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Senate Select Committee - XIV
INTRODUCTION - Creation of the Senate Select Committee
The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was created because in 1991, almost nineteen years after the formal termination of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, a part of the war remained very much with us as a nation. For almost two decades, the questions of whether American prisoners were left behind and, if so, whether they remained alive somewhere in captivity had haunted America. The failure to resolve these questions had raised doubts about the good faith of our government, about whether a real commitment had been made to the issue, about the wisdom of past actions taken or not taken and about realistic options for the future.
The durability of the debate surrounding the POW/MIA issue caused-- it did not result from--creation of the Select Committee. The committee began its work at a time of swirling controversy and doubt about whether official U.S. handling of the issue matched the high priority the government claimed it received.
The Committee was established on August 2, 1991 when the Senate approved a Resolution introduced by Sen. Bob Smith providing for the creation of a Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to serve during the remainder of the 102nd Congress. By October, 1991, a Chairman, Vice-chairman and ten additional Members had been appointed to the Committee and a Resolution providing funding had been approved.
Despite the passage of time, the work of previous Committees and commissions, the efforts of countless officials to clarify and explain and the public status throughout the past decade of this issue as one of highest national priority, a Wall Street Journal poll, taken shortly before the Committee was created, found that 69 percent of Americans believed that U.S. servicemen were still being held against their will in Southeast Asia and that of those, three- fourths felt the U.S. Government was not doing enough to bring the prisoners home.
As these numbers indicate, the POW/MIA issue has had a life of its own. The simple explanation for this is that although no American prisoners are known for certain to be alive, 2,264 continue to be officially "unaccounted for" and therefore not proven dead. In addition, the U.S. Government has continued to receive reports alleging that some Americans remain alive in captivity. It is only human nature to hope, in the absence of contrary proof, that a loved one has survived. And it is only to be expected, in such circumstances, that the American people, would demand the fullest possible effort to establish the truth.
The evidence of the past 20 years is that on a subject as personal and emotional as the survival of a husband, brother or son, it is simply not enough to talk of probabilities and the need for perspective. It means little to the family and friends of a missing serviceman to be told by some that the percentage of U.S. forces missing after Vietnam is lower than in previous wars or that it is inevitable that there will be a certain number unaccounted for in any major armed conflict and that the opposing side has far more MIAs than the U.S. The search for answers to POW/MIA questions is not about mathematics; it is about the fate of individual human beings who went to Indochina to fight for their country and who did not come back. Something very real happened to each of those brave men, and our country will not be at peace with itself until we are morally certain we have done all we could to find out what.
In addition to the emotional concerns of families, a second impetus for establishing the Committee was provided by legitimate unresolved questions of fact. Why, Americans asked, did so few of the U.S. airmen downed in Laos return home? How do we explain the dozens of unresolved, first-hand reports of Americans being sighted in captivity in Southeast Asia after the end of the war? Were the hundreds of resolved reports adequately investigated? How can we trust the assurances of Vietnam that it holds no prisoners when we have strong evidence that it has stockpiled American remains? What about the Tighe Commission's 1986 conclusion that "there is a strong possibility of U.S. prisoners being held?" And what about the steady drumbeat of rumors about conspiracy, cover-ups, photographs, failed rescue missions and mysterious videotapes?
All of this controversy was fueled in the period just prior to the Committee's creation by the February 12, 1991 resignation of Colonel Millard Peck as Director of DIA's Special Office for POW/MIA Affairs. In his letter of resignation, Col. Peck criticized what he called a "mindset to debunk" information that U.S. POWs might be alive and suggested that a "'cover-up' may be in progress."
Even more dramatic was the identification by family members in mid- 1991 of individuals in three photographs that appeared to depict American POWs in Southeast Asia. The photographs generated enormous publicity and sparked demands for an immediate government response.
