...What is truly intriguing is this; Up until the end of 1972, United States satellite systems were 'active' approximately 158 days of the year. However, an analyst studying US satellite time usage found that during the time frame 1973-1975, that's post-war when many of the 'live sightings' of American Prisoners and Missing started to pour in to the intelligence agencies, the USG souped up the system time usage to over 300 days a year. It is incredible to think that we would use our satellite systems more AFTER the war than during... unless of course the powers that be, knew that something was going on in those remote jungles. That the caves of Laos were rife with activity and that an unusual pattern of air transport from remote regions of Southeast Asia to the heart of Hanoi were becoming regular, and these activities were being monitored closely. Very, very closely.

Human Intelligence or HUMINT, the result of trained military observers, covert ops detachments, CIA civilian assets as well as indigenous people, provides and endless avalanche of critical data. Eyewitness reports, experiences and conversations, add compelling facet to the overall intelligence picture of any region. Culling through the reports coming out of the Second Indochina War's Phoenix Program and its tortuous PICs; the Army Security Agency's intercepts and the CIA owned and run PA&E observers, we see a frightening level of awareness throughout Southeast Asia. And once again, the reports, analyses and briefings were sent to some secret corner of Foggy Bottom's basement, for study and ultimate seclusion. Ironically, although the USG stated repeatedly that after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Communists in April 1975, most, if not all of their on ground collection assets were lost, we know from history that the continued flow of intelligence and access to information kept the DOD , among others, very well informed. Tragically, by down-playing to the American public the reliability and importance of HUMINT, and by miscalculating the relationship between American forces and the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the Department of Defense initially missed one of the most important post-war intelligence gathering opportunities. Because of their blissful or orchestrated ignorance of the information held by Southeast Asian refugees, invaluable HUMINT may have been lost forever.

With the DODs inaction, it was left to a POW family member and a Vietnamese refugee to piece the puzzle together, and ultimately do the job our government had been tasked with.-#11

When the human wave of refugees began its exodus from the then Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the brutal communistic elite purged the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, it was learned that the Defense Department and its sister agencies were not interviewing any refugees with respect to Missing and Captive Americans in Southeast Asia. POW father, George Brooks, traversed the country to speak with a young refugee in Virginia, who related a story of a family member who had seen captive Americans, after April 1973... after Homecoming. Sadly, neither he, nor the incalculable other refugees had been interviewed and POW family members clamored that such critical intelligence was being ignored. With no other options available, the families took the refugee stories to the public. From that point onward, once the refugee live sighting reports saw the light of day, there was nothing the USG could do to quell the storm. So, teams were dispatched to the Pacific Rim, scouring the refugee camps and beating the proverbial bush. As a result, the reports poured in by the thousands. And, by the thousands, the governmental; vacuum tasked with their care and consideration filed them away before family members were told that within these reports, information on their missing loved ones was hidden.

Who...

Beginning with the former OSS during World War II and then the CIA in 1945, the task of eavesdropping on the world fell upon at least one government entity. With newly refined systems and guidelines, the weight of intelligence gathering required that more agencies and personnel take up the craft. Each year brought about the birth of another coven of spooks and joining this cult from 1965 onward, the Army Security Agency or ASA and its parent, the National Security Agency or NSA, became the eyes and ears of the USG and the Department of Defense in Southeast Asia and other locales.

With teams crawling around the countryside in Burma, Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Thailand, they snooped and sneaked, gathering intelligence and cutting into transmissions as they bounced through the air. In Burma alone, land of the Golden Triangle and heir apparent of the Anatolia Plateau, the thick antenna fields looked like a science fiction scenario, where virtually everything, every place and everyone was monitored. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, according to former ASA personnel was "...wired like a pinball machine... and every night we plugged her in." Flying along the coastline of Vietnam and westward, along its contiguous border with Laos, were 3 specially equipped intercept/relay aircraft, a U-2, AC-130 & EC-47Q, that collected and then bounced their signals to Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the NSA, and the NSA's other collection points in Turkey, Thailand, Iran and Australia for assessment and analysis.-#12

