Letter from David Hendrix

Among the more interesting cases of Post 1973-captures of Americans in Southeast Asia are those of civilians Arlo Gay and Rosemary Conway. Both are particularly interesting because each tells of coming across information of American POWs being held post 1973, including one of the nation's more prominent cases, Col. Charles E. Shelton. Shelton was an RF-101 pilot shot down over Laos in 1965 and was KNOWN to be alive for years, along with his prisonmate, F-105 driver David Hrdlicka.

Mr. Gay and Ms. Conway were captured in 1975, Mr. Gay in Vietnam and Ms. Conway in Laos. Each performed "above and beyond" on behalf of US requests and interests and each was treated shabbily by US officials after release. Especially distressing were the responses to their information that other Americans - military and civilian POWs - still were being held.

Remember, there was "no evidence" the South Korean POWs were being held 45 years after the end of the Korean War until the men declared dead showed up alive. So much for "unprovable hearsay reports" of POWs being held decades beyond a war's end. What makes Americans so unique that they ALWAYS are returned? Because most of us have round eyes? Or God loves us better? I think not.

Arlo Gay was a commercial fisherman married to a Vietnamese woman. They fished the Gulf of Thailand and western coast of Vietnam. When Saigon - and all of South Vietnam - were about to fall in April 1975, the CIA approached the Gays and asked them if, when the end came, they would use their boats to spirit out dozens of US-connected Vietnamese nationals -- essentially, people who had worked for the CIA and US intelligence. Julie Gay says she was offered a significant sum of money but opted instead for a promise from American authorities that they (US) would take her family -- stepmother and six brothers and sisters -- out of the country if the Gays took care of the American assets. The deal was struck.

The Gays got the first boatload out but the second did not make it because the Americans did not show up at the rendezvous point. A lot was happening. Saigon was falling. Arlo and Julie's brother were captured while Julie tried to shepherd the second boatload to a safe point. Those on board eventually mutinied. When she returned, her husband was in prison near Saigon and her relatives had not been contacted, let alone evacuated.

Arlo told me he was not really roughed up as a prisoner. Some weeks after his capture, on April 30, 1975, the chief of Vietnam's prison system showed up and personally escorted Gay - and Gay alone -- via helicopter up to Hanoi and the Hanoi Hilton. Gay was kept in isolation, as I understand most new arrivals always were. He had nobody to do the tap code with, however. But, one of the rooms he was in, had a name and information scratched in the wood on the underside of a table. The name was LtCol Comb. The Vietnamese guard said Comb had been there for one month before being transferred to an unknown location. US officials say there is no one missing by the name of Comb. (But then, they said for 16 years that nobody was missing from Site 85 in Laos. The JCRC didn't even know they were supposed to be looking for the 13 missing Air Force technicians until 1984. How is that for great intelligence and informing the people who are supposed to do the searching?) The actual engraving, according to declassified documents, was "LtCol Comb,G1/Corps/Pine G-4 fwd/cp arr from Danang Apr. 23, 1975." Anybody out there missing him? Or was he reported dead in a Jeep accident in Germany?

Arlo said he was interrogated for about a week, and then only sporadically after that. What did Hanoi want to know about? Locations of oil drilling exploration sites in the Gulf of Thailand. They wanted to know about oil.

Julie, meanwhile, was selling cigarettes in Saigon to raise money to get to her husband. She unleashed an avalanche of letters to officials and hounded them daily. Arlo actually escaped for a month. The door hinges came loose from the wall of the isolated cell house he occupied. Because he was the only one walking the area, he ventured farther and farther until one evening he just walked away, he said. He says he hid out in a hillside thicket for about a month, living off the fruit, but soon concluded he had nowhere to go. At 6 foot 5 and white as can be, he couldn't venture out during the day and had no idea where to head at night. He says he just turned himself back in. Arlo was released Sept 21, 1976, when the Vietnamese figured he really was no asset. DOD records simply say "Left Saigon." He and Julie came to the US For 18 years she sought to have the US complete its end of the promise and help get her family out of Vietnam. She came to me in 1994 for a story when the State Department returned all her documents and said they could do nothing. It was interesting. In reporting the story, and turning to the CIA for comments, it was the first time in almost 30 years reporting that somebody in the CIA said, "Have them call us. It appears somebody fell down on the job. Maybe we can do something for them."

Rosemary Conway is quite another story. I'm almost reluctant to tell it because of the disinformation that will come flying out of the woodwork. But people should know.

Rosemary went to Southeast Asia at the request of the US government. She wound up in Vientiane, Laos, teaching English in 1974 and 1975. She mingled with US, Royal Lao, Neutralist and Pathet Lao officials. She had two US passports -- diplomatic and regular. She crossed between Laos and Thailand, providing information to US officials. When, in 1975, it became apparent the "secret war" in Laos would be lost to the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese, US officials asked her to persuade Lao pilots to fly their aircraft and families to Thailand so the Pathet Lao would not wind up with a ready made air force. She did and they (pilots) did and the Pathet Lao captured her on June 4, 1975. She spent until Aug. 11, 1975 as a prisoner and was beaten during the time. Rosemary gained her guards' admiration through three levels.