Interest in the issue was stimulated, as well, by discussions of conditions for establishing normal diplomatic and economic relations between the United States and Vietnam. The U.S. State Department's "Road Map" to normalization required, among other things, full cooperation by Vietnam in resolving last known alive discrepancy cases, implementing a plan to resolve expeditiously live-sighting reports on which the U.S. requests assistance and the rapid repatriation of all recovered and recoverable American remains.
The Committee's Mission
Obviously, even the fullest possible accounting for U.S. POW/MIAs will leave some questions unanswered. Investigations can uncover information, but not create it. If, for example, neither friend nor foe had certain knowledge at the time about the fate of a pilot lost over water, there is little likelihood that the Committee or any other investigative unit could, at this distance in time, establish that certainty.
But the Committee was not created with the expectation of final, definitive, case-by-case answers. That is a task that may well be beyond mortal power to achieve, and that only the Executive branch has the resources to attempt. Rather, the Committee's job was to investigate the events, policies and knowledge that have guided U.S. Government POW/MIA related actions over the past 20 years and to do so in order to advance the following goals:
De-Mystifying the Process
Nothing has done more to fuel suspicion about the government's handling of the POW/MIA issue than the fact that so many documents related to those efforts have remained classified for so long. Rightly or wrongly, the secrecy--especially about live-sighting reports and critical internal reviews of Defense Intelligence Agency procedures--have fed the perception that government officials have something to hide. This perception increased in the months prior to the Committee's creation because of evidence that some Congressional inquiries may have been responded to with inaccurate or incomplete information and because then Congressman Bob Smith and Senator Charles Grassley had enormous difficulty in prior years in gaining DOD permission to review classified POW/MIA related materials.
As a result, the Committee sought from the beginning to work with the Executive Branch to make public all information relevant to the POW/MIA issue, except that related directly to the sources and methods of gathering intelligence. The Committee agreed that "source and methods" must be kept confidential in order to maintain America's ability to gather new information and track leads in the future. The Committee's goal was to "de-mystify" the POW/MIA issue and to lay before the public a complete picture of what the U.S. Government knows. The Committee generally succeeded in this objective. A full description of the efforts made to obtain the de- classification and public release of documents is included in chapter entitled "Declassification."
Accountability and Response
A major investigative priority of the Committee was to examine the U.S. Government's ability and willingness to respond rapidly to possible evidence that live Americans may still be held against their will in Southeast Asia. The Committee also sought to gain greater cooperation from the governments of Southeast Asia in efforts to obtain answers to questions about specific missing Americans. These "process-oriented" issues go to the heart of U.S. priorities. For example, a bureaucracy that assumes that all American POWs are dead may not respond as energetically to an unconfirmed, but possibly credible, report that a POW has been sighted as a bureaucracy that assumes Americans may still be alive. Similarly, an Administration that attaches a genuinely high priority to POW/MIA issues is likely to devote greater resources of intelligence and response than an Administration that does not. The evolution of U.S. government policies and procedures from Operation Homecoming to the present are discussed in the "Accountability" chapter of this report.
Building a Public Record
Beyond the questions of process, there exist the fundamental questions of fact. The Committee understood from the outset that it could not expect to answer every question, but that it had a responsibility to pursue as comprehensive an investigation as possible. To this end, the Committee conducted more than 1000 interviews; took more than 200 sworn depositions; held more 200 hours of public hearings; reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents, files, and reports; studied large quantities of intelligence information, including raw intelligence; posted a full-time investigator to Moscow; and sent Member delegations to Russia, North Korea and four times to Southeast Asia.
The Committee's goal was to identify and explore every promising avenue of investigation. To this end, the Chairman and Vice- chairman sent personal letters to the primary next of kin of all Vietnam-era POW/MIAs, and to all returned POWs, seeking information and advice. During televised public hearings, Members of the Committee have repeatedly invited all those with information concerning a POW/MIA related matter to come forward and share that information with the Committee. The Committee has also solicited suggestions from veterans organizations, activist and family groups, current and former U.S. officials and from the public at large with respect to possible witnesses and areas of investigation.
