A McCAIN MUTINY? HAVING SECURED DIPLOMATIC RECOGNITION FOR HANOI, WILL HE DRAW THE LINE ON U.S. TAXPAYER AID?

(Washington, D.C.): Bill Clinton is expected tomorrow to
perform one of the most extraordinary, if odious, feats of his
presidency: Even though the 1992 campaign established that one of
Mr. Clinton’s greatest political vulnerabilities is his record of
opposition to the war in Vietnam, he reportedly will announce the
normalization of diplomatic relations with the same communist
government whose side he took twenty-five years ago. By so doing,
the President intends not only to exchange ambassadors but to
clear the way for substantial U.S. underwriting of American trade
and investment with Vietnam.

If President Clinton does pull off this initiative, he will
largely have one individual to thank: Senator John McCain.

Runners-Up

At first blush, it may seem that many are in contention for
this dubious distinction. First, there are the gaggle of vehement
opponents of the Vietnam War holding senior positions in the
Clinton Administration. To be sure, National Security Council
Senior Director Morton Halperin, his boss — NSC Advisor Anthony
Lake — and State Department Assistant Secretary Winston
Lord have been beavering away for years to reward the
communist rulers of Vietnam for their breach of the Paris Peace
Accords and the subsequent brutal repression of America’s
erstwhile ally, the Republic of South Vietnam.

Then, there is Major General Thomas Needham, the
former commander of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTFFA).
He used that position artificially to reduce the number of
outstanding cases of unaccounted-for Vietnam-era POW-MIAs by,
among other things, reorganizing the JTFFA. This allowed him to
eliminate competent civilian personnel who might resist his
orders effectively to close out investigations, even when that
could only be done by making unjustified determinations
concerning the fate of missing personnel. Gen. Needham also
personally shredded immense quantities of irreplaceable
investigative field reports and other relevant information in the
U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. And, like special envoy General John
Vessey before him, Gen. Needham made a point of stressing to
every congressional delegation and friendly reporter that the
Vietnamese were cooperating “superbly” with the effort
to achieve a full accounting.

In fact, the communist regime in Vietnam is doing today
what it has done all along. It is cynically exploiting the wealth
of information, archival data, warehoused artifacts and, yes,
American remains in its possession to extract concessions
from Washington. Predictably, the more the Clinton
Administration has been willing to provide Hanoi — for example,
access to the resources of international financial institutions,
lifting the trade embargo, opening liaison offices — the less
forthcoming the Vietnamese have actually become.

A Critical Congressional Hearing

The Administration points, nonetheless, to quantities of
remains and documents Hanoi is turning over as evidence that
further rewards are in order. The truth — as borne out by sworn
testimony at a marathon hearing of the House National Security
Committee’s Personnel Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Robert Dornan
(R-CA) on 28 June — is very different. Most of these remains
are eventually established to be those of animals or non-American
individuals. Similarly, Administration representatives
were obliged to tell Congress that none of the several
hundred pages of documents finally served up by Hanoi to a
visiting presidential delegation last May is expected to be of
any help in resolving outstanding POW-MIA cases.

Even more damning was the record compiled by non-governmental
witnesses like Garnett (Bill) Bell and Michael Janich
— two highly experienced and respected Vietnam vets turned
POW-MIA investigators. Mr. Bell assailed both Hanoi and
Washington:

“If one takes a close look at documentation of
their wartime accounting procedures, it should be obvious
that the Vietnamese are merely using a ruse in the hope that
our policy-makers will cooperate with them in creating an
illusion of tangible progress when, in reality, none
exists.”

For his part, Mr. Janich confirmed that the Vietnamese
routinely went to great lengths to interfere with joint field
investigations:

“During the period I served as a team leader in
Vietnam, I experienced and reported in detail to my superiors
regular occurrences of witness coaching, prompting and
intimidation by my Vietnamese counterparts. I also
experienced and reported the intentional withholding of
information and documents by Vietnamese officials and
witnesses and levels of cooperation so low that they would
more properly be considered obstructions of our investigation
efforts.”

According to Mr. Janich, Vietnamese skullduggery was
complemented by Gen. Needham’s. He described for the Committee a
number of steps the general took to effect “changes to
[JTFFA’s] mission under his command”:

“The combination of untrained, unqualified infantry
team leaders and sometimes marginally qualified team members
was alone enough to seriously degrade the quality of the
investigation process. This decline was hastened, however by
the relentless pressure placed on team leaders by Brigadier
General Needham. He demanded that greater and greater numbers
of cases be investigated during each field activity and
reduced the time allotted for preparing investigation
reports. Investigation and report writing standards were thus
further compromised to meet these demands.”

Mr. Janich recounted how “one infantry officer, who
established the record for the greatest number of cases
investigated during a single Joint Field Activity, averaged two
case investigations per day.” The military has an expression
for this approach: You want it bad, you get it bad.