First, she could speak their language.Second, she taught them Elvis Presley songs.Third, she attacked her guards one time and beat them up.

She said she got the idea and courage for the third action after guards told her of a famous prisoner - Air Force recon pilot Charles E. Shelton - in the prison system who had killed three Vietnamese interrogators with a metal chair during one interrogation session. Shelton was not killed, the guards said, because he was expected to resist. Rosemary was not punished because she was expected to resist.

(Shelton was shot down over Sam Neua on April 29, 1965, his 33rd birthday. F-105 driver David Hrdlicka joined Shelton in mid-May. Both were known to be alive and prison mates for years. Photos of Hrdlicka appeared in Communist and European newspapers and he made recordings aired on Communist radio. They were filmed. They were paraded before visiting journalists and dignitaries by their captors, who included one of Laos' three princes. Shelton was famous on both sides for his resistance and escape attempts. Shelton and Hrdlicka allegedly were rescued by friendly forces in an operation called "Duck Soup" and then fell back into their captors' hands. The date(s) of their rescue(s) and conditions of their recapture(s) are points of major disagreement. US officials, including Col. Schlatter, said "Duck Soup" never happened, never existed as any kind of Vietnam War operation. However, documents unearthed in the LBJ Library in 1995 proved otherwise. So much for having all the pertinent information needed to reach conclusions. Then US officials said "Duck Soup" had nothing to do with Shelton and Hrdlicka. But people involved in the operation, both Lao and US, say otherwise.

Declassified CIA reports say Shelton did kill three Vietnamese interrogators in 1968 and that he then was moved to Hanoi. Intelligence sources say he was moved to Ho Thac Bai, an island prison on En Bai Reservoir, north of Hanoi, in April 1985, the 20th anniversary of his capture and only months after the US announced his case was going to be kept in active POW status until the US learned whatever became of him. Remember, he and Hrdlicka were among the almost 600 US military and civilian POWs and MIAs who did not return from Laos. A large number of those were known to be alive on the ground. Shelton remained on active duty status as a POW until 1994. That's right, 1994. His monthly paycheck continued to his wife, who literally searched the world over for her husband, until she committed suicide in San Diego in October 1990. She told me in 1985 that she was told about Duck Soup by mission participants but the US government denied the operation's existence. She died before documents were unearthed that bore out what she had been told. Officials now say Duck Soup was designed to shoot down North Vietnamese transport planes coming into Laos in 1965. Mission participants say that was a cover story to provide CAP resources when the two were rescued. Unfortunately, the CAP crews never got to mount their part of the mission.)

Upon Marian Shelton's death, Col. Shelton's monthly active-duty paycheck continued going to his family's estate until his children asked in 1994 that he be declared presumed dead to end the terrible emotional drain on the family. The Air Force concurred in September 1994 and on Oct. 4, 1994 - four years to the date after Marian Shelton's suicide -- a symbolic burial ceremony was held for Col. Shelton in Arlington Cemetery. But his body was not there. Marian had been buried there in 1990 by special permission.)

Rosemary Conway, who heard about Shelton while a prisoner in Laos, told her story to US authorities as soon as she was released, no small fete. She got the help of some of the Pathet Lao officials she knew and Sen. Barry Goldwater worked from the US side. When Rosemary talked to US officials in Thailand in August 1975, she told them about four other Americans she had heard the Pathet Lao talk about, while discussing sending her to Tchepone "where the other Americans are:" Capt. Morgan Donahue, John Emerson, reportedly a teacher, a Mr. Huxley and a "Connelly." US officials said they had no information about Emerson or Huxley. And they discounted Conway's information also because she talked fast and appeared agitated.

(Anybody out there missing anybody with those names? Nobody knew anything officially about the missing Site 85 people either, and they had been gone seven years at that time. Because US officials said they didn't know about a missing Emerson or Huxley, they discounted Conway's information. As for Connelly, a Connelly was KIA/PFOD and Conley KIA/BNR).

US officials will tell you Conway never worked for them in the capacity she says she did, that she was not the one to influence the Royal Lao pilots to take themselves and their planes to Thailand and that she was jailed, not a prisoner.

I've talked to the Lao pilots who immigrated to the US and they tell Rosemary's story, not her. They say she's the one they trusted, not others. Rosemary shows up on the official POW lists and received POW benefits until the American bureaucracy screwed things up in the mid-1980s, after she began talking. She's fighting to regain her benefits and is a near pauper and in poor health in Arizona. So much for national appreciation.

Charles Shelton, by the way, was supposed to be America's "representative POW" when the Reagan administration in 1984 decided to keep his status active. Odd. The US government never asked the Shelton family what they thought nor told them of their intentions. A friend of Marian's read about it in Air Force Magazine and informed her of the decision two months after it was made.

So much for being forthcoming.

David E. Hendrix

PS By the way, the February 1980 DOD list of American citizens and military personnel detained, captured, missing, lost and imprisoned lists 155 Americans confined or killed in Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand between May 1973 and May 1979. That includes the Mayaguez incident.

The names of the Site 85 personnel are not on that list, which goes back to November 1963. So we know it's incomplete. What else is incomplete? By definition, we don't know.

ORIGINAL HENDRIX ARTICLE ON THE SECRET-RETURNEE PROGRAM:

"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."