News-Info-Alerts

Re: US Suspended Korean War MIA Recovery Over Nuke Admission

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 22, 2003

"Crisis Slowed Korean War Dead Recovery

ROBERT BURNS Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration briefly suspended its only avenue of military cooperation with North Korea after the communist government confirmed to a State Department envoy last fall that it was running a nuclear weapons program, a senior Pentagon official says.

Jerry Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs, said Monday that cooperation on recovering remains of U.S. servicemen lost in the Korean War was put back on track in June after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld decided it did not contradict U.S. policy.

The administration had not previously disclosed that it suspended this program last fall out of concern by some in the government that continuing it could be seen as a sign of weakness.

In an interview Monday in his office near the Pentagon, Jennings said there was a "huge battle" inside the administration over whether the United States should continue working with the North Korean military to find and recover war remains - a program that began in 1996.

The fight erupted after James Kelly, President Bush's top State Department aide for Asia, was told by North Korean officials in Pyongyang last October that they had an active nuclear weapons program, even though they had agreed in 1994 to dismantle it in exchange for energy aid.

"The word came back" from Pentagon officials whom Jennings did not identify: "'Don't talk to the North Koreans.' There was a consensus that developed that we shouldn't have any contact with the North Koreans." At the same time, veterans groups lobbied to resume the program.

About 8,000 American servicemen are unaccounted for from the 1950-53 Korean War.

People inside the administration who opposed a resumption of the program argued, in part, that it was wrong to be paying millions of dollars for the North Koreans' assistance, Jennings said.

"You people continuing to talk to these guys (North Koreans), when we may be going to war with them, could be confusing," Jennings said he was told by the opponents. He argued that the program was humanitarian in nature and designed to benefit the families of the missing.

"The wheels came off in October of '02 - no contacts" with the North Koreans, he said. "It was a huge battle that we had" until Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, settled the matter and gave Jennings permission to send a letter to Pyongyang in June proposing a resumption of negotiations. The North Koreans responded 13 days later and the two sides reached an agreement July 12 to conduct two monthlong recovery operations at two sites.

The United States is paying North Korea $2.1 million for services provided in support of the operations. The work is scheduled to end Oct. 28.

Jennings said the two sides plan to meet in November to negotiate as many as five sets of recovery operations for 2004. Since the work began in 1996, 25 recovery operations on North Korean territory have yielded 178 sets of remains believed to be those of American servicemen. Of the 178, only 14 so far have been identified positively.

In a related matter, Jennings said the Pentagon plans to hire retired senior Vietnamese intelligence officials to search classified Vietnamese files for information about missing U.S. servicemen from the Vietnam War.

The unusual, if not unprecedented, arrangement has been approved by Vietnam and should begin within months, Jennings said, adding that he hopes the Vietnamese are serious about making it work.

"We're assuming good faith on one thing: that the government wouldn't sign on for this just to rip us off for the pay for a retired individual for three months; that there is good faith in terms of this guy conducting an honest search," he said.

The retired Vietnamese officials would submit regular summaries of their findings, but documents that contained relevant information about POWs or MIAs would not be turned over to the United States.

Jennings, who was a CIA intelligence officer in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, said there has not yet been a selection of the former Vietnamese officers. He said U.S. authorities would have some say in the selection, but the pool of potential candidates would be vetted first by the Vietnamese government.

The Pentagon says 1,882 Americans are unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, but none is listed as a POW.