The final judge and jury of U.S. Government actions on the POW/MIA issue is not this Committee; it is the American people. As previous POW/MIA related inquiries have shown, it does not matter much what the official view is if the public does not generally understand and share that view. As a result, the Committee made a conscious effort to combine its behind-the-scenes investigative work with public hearings so that the public would learn--almost contemporaneously with the Committee--about various aspects of the POW/MIA issue. For the same reason, the Committee made every effort to avoid holding hearings in executive session and to provide for the declassification of Committee-generated documents, such as depositions. The goal from the outset has been to create a comprehensive and unbiased public record that would be available for families, journalists, historians and citizens to review and make their own best judgments about the facts. This report is an important part of that record.
The Investigation
The Committee investigation began by tracing the history of the issue back to its war-time beginnings. Clearly, the chance that American POWs are alive in Southeast Asia today depends on whether some were left behind after Operation Homecoming. The chapters in this report entitled "The Paris Peace Accords" and "Accountability" focus in detail on this possibility.
The largest share of Committee efforts was devoted to examining information concerning the possible survival of Americans during the post-war period and up to the present day. This required the review of vast quantities of first, second and third-hand "live- sighting" reports; the analysis of a wide range of intelligence; examination of the methods that DIA uses to evaluate information; and the consideration of indications that POWs may have been transferred to the former Soviet Union or to China during or after the Korean or Vietnamese conflicts. Chapters 4 and 9 describe this aspect of the Committee's investigation.
Cooperation of Southeast Asia Governments
It will be extremely difficult for our government to obtain additional solid information concerning the fate of our POW/MIAs without the cooperation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Accordingly, the Committee has sought to use its review of POW/MIA issues to encourage recent trends towards greater cooperation between and among these governments and the United States. Members of the Committee traveled to Southeast Asia in April, October, November and December, 1992 for talks with foreign officials and U.S. personnel deployed there. In addition, Committee Members have met from time to time in the United States with representatives of the foreign governments to exchange information and clarify outstanding questions.
Below is a very brief summary of the situation that existed in each of these three countries at the time the Committee's work began. A full description of the issue is contained in the "Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia" chapter of this report.
Vietnam
When the Committee was formed, 1656 Americans were listed as unaccounted for in Vietnam. Since the end of U.S. involvement in hostilities on January 27, 1973, the remains of 266 Americans have been returned and identified.
Most of the Americans lost or captured in North Vietnam during the war were Air Force or Navy airmen who crashed in populated areas accessible to Vietnamese authorities. The North Vietnamese made a systematic effort to investigate crash sites, capture and process American POWs, bury and preserve remains and maintain centralized records.
About two-thirds of the Americans lost in South Vietnam were enlisted Army and Marine Corps personnel. U.S. officials have found that records and information concerning American prisoners held in the south are less complete than for those held in the north.
Since the war, Vietnamese officials have steadfastly denied that any Americans are held captive or that the remains of American servicemen are being knowingly withheld.
Cooperation from Vietnam is essential to the resolution not only of cases involving Americans lost or captured in Vietnam, but in Cambodia and Laos, as well. This is because the vast majority of Americans missing in those countries were believed to have become missing in areas under the control of North Vietnamese military forces at the time. Thus, Vietnam's military archives and other records are an important potential source of information concerning the fates of these men.
Since 1973, the degree of cooperation received from Vietnam has varied widely depending on the international political situation. A good working relationship was impossible during the years immediately after Operation Homecoming because of disputes over violations of the Paris Peace Accords. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, some efforts were made on both sides to pave the way for more normal political and diplomatic relations. That progress came to an abrupt halt in late 1978, however, following Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, which the United States strongly opposed. Significant bilateral discussions did not resume until the early 1980's, but have since grown steadily in their frequency and depth.