Among the other witnesses providing critical testimony from
the perspective of veterans organizations and families groups
were John Sommers, Executive Director of the American
Legion, and Ann Mills Griffiths, Executive Director of the
National League of POW- MIA Families. As two of the Nation’s most
knowledgeable and influential public figures on the question of
Vietnam-era POW-MIAs, they were routinely asked to participate in
presidential missions to Hanoi. That is, they were until
the decisive May 1995 mission — a trip that was evidently
scripted to result in a finding that Vietnamese accounting was
full enough for government work. Their presentations to the
Committee make clear that neither Mr. Sommers nor Ms.
Griffiths agree with that assessment; both believe that Vietnam
has failed to satisfy any one of President Clinton’s stated
four-point litmus test for normalization.

Perhaps the most damning testimony of all, however, was that
supplied by Major Sandra Caughlin, who evaluated field
investigations of live-sighting reports being performed in Laos.
Major Caughlin told the Committee she stood by the following
harsh judgment contained in an official reporting cable she
authored in September 1994:

“In summary, not only does [her critique of
specific investigative practices] lead us to believe the
results of these investigations are not credible, it forces
us to question the validity of all the live-sighting
investigations (LSI) that have been conducted in Laos to
date. In light of the questionable results, the Defense
POW-MIA Affairs Office believes that this may be an opportune
time to [re]assess the value of conducting LSI investigations
in Laos, knowing full well that the investigations are going
to be hindered by the government of Laos. Under the present
circumstances for conducting investigations in Laos, it may
be impossible to establish a credible LSI mechanism.”

As Chairman Dornan dryly observed, “It is hard to
believe that this could take place in Laos and not take place in
Vietnam — the coaching of witnesses, the threatening of people
in the area, the threatening of witnesses. These are [both]
police states.”

Enter John McCain, U.S.S., Ex-POW

While the President’s men, Gen. Needham and others associated
with JTFFA and the communist despots of Vietnam have all played
their part, the fact remains that no one has been more helpful
to President Clinton in his bid to embrace Hanoi than Senator
McCain, a Republican from Arizona. As a Vietnam veteran who
suffered at the communists’ hands for 5 1/2 years while a
prisoner of war, Sen. McCain enjoys great deference from his
colleagues on Capitol Hill.

When John McCain asserts that the Vietnamese are
cooperating fully, it sounds more believable than when Mr.
Clinton says it. When he talks about the need to build up Vietnam
as a counterweight to China, there seems to be a realpolitik
rationalization for financial and perhaps even security
assistance that might otherwise appear to be the sort of
guilt-alleviating reparations which the United States has
heretofore refused to make. And when he, with his fair claim to
vengeance, says it is time finally to end the Vietnam conflict,
it is easier to ignore the abiding presence of the repressive,
totalitarian regime the U.S. went to war with in the first place.

It is regrettable that Senator McCain has chosen to play such
a part. On the one hand, the legerdemain of both the
Clinton Administration and the Vietnamese government with respect
to accounting for U.S. POW/MIAs should not be condoned, let alone
endorsed.

On the other, economic engagement with a
still-totalitarian Vietnam will surely result — as it has in
communist China — in a hemorrhage of American manufacturing
industries willing (provided they can get taxpayer-guaranteed
investment insurance, of course) to exploit the slave labor
conditions that exist in most of Vietnam. Under present
circumstances, the upshot will likely be to produce yet another
U.S.-Asian trade deficit, as the government in Hanoi endeavors to
keep the Vietnamese people too poor to buy many of the consumer
goods American firms hope to sell them.

The Bottom Line

Offering Vietnam both normalization and American
taxpayer resources at this time will basically eliminate
Washington’s leverage to get a real full accounting —
while helping to extend the lifespan of the brutal regime in
Hanoi that is currently preventing such an accounting. If
Senator McCain insists on helping President Clinton establish
diplomatic relations with Vietnam, he would be wise to separate
that move from the granting of Most Favored Nation status or
otherwise qualifying the communist Vietnamese for access to the
U.S. Treasury via the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and
the Export-Import Bank. By bifurcating these initiatives, the
Senator and his admirers in Congress could take a large step in
the direction of reconciliation without offering an
as-yet-unwarranted, and possibly blank, check to Hanoi.

The Center for Security Policy understands that House
International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman
(R-NY), Rep. Dornan and another distinguished former Vietnam-era
POW, Rep. Sam Johnson, (R-TX), intend to oppose Mr. Clinton’s
efforts to saddle the American taxpayer with what amounts to
foreign aid for Vietnam. It looks forward to a hearing of the
International Relations Committee scheduled for Wednesday, 12
July. Such a hearing should build upon the extremely important
record compiled by Rep. Dornan and his colleagues on 28 June. It
should also make the case for continuing to withhold OPIC and
EximBank funding from an undeserving, communist Vietnamese
regime.