Testimony of Monika Jenson-Stevenson
November 7, 1991

It's a great honor to appear before this distinguished group of Senators. I know that many of the Senators on this Committee have worked long and hard to finally bring to justice, an issue that has so strongly affected our country and has for so long been neglected.

I came here at my own expense today because I and my husband have spent the last six years of our lives researching and writing a book about the subject you will address. The conclusions we drew were ones that I would have thought inconceivable 10 years ago. I am here because the response to the book has made it overwhelmingly clear that the many people that concern themselves with this issue need desperately to have, just one segment of the U.S. Government champion their right to know the truth about what happened to American soldiers who were taken prisoner in a war that everyone wanted to forget about as soon as it was over.

This issue, as we see it, is about trust between citizens and their government on the most important contract, when soldiers risk their lives for a country and the country promises certain protections in return. Sadly, in my view, that trust has been badly abused by the government agencies who have controlled the Prisoners of War issue.

When I began this story for a Sixty Minutes program, I was an experienced reporter. I was not naive. I felt that almost nothing would shock me. But I was shocked to find that my government, which I believed had a common objective with the families of the missing and veterans, was deliberately lying and putting an incomprehensible resistance to the people they were most obligated by moral, legal and Constitutional mandates to protect. We found, my husband and I, in the writing of the book, that the Interagency Group which controls this issue, not only lied with impunity, they did so with full conviction that they had a moral right to do so. We wanted to find out why but the best answer we ever got was that it was necessary for reasons of National Security. Whatever that meant in this context, it did not include the American soldiers who were caught by a vicious enemy and War situations that embarrass this country.

The soldiers lost in Laos, for example, were protected by no National Security umbrella. They were simply designated nonexistent. The official government position has always been that there is no credible evidence of prisoners left behind in Laos or anywhere else in Southeast Asia with the best will, that can only be described as a blatant lie, yet it is policy. We came across large amounts of credible evidence, evidence collected by the most expensive and the best technology in the world, as well as that reported by competent and loyal human agents, many of whom were our former allies and risked their lives, their limbs and also lost prisoners in that conflict. Evidence that was described on my "60 Minutes" segment by General Tighe, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as a miracle. Now if the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in all those critical years knew that is was a miracle, we believe that the Interagency Group controlling the Prisoners of War also knew it. Yet almost all of the evidence, a lot of it has been inexcusably retired, left to disintegrate and be destroyed. That is a fact that will make this Committee's job very, very difficult.

Another devastating lie is that if men are still alive, they are there by choice. My husband knows something about that. He saw French prisoners long after the French Indo-China War was over and filed a report with the Canadian Government. The Vietnamese displayed these prisoners to my husband as converted Communists, but it was clear that they were prisoners and that they were under extreme duress, like Bobby Garwood in Vietnam, abandoned by their country. They had no way of telling the truth about their real position without forfeiting their lives. We believe the Prisoners of War Control Group knows that about Bobby Garwood and the other American prisoners that they have reports on.

Another lie is that the Vietnamese have never offered to return prisoners. We too have talked to the Vietnamese, my husband more extensively than I, and we have talked with people who were direct witnesses to meetings where the Vietnamese made a direct offer of prisoners for money. One was made to the Woodcock Commission in the late 70's.

The truth is that lies have become U.S. Government policy on prisoners. That's a policy more generally known a plausible deniability. I'd like to give you just one very graphic example of what happens to credible intelligence and what happens to our institutions.

One of our sources is a retired CIA man of high rank who personally saw prisoners in Laos in the early 80's. He reported this to the appropriate agencies and he knew which ones they were. The negative response spurred him to look into the policy. What he found was a deliberate organized attempt by some Intelligence officials to disinform and harass the families of the missing who were most vocal in their disaffection of government policies. He brought very specific charges to the Justice Department. When we tried to find out what happened to those charges, they had disappeared. All that the Investigator could find was self-serving documents that cleared the DIA of all wrong doing. The Investigator then asked the Justice Department for the full file. The official said he would have to take this up with another government department and later, the official withheld the complete file because of a third agency's objection. Is this what American Justice has sunk to, that a third agency, without identifying itself, can interfere with critical matters effecting the lives of Prisoners of War that are brought before the Department of Justice?

I know that many of the readers of our book find this unacceptable. We hope, and they hope that you will not only address this problem but you won't allow this investigation to become made ineffective by the same kinds of abuse, abuse of secrecy and that you will rectify this kind of activity.

I've been asked to bring up one more matter by the people who have been working quietly and diligently on the issue of live prisoners. They are concerned that perhaps this Committee will address itself too much to the issue of remains and not live prisoners. They recognize that you have a full years investigation ahead before you can issue any definite statements about prisoners but, they are urging that you issue now, a public statement which says:

"If there are American alive in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who were taken prisoner during the Vietnam War or because of activities growing out of that War, the Select Committee will welcome them home."