News-Info-Alerts

Re: Vietnam Agrees In Priciple to File Search

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 24, 2003

"Vietnam opens files in MIA hunt


The U.S. says 1,882 Americans remain listed as MIA from the Vietnam War.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Vietnam has agreed to give the United States some access to Hanoi's top secret files to gather possible information about U.S. troops who may have been held captive after the Vietnam War, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Pentagon's office of POW-MIA affairs said Hanoi had agreed "in principle" to an unusual U.S. proposal to hire retired senior Vietnamese intelligence officers to search classified Vietnamese government files.

"They have agreed in principle to do this. The details are far from being worked out, but they have given a positive reaction," POW-MIA spokesman Larry Greer told Reuters in response to questions.

The virtually unprecedented plan, which could begin before year's end, is being pressed by Jerry Jennings, head of the POW-MIA affairs office, and is currently under discussion by the two countries.

The United States says 1,882 Americans remain listed as missing in action and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. None are listed as prisoners of war, but there have been reports over the years that some prisoners remained there after the war ended in 1975.

Despite denials by Hanoi, U.S. veterans groups say Washington has received information indicating that some Americans were held in Vietnam after the war.

Greer said no details had been worked out on how many retired top level Vietnamese intelligence officers would be hired by Washington or what they would be paid under contract to search the files.

"It's not ironed out yet at the staff level. It is obviously something that we will need to work through," he told Reuters.

Other U.S. defense officials said Vietnam would probably provide a list of candidates for the search and that the United States would investigate to determine whether they had experience to search archives in question.

None of the unclassified Vietnamese files seen to date have given any indication that the Vietnamese continued to hold U.S. POWs after the repatriation of hundreds of such prisoners as the war ended.

"But we are exploring ideas with the Vietnamese. The significance of this is to try to gain access to files which heretofore we have not had access to -- files related to intelligence matters," Greer told Reuters.

"We have had access to Vietnamese files that are not intelligence-related files -- wartime unit files, for example, such as aircraft shoot-downs."

Copyright 2003 Reuters"