News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Original Hendrix Secret-Returnee Article

Date: October 18, 2001

"Story published in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside County, California, Friday, June 19 edition. (1992)

THE ALTERNATE IDENTITY PROGRAM

By David D. Hendrix

The Press Enterprise

The staff of a select U.S. Senate committee is investigating reports that as many as 300 American POWs from Southeast Asia have been relocated throughout the world in a secret resettlement program.

Retired military personnel who say they are familiar with the program or helped operate it say the far-reaching enterprise involves new identities, the active cooperation of several governments and secret aid to Vietnam.

The so-called "new identity" program's goal is to free prisoners while avoiding embarrassment for U.S. officials and Vietnamese leaders. For years, officials of both nations have said no American POWs were left in Southeast Asia or no definitive proof exists of their presence.

The program stretches back to at least 1979, sources say, and was at its height in 1985-86 when it was suspended because of the focus the Iran-Contra revelations directed at the National Security Council. The security council was involved in the program, which was revived in 1989, a retired Air Force communications specialist said. Former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, who was deeply involved in American efforts in the mid-1980s to barter arms to Iran for U.S. hostages in the Mideast, called the stories about the POW relocations surreal. He said he never had heard of such activities. The Department of Defense is not aware of any such operation, spokeswoman Capt. Susan Strednansky said last week. Investigators for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs, however, have asked private researchers for help to determine whether such stories are true.

Committee spokeswoman Deborah De Young said she could not discuss specifics of any investigation. The committee was formed last fall to investigate whether American POWs were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War and whether any might still be alive.

Homecoming II, an organization of people who believe American officials knowingly left U.S. prisoners in Southeast Asia at the end of the war, wants any of the alleged returnees to telephone (919) 527-8079 for help.

According to a number of sources, including a former KGB general: Selected American POWs, some of them alleged turncoats, were permitted to return to the United States in 1979, shortly after U.S. Marine Robert Garwood made his presence known in Vietnam and was returned home. Garwood was court martialed and convicted of charges that he collaborated with the enemy and struck a fellow prisoner.

The prospect of additional MIAs coming up alive was potentially too embarrassing for U.S. officials, the story goes, especially after a number of reports and commissions had determined there was no evidence the prisoners existed.

In 1981, shortly after taking office, President Reagan was offered a large number of prisoners for $4.2 billion but rejected the offer at the advice of his staff. It was too much like the Iran hostage situation, which had brought about his predecessor's downfall, and Reagan had taken a tough stance against negotiating with hostage holders. Instead, the administration mounted a series of expeditions into Laos, one of which came back with at least one unidentified person.

At some undisclosed point in 1981, the United States and Vietnam decided to begin exchanging prisoners for secret aid, similar to the later Iran-Contra program, sources say. Unlike the well-publicized Mideast hostages, however, the POWs could not be acknowledged. George Russell Leard, then a 46-year-old retired Air Force communications and computer specialist, discussed the new identity program in two July 1989 interviews in Las Vegas where he worked. Standing beside his battered white van behind the Las Vegas Sun newspaper building, he smoked cheroot-style cigars while describing a program that he said included life and death.

Leard said that by the end of 1986 the program had funneled up to 275 Americans through a Pacific Ocean island complex specially fitted for the project. About 35 were in such poor health that they died aboard medical evacuation flights between Vietnam and the island, he said.

Leard, who said he was a specialist in the program, declined to name the island but said the site was not in the Philippines, Guam or Hawaii. The bulk of the returnees were brought back between 1984 and 1986, he said.

After being processed through the recovery and re-orientation camp, the surviving prisoners were sent to military or veterans hospitals in the United States, he said. Up to 100 were given new identities in the United States; another 65 elected to return to Southeast Asia for various reasons.

Leard's military records reveal a 20-year career that started with the Marines, switched to the Air Force, and involved tours in Vietnam, where he was nearly killed in a machete attack, and Korea.

In his later military service, he had stints in Virginia and Nevada for special Air Force detachments where numbers disguise specific duties. He held a top secret security clearance. Commendations and outstanding performance reports praising his talents as a computer and scheduling specialist fill his files.

Leard said people were selected individually for their talents to administer the program, making it impossible to trace through specific units. Leard, who since has moved to New Mexico, has been called by Senate investigators but declined to talk to them on the telephone. De Young, the select committee spokeswoman, declined to say whether Leard would be subpoenaed to testify.

The retired Air Force specialist is not the only person talking about secret returnees. In January, retired KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin testified before the Senate select committee that his Soviet counter)intelligence staff in 1978 interviewed three American prisoners in Vietnam held after the war. The three were among a handful made available for the interviews and one consented to act as a Soviet agent if returned to the United States, he said.

Kalugin said that recruiting POWs was a major goal of his staff following the successful recruitment of a British POW during the Korean War.

Vietnamese officials, he said, told him the CIA, Navy and Air Force officers were sent home in 1979. He said the KGB waited several months "until these guys settled down" before trying to contact them.

But he said that either the phone numbers and addresses his agents were given were false or something else had happened because the returnees could not be contacted. In 1980, Kalugin said, he was reassigned to other duties.

Oleg Nechiporenko, whom Kalugin said did the interviewing, said the KGB General's account was not accurate )) that the talks with the three POWs were held in 1973. Vietnamese officials called the story false.

The only American prisoners from the Vietnam War acknowledged as being released, almost 600, were returned in early 1973 in Operation Homecoming. More than 2500 MIAs, including Robert Garwood, remained unaccounted for.