Known colloquially as windows or listening posts, the collection points proved so very valuable to our intelligence gathering community, as many allowed the war to be virtually audio taped and then studied in a short span of time from nearby locales. The communication and signal intercepts are sucked in much the same way that a vacuum sucks up debris. The transmissions are then either transcribed or the tapes themselves are stored in computers fro analyses. To fully appreciate the high-tech capabilities of such systems, this example should suffice; the entire text of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a full wall of text to be sure, can currently be transmitted from a satellite system to a 'window' in 3.5 seconds.-#13

Enemy intercepts, troop movements, shoot-downs and the capture of pilots or 'bandits' as air crews were referred to, were recorded and reported fro all the linguists and analysts to hear. Not only were the communications intercepted, recorded and kept for posterity and further analysis, but briefings based on this information were created immediately and sent onward to Washington and the Pacific Command. The NSA to this day, and to its discredit, has countless boxcars full of tapes and transcriptions from the Second Indochina War in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, underneath its main facility. And some of it has never been analyzed or decrypted to this date.

Why...

Family members, at the mercy of the service branches, casualty officers and the Department of Defense, have traditionally been given a casualty folder that explains, very briefly, the loss and the resulting search and rescue attempts. What they are not privy to are the dozens perhaps hundreds of reports generated that pertain or are cross-referenced to their cases. Under the auspices of the Privacy Act or National Security, they are told they cannot see what they seek. It would imperil valuable intelligence assets or foil any attempt to recover their loved one from enemy hands. They are forced to fight with every ounce of energy fro every scrap of paper. And when all else fails, under the Freedom of Information Act, they must sue their very own government for these documents.

And when and if they get them, the documents are so frequently excised, redacted and sanitized as to be practically worthless. Cryptic notations appear without explanation and correlation to men involved in the same loss incident is non-existent at times. Trying to decipher a redacted government document, will make one blind or crazy or both.-#14 & #15

But why? What is the vested interest of National Security to hold back intelligence reports and documents, sometimes as much as 40 years old from wars long past? It to preserve the integrity of the interception, reconnaissance or satellite system that collected the data from which these reports were created?

The answer would undoubtedly be no, because many of the systems in use during this time frame have floated into obsolescence or were compromised by traitors or spies. Defense budgets for new systems are staggering, the majority of which are secreted in clandestine operational budgets fro other agencies. The NRO for example, which did not officially exist until recently, like so many other agencies, has a black budget hidden within the United States Air Force budget, that no one can seem to figure out or account for. Infamous spy cases of the '70's and '80's, told the American people that the actual manuals for these aircraft and satellite systems had been sold to our adversaries on the other side of the world. In many instances, our adversaries had acquired intact aircraft or crew members and were capable of utilizing reverse technology to recreate the craft. The Russians and Chinese knew these intelligence gathering systems existed and they even had the manuals with which to build some of their own if they force down and capture one of ours.

Was it to protect the people who listened to, or chased the phantoms across the dark jungles? Again, the answer is no. Countless years have passed and rendered those people either still active in service, retired with a secrecy oath or dead. The family members were simply and expediently told in most instances that their loved ones were Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered or KIA/BNR. And after a two or three year period, they were forced to sit through a three judge panel procedure called a Presumptive Finding of Death Hearing, whereby their missing son, father, brother or husband went from probable or possibly living, to positively dead in seven minutes. With the stroke of a pen, you cease to officially exist. It's that simple and quick... and there is no recourse.-#16

You can bet, if there was data that indicated a POW or MIA was dead, it would have been hauled out by DOD for all to see a long time ago. But it hasn't happened, because you cannot prove a negative.

With respect to Vietnam, approximately 28,000 photographs images were taken of Southeast Asia as a result of intelligence collection activities. What do these images show? Are they hidden from the families because the families pose such a grave threat to National Security, or are they hidden because when the images are viewed, one can see things such as names like SEREX, secret 6 digit authenticator codes like TH1973 and GX2527, that only the MIA and the USG know. The Escape & Evasions codes, again, secret alpha-numeric codes that specifies a year or mission, social security numbers and messages.-#17

Are the millions of documents, reports and intercepts hidden from families because the families would tell the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the North Koreans or Russians that we were eavesdropping untold years ago?

