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Memorandum for the Record::

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United States Senate
"Unclassified and Based Entirely Upon Unclassified Sources and Information
From: (REDACTED)
Date: April 8, 1993

Subject: Russian Document From Soviet CPSU Central Committee International Department Archives Reveals 1,205 American POWs Were Held in North Vietnam in September, 1972--Five Months Before Operation Homecoming Returned 591 POWs.

Summary: The Newly Acquired Russian Document Has Been Authenticated by the U.S. Executive Branch, and it Reveals That About 700 American POWs Were Kept Behind by the North Vietnamese in 1973. There is also Corroborating Evidence from Two Credible Sources, Buttressed by Declassified Overhead Imagery and Other POW Prison Systems in North Vietnam Where These 700 POWs Were Kept, Other Evidence Shows that Some American POWs Were Sent to the Former Soviet Union in yet Another Separate Prison System.

President Clinton was Briefed on this Document and its revelations before his April 3, 1993, Summit Meeting with Russian President Yeltsin, But President Clinton Reportedly Failed to Bring up the Subject of POWs at all with Yeltsin. (End Summary).

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"The 1972 Soviet G.R.U. Document on American Prisoners of War being Held in North Vietnam An Evaluation by Dr. Stephen J. Morris Visiting Scholar Center for International Affairs - Harvard UniversityThe Soviet G.R.U. document has failed to receive a thorough and objective evaluation from the bureaucratic agencies of the United States government, in particular the Departments of Defense and State. In part the U.S. government's evaluation is crippled by its lack of access to other relevant documents of this kind --- that is genuine Vietnamese communist politburo or military high command documents dealing with the American prisoners of war and their political role in VIetnamese communist policy. But that problem is potentially soluble through the possible further use of another source of Vietnamese documents and valuable intelligence reports -- the archives of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow.

A more profound and possibly intractable problem which has crippled U.S. government evaluation has been the prejudice on the part of many senior U.S. government officials -- and the Presidentail emissary General Vessey --- to totally reject the value of the Soviet G.R.U. document. As the previous discussion has shown, the criticisms at best show a lack of proportion and at worst a total incompetence in even reading the Soviet document."
Foreign Relations SubCommittee for Asian and Pacific Affairs
Testimony of Dr. Stephen J. Morris - July 14, 1993