Kalugin, maintaining his account of the interviews was correct, said the former Soviet Union's intelligence agency did not want to disclose old programs. Besides, Kalugin said, Vietnam is one of the few intelligence listening posts left for the crumbled former Soviet Union and his disclosure was embarrassing to the Southeast Asian nation.

The three officers were not the only ones who returned secretly in 1979, say other sources. Three missing Marine riflemen, each branded as a possible deserter or turncoat, also came back to the United States that year and two of them received new identities, according to William R. Adkins.

Adkins, who served with the Army Special Forces in Vietnam, said he was shown many classified documents revealing the program in 1979 while gathering information about Garwood, the MIA who returned openly that year and was court martialed.

Adkins was imprisoned in England in 1980 and in Virginia in 1987 on charges of carrying concealed weapons. Both arrests came shortly after he publicly discussed the program.

The return of one Marine, Jon M. Sweeney, was noted briefly by the New York Times. Sweeney quietly was discharged without a court martial, Adkins said.

Official Department of Defense record show Sweeney listed missing in action in February 1969 in South or North Vietnam and "released in Hanoi" in August 1970. No mention is ever made of any later return to the United States.

Adkins said Marines Robert L. Greer and Fred T. Schreckengost, two other 1979 returnees, were treated quite differently than Sweeney and Garwood. Greer and Schreckengost were given new identities and sent on their way, he said.

A jawbone, 22 teeth and some small bone fragments were identified by U.S. authorities early last year as the remains of Greer, of Pleasant Hill, California and Schreckengost, of East Palestine, Ohio. Officials said the remains were retrieved from an old grave site in Vietnam.

Men claiming to be Greer and Schreckengost, however, surfaced in 1987 in New York and Bangkok.

Captured June 6, 1964,, while swimming in South Vietnam, Greer and Schreckengost either were killed almost immediately, sent north to Hanoi and escaped at least once enroute, or turned and actually fought against American troops, according to official U.S. documents. But they weren't returned to new lives in America, U.S. officials have said.

Not so, said Adkins. He said he showed the documents to Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in southeast Asia, and to an investigator for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

In an Oct. 26, 1980 column, Anderson wrote:

"As many as six Americans are believed to have taken up arms against U.S. troops in Vietnam. At least two of these (both Marine privates) are known to have joined in combat with the Viet Cong against American forces. Yet these two men now live in the United States, unpunished, under new identities furnished by the government itself."

In early 1987, two men in New York contacted writer Stephen Arkin and said they were Greer and Schreckengost. The two said they wanted to live in the open and offered to turn themselves over to military authorities; they permitted themselves to be photographed.

Arkin negotiated with Col. Howard Hill, then the Defense Intelligence Agency's chief of the MIA/POW branch, and arranged to have Hill meet the two men. But Hill did not show up for the rendezvous and a Marine lieutenant colonel refused to take custody of the pair, saying they should turn themselves over to military police as deserters. The two men declined, left, and called off the bid to publicly present themselves. Hill said there was a mixup in arrangements. Arkin said last month that he thought the two men were impostors, a conclusion supported by the Defense Intelligence Agency. In May 1987, a man who said he was Robert Greer, told his story in Bangkok to Rosemary Conway, one of the Vietnam War's few women POWs. She was imprisoned in Vientiane in 1975 after convincing Royal Laotian pilots to fly their aircraft to Thailand, thwarting plans to turn the planes over to the victorious communist Pathet Lao.

Conway, who did contract work for CIA officials in the waning days of the war, now heads a national volunteer group for presidential candidate H. Ross Perot.

In a May telephone interview, Conway said she was teaching English in Bangkok in 1987 when another instructor agreed to introduce her to officials at Satri Voranart School where he had been offered a job. He told her he had just received a research grant from an American foundation and would not need the school position.

Conway said she went with the man to the school, where she was introduced and eventually earned a teaching job. Following the interview, the man and Conway returned to her apartment where a photo of her with Gen. William Westmoreland led to a discussion about POWs. After Conway recounted her experience in captivity, the man said that he too had been a POW.

He told a story of being sent to a Soviet Bloc nation and escaping through a Scandinavian country, Conway recalls. He said he was returned to the United States in 1979, given a new identity, sent to a school in Florida, and then went to work in the Middle East where he met his wife, a Thai woman. Not being particularly close to his family before joining the Marines in 1961 and tired of roaming, he settled in Thailand.

Conway asked him what his name was. Robert Greer, he replied. The name was not new to her. She says she had seen a government document in Arizona in 1984 that said Greer and Schreckengost were given new identities. "I was so startled to see it, I was flabbergasted", she said of the document.

She also had talked to the Greer family before leaving for Thailand in 1986. Conway said she kept the man's secret until she returned to the United States in 1989.

Ronald Greer, who lives in Northern California, said on May 22 that he knew about his brother's alleged re-identification and the report of the missed opportunity in New York in 1987. He said he had trouble understanding Conway's story and the issue was eating up his family's life. That's why, when military official said last year they had found his brother's grave and recovered a jawbone and 22 teeth, Ronald Greer said he accepted the identification. "I have very little doubt that those remains were his", Ronald Greer said. He had an independent dental pathologist check the teeth against dental charts. Yet, he admitted, there is some concern with the identification process because the dental charts (not X-rays) were provided by the U.S. government. "That's why there's going to be a tiny little doubt", Greer said."