One of the most positive outgrowths of recent talks was the appointment in 1987 of Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr. (USA Ret.), as the President's special envoy to Vietnam. As a result of Gen. Vessey's discussions with then-Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, the U.S. established a POW/MIA liaison office in Hanoi in July, 1991. The purposes of the office are to investigate live-sighting reports, to conduct joint searches for the remains of American servicemen and to seek access to the relevant Vietnamese records.
The Vessey team has placed a major emphasis on the investigation and resolution of the "discrepancy" cases. Discrepancy cases are those where U.S. officials believe there is the highest probability that additional information concerning a missing American can, with the proper degree of cooperation and investigation, be found. Currently, 135 discrepancy cases involving Americans lost in Vietnam are under investigation and a preliminary investigation in Vietnam of each case is to be completed by January 1993.
Laos
At the time of the Committee's creation, 528 Americans were listed as unaccounted for in Laos, of whom 335 were considered POW/MIA. Only 12 U.S. POWs captured in Laos returned during Operation Homecoming and one, Emmet Kay, who was captured after the cease- fire returned in September 1974. Since the end of the Vietnam conflict, the remains of 42 servicemen have been repatriated.
U.S. efforts to obtain information from Lao authorities have been complicated by the facts that Laos was not a party to the Paris Peace Accords and the United States was not a party to the 1973 Laos cease-fire agreement that pledged all sides to return captive personnel. In addition, the Defense Department estimates that at least 75 percent of the Americans missing in Laos were lost in areas controlled at the time by North Vietnamese armed forces. These losses were generally in eastern Laos along the border with Vietnam and near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Although the POW/MIA records kept by the Lao have been judged to be less extensive than those kept by Vietnam, there is credible evidence that at least a few unaccounted for Americans were actually held by Pathet Lao forces during the war. Therefore, the Lao can be expected to have knowledge concerning the fate of these individuals. Additionally, there is strong reason to believe that North Vietnamese military were instructed to recover and record all they could about downed U.S. aircraft and killed or captured pilots. Thus, efforts to account for many Americans will ultimately require tri-lateral cooperation involving not only the U.S. and Laos, but Vietnam as well.
In recent years, Lao authorities have been more cooperative with the U.S. in planning and carrying out investigations at known U.S. aircraft crash sites, often in remote and virtually inaccessible locations. The government has also cooperated in efforts to evaluate photographs alleged to depict American POWs.
Cambodia
At the time of the Committee's creation, 83 Americans were listed as unaccounted for in Cambodia and no prisoners or identified remains had been repatriated during the post-war period until recently. Cambodia was not a party to the Paris Peace Accords and no separate cease-fire agreement on repatriation was reached in the aftermath of the war. The recovery of American POWs or remains in Cambodia was made virtually impossible after 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power and embarked on a bloody reign of terror directed at Cambodians and foreigners alike. Throughout much of the past 20 years, the U.S. has had either difficult or non-existent diplomatic contacts with the Cambodian Government. The years of struggle and chaos leave little hope that documents or records have survived that would reveal additional information about U.S. personnel.
As in Laos, however, most of the Americans unaccounted for in Cambodia were lost near the border with Vietnam in areas where North Vietnamese forces were dominant. Thus, the best potential sources of documentary information concerning those lost in Cambodia may be in Hanoi, not in Phnom Penh.
Fortunately, the current government in Cambodia has demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the U.S. in joint field investigations and other efforts to obtain accurate information concerning American POW/MIAs. Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen has been particularly helpful in this effort.
Previous Wars
The seeds of the Cold War were sown by the Red Army as it pursued the Wehrmacht across Eastern Europe. The Kremlin imposed Communist regimes on the war-ravaged nations of the region and war-time alliances were replaced by a deadly rivalry: NATO versus the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union and its client states, from Europe to the Bering Sea, from the Arctic to the tropics, became the theater of operations for the far-flung activities of U.S. intelligence agencies and units of each service.
