the one real concession the
Administration had made to the POW/MIA
activists began coming home to roost: The
vast quantities of relevant — but
heretofore classified — information that
President Clinton promised to have
released by last Veterans’ Day contain
substantial evidence that the U.S.
government knew men were left behind
alive and in enemy hands when the war in
Vietnam was ended.
Even the Washington
Post…
So compelling is this evidence that
even Thomas Lippman, a long-time reporter
for the Washington Post and
inveterate skeptic about allegations of
live POW/MIAs, was moved to call public
attention to it. In a lengthy front-page
story entitled “POW Pilots
Left in Laos, Files Suggest: Evidence
Emerging that Officials Knew Locations of
Prisons” published in
yesterday’s editions of the Post,
Lippman referred to a number of documents
that suggest that “some men were
abandoned to their fates when the last
U.S. troops left Indochina….”
Interestingly, among these materials
is a 1992 congressional deposition by
Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, the new Secretary
of Defense-designate, to the effect that
“in ’73 a large number of us thought
there were [prisoners in Laos] simply
because we had known people had gotten to
the ground, that there were substantial
prisoners in Laos that were unaccounted
for….” Lippman notes that Adm.
Inman subsequently changed his opinion
when none of the prisoners ever surfaced
or was found, concluding that
“either the original assumption of
their safe landing was incorrect or the
[communist] Pathet Lao shot the prisoners
rather than keep them.”(2)
It is important to note one point not
mentioned in the Lippman article:
Throughout the Vietnam war and in its
aftermath, the Vietnamese communist party
controlled Laos. In fact, in
December 1992, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA),
then-chairman of the Select Committee on
POW/MIA Affairs, advised Vietnam’s
president, Le Duc Anh, that he had been
repeatedly told by high Laotian
government officials to talk to the
Vietnamese if the U.S. wanted information
about prisoners in Laos; they controlled
the prisoners. In addition there is
controversial satellite imagery
suggesting that as recently as mid-1992
American prisoners were incarcerated in a
Vietnamese prison camp.
It Ain’t Necessarily So
If, however, Adm. Inman had an
opportunity to receive a two-hour
briefing prepared by Sen. Robert Smith
(R-NH) — as Tom Lippman, Ross Perot and
some forty others interested in the
POW/MIA issue did on 15 December — he
might well change his mind again.
This three-part briefing offers
persuasive evidence that the U.S.
government had credible reports through
the late 1980s that American servicemen
remained in captivity in Indochina.
Washington’s only response, however, was
to seek to discredit the sources of such
information and to mislead the Congress
and the public about the truth, as Sen.
Smith has formally contended in a recent
letter to Attorney General Janet Reno.
Unfortunately, the Smith briefing —
compelling as it is — is not a complete
story. Not all of the relevant documents
have been made available; moreover, many
of those that are have been heavily
redacted. Still, the briefing
does suggest what can be done if the
U.S. government is willing genuinely to
“come clean.“
Should a decision be made to do so in
this area, comparable to the
leave-no-stone-unturned approach
ostensibly now in effect in the
Department of Energy, a coherent
picture of what Washington knew about
live POW/MIAs — and when it knew it —
could finally be compiled.
The result would be, at long last, an
honest basis for pursuing with Hanoi the
present status of all American personnel,
both the quick and the dead. If U.S.
servicemen are still alive and in
captivity, their return must be made a
non-negotiable precondition to any
further progress toward normalization of
relations with Vietnam.
The Bottom Line
The United States government
owes at least as great a debt to those
who served their country, were lost in
combat and who did not come home from
Indochina — and to their families — as
it does to those relatively few who were
improperly used as subjects in medical
radiation experiments. If the
Clinton Administration is serious about
its commitment to “come clean”
and to restore faith in government, to
say nothing of its stated determination
to provide the fullest possible
accounting for Vietnam era POW/MIAs,
it can do no less for these servicemen
than it is doing for the uninformed
participants in such experimentation.
At a minimum, Adm. Inman has a moral
obligation to commission a comprehensive
review of the newly declassified material
so as to establish whether or not his
original assessment about live servicemen
being left in Laos was correct. If
it is to be rigorous and honest, such a
review must not be conducted by the
“usual suspects” — i.e., those
from Assistant Secretary of State for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs Winston
Lord on down through the various bureaus
of the Office of the Secretary of Defense
and Defense Intelligence Agency who have
a vested interest in preventing,
rather than facilitating, a true
“full accounting.”(3)
Certainly, such an independent analysis
should be completed before the
Department of Defense is asked to agree
to the now-imminent decision to make
further U.S. economic or other
concessions to Hanoi.
In this regard, the Center for
Security Policy welcomes the strong
statement made yesterday by Sen. Minority
Leader Robert Dole (R-KA) expressing his
opposition to lifting the trade embargo
on Vietnam at this time. It
encourages Sen. Dole — and every other
member of Congress — to make a priority
of receiving the Smith briefing before
any further disservice is done to a group
of Americans, the missing POW/MIAs,
already monstrously ill-served by this
Administration and its recent
predecessors.
– 30 –
1. For example,
consider the following excerpt from a
recent Decision Brief by the
Center (U.S.
‘De-Nuclearization’: Who Is Minding the
Store?,
9 December 1993):
“Without shedding any new
light on the subject, [Secretary
O’Leary] managed to hype stories that
have been in the public domain since
1986. Worse yet, she exacerbated the
adverse publicity by commingling the
eighteen instances in which informed
consent was evidently not obtained
with 800 experiments involving some
600 people in which it was….The
effect of the Secretary’s remarks
will almost certainly be further to
discredit her organization
— and not, as she claimed, to create
the new basis for public trust and
confidence in the Department or her
stewardship of it.”
Particularly offensive is the
determined effort being made by Clinton
Administration officials to portray these
medical tests as “Cold War
experiments.” In fact, they had
nothing to do with the Cold War —
except to have coincided with its
earliest years. Instead, they were part
of a civilian medical research program
that produced, among other things, highly
valuable radiation therapies for the
treatment of cancer. This does not
justify the practice of using mentally
handicapped patients where informed
consent may not have been possible. By
the same token, that practice (utilized
in a relative handful of instances and
long-since abandoned) should not be
permitted, as the Administration
evidently intends, to impugn the Cold War
struggle against communism or the
military activities legitimately related
thereto.
2. Interestingly
though, while Adm. Inman was director of
the National Security Agency from
1977-81, a series of radio intercepts of
Laotian military units guarding prison
camps contained sufficient information on
U.S. captives to cause President Reagan
to order a rescue attempt at the prison
camp at Nhom Marot, Laos in early 1981.
Ironically, the mission had to be aborted
when it was disclosed on the front page
of the Washington Post.
3. For more on
Secretary Lord’s serious conflict of
interest and the reasons why he should
recuse himself from decision-making
concerning the POW/MIA issue and
normalization of relations with Vietnam,
see the Center’s Decision Brief
entitled MacNeil-Lehrer
Post-Mortem: If Clinton Wants the Truth
on Vietnam, He Better Not Look To Winston
Lord, (
20 September 1993).
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