Or are they hidden because when we research Vietnam documents alone we find reports that state, '...source saw 2 Americans tied together with 100 communist guards', a Thai source told of, '100 American PWs' and provided the US Air Intelligence Group with a detailed sketch of the compound. a source offered that '3 US PWs, one negro and two cau, are described as follows' and went on to describe the men down to their height, weight, features, coloring, birthmarks and what type of cigarettes they smoked. A CIA report of '30 PWs being moved around Haiphong, Son Tay, Kien An and Don Son', and another CIA report stating, 'American Prisoners of War are being held in North Vietnam, to be used as bargaining chips with the US'.-#18

Are they hidden because the United States Government maintains the 'secret of secrets'. That US POWs were human guinea pigs for the most horrifyingly atrocious Chemical-Biological warfare experimentation imaginable. That over 1500 POWs died or were 'terminal' experimentation material in the hands of the sadistic Japanese scientists who dreamed this nightmare. And that not one of these criminals ever stood before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal for these atrocities, because the United States as beneficiary of the research, documentation, human slides and other materials, openly and aggressively prevented their prosecution.-#19

Are they hidden because the United States knowingly hid from the American public the documented fact that American POWs were interned in German concentration camps. That they were at times segregated from the POW camp population, reclassified as Polizeihiftling - political prisoners, and sent to the depths of hell... where they were beaten, starved, tortured, executed and then burned in crematoria. That they endured untold horrors in such infamous camps as Bad Orb, Berga, Buchenwald, Flossenberg, Dachau and Mathausen.-#20

Are they hidden because the United States knew American POWs from the Korean War were intercepted, interrogated and transported by the former Soviet Union into Gulags, Sharashkas and psychiatric prisons in the Soviet satellite territories and Siberia. That Soviet archives are producing masses of documents that show the wartime interrogations of at least 451 American POWs by Soviet officials, most of which are unaccounted for today. That the USSR aggressively devised a program to access specific US aircraft and their crews, such as the F-86, ad the successive USG sanctioned reports of these activities are, like everything else, classified.

That Soviet lists offer the names of US airmen shot down during the Korea-Cold War era, who never returned and about whom the former USSR's bureaucrats feign ignorance while their US counterparts have reduced investigations of Korea-Cold War to an archival exercise.-#21

The United States Government, has continually refused the families and the American public, access to the only non-biased materials that will answer many of the questions that remain as to the fates of our missing brothers.

If there is really nothing there, then why is it two Presidents, George Bush and William Clinton, ordered a release of documents, yet it has taken almost 6 years with virtually no results. Why is it that the serviant agencies, such as the NSA, have not opened their files for inspection. Why is it that what is released is so heavily censored.-#22

Why is it that on the DIA level alone, of the 16,000 released post-war reports on American POWs in Southeast Asia, this figure represents only 8% of the materials in their hands. If we do a little math, we will find that 16,000 represents 8% of 200,000. And a document is not a single sheet of paper, but more often 10-50-100, sometimes easily 200 pages or more. That means the DIA alone, has in its possession approximately 1.5 to 2 million pages of post-war, Southeast Asia, American POW information that it hasn't seen fit to release.

Is it truly in the spirit of National Security, to preserve the security and future of our children. Or is it actually the result of securing jobs, promotions, benefits, pensions and identities of those who have hidden behind the veil of National Security and perpetuated the pain and suffering of our POWs and their loved ones.

The American taxpayer has paid over $350 billion dollars fro the satellite systems alone that collect the data. The American taxpayer has supported, by their contribution of untold billions, the exotic reconnaissance craft that are designed, flown and scuttled before we even see the bill. And the American taxpayer has continued to pay the salaries of the men and women who analyze the data from these systems, who write the reports and who know the truth. It stands to reason then that we should be able to what it is we have gotten for our money. But unfortunately, because of National Security... that remains a secret.