To no one's surprise, the Soviet Union reacted. It kidnapped intelligence agents and "attaches." It shot down U.S. intelligence aircraft and the air crews disappeared. These were America's "Cold War losses."
Another tragic outcome of the rapid advance of the Red Army was the "liberation" of American and Allied POWs from German POW camps by the Red Army. Rather than moving these hapless soldiers westward toward their own advancing armies, the Soviets took thousands of them eastward to Odessa. Some boarded ships and eventually reached their homes safely. Others, and we may never know how many, became prisoners -- not of war, but of the Soviet gulag.
During the Korean War, thousands of American fighting men were captured by North Korean and Chinese forces. Estimates vary, but clearly hundreds were not returned after the armistice and prisoner exchange. Intelligence information, collected during and after the war, indicated that many POWs were held in China, and some were sent to the Soviet Union. Therefore, accounting for the Korean War missing involves not only North Korea, but China and Russia as well.
The problems the United States faces in recovering soldiers who have fallen into Communist hands predates even World War II. We note that the Bolsheviks captured American soldiers on the Archangel and Siberian fronts during the Intervention of 1918-19. Additionally, the U.S. is not alone in trying to account fully for missing and captured soldiers in the period immediately following past wars. Many of our allies from the Korean conflict still have unaccounted for servicemen.
Because the Committee's focus concerned the possibility that American POWs could still be alive, our resources were devoted primarily to investigating the relatively recent conflict in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Committee did focus considerable attention on investigating previous wars and conflicts. A discussion of this phase of the Committee's investigation is contained in Chapter 9 of this report.
Previous Investigations
The Select Committee began its work in October, 1991 fully aware that the POW/MIA issue had been examined and investigated by Congress and the Department of Defense many times in the past. One of the challenges facing the Committee was whether it could uncover significant information that previous investigations into the subject had not.
The Committee's approach has been to learn from, and build on, those previous investigations, without necessarily accepting as valid either the methods or the findings of those inquiries. The Committee's review of earlier studies has helped to focus resources and attention on areas that had not been thoroughly examined before or where still unanswered questions had been raised.
It should be noted that earlier investigations have varied widely in content, method, purpose and work product. Most previous efforts have consisted simply of Congressional hearings or single-purpose studies into the workings of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The only previous study that was comparable in its original mandate to that of the Senate Select Committee was that of the Montgomery Committee in 1975-1976. A summary of prior investigations and hearings is included as an appendix to this report.
The Montgomery Committee
The most extensive and influential of prior Congressional investigations into the POW/MIA issue was conducted by the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, known as the "Montgomery Commission report" after Committee chairman, U.S. Rep. G.V. "Sonny" Montgomery. The investigation included public hearings, private meetings with U.S. officials, including President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and direct talks with key government officials in Vietnam and Laos. The Montgomery Committee reviewed many of the same issues that would be considered by the Senate Select Committee 16 years later. These included the implementation of the Paris Peace Accords, the possibility that U.S. POWs may have survived in Laos and DIA procedures for obtaining the fullest possible accounting of POW/MIAs.
The most significant and widely-quoted finding in the Montgomery Committee's December 13, 1976 final report was its conclusion that "no Americans are being held alive as prisoners in Indochina, or elsewhere, as a result of the war in Indochina." The Committee did not, however, exclude the possibility that some American servicemen might have remained behind voluntarily, citing specifically one deserter and one defector (then listed officially as a POW) who "were alive in Indochina in the early 1970's and may still be alive."
During its investigation, the Committee reviewed the files of the 33 U.S. servicemen still listed as POW in 1976. The Committee concluded that six of the 33 had been classified improperly as POWs, and that there was no evidence that 16 others had ever been taken prisoner. The Committee identified only 11 POWs who had not been accounted for by the Vietnamese.
Although the Committee found no "dereliction or malfeasance of duty on the part of U.S. Government officials," it did cite the military security classification system for contributing to "unnecessary confusion, bitterness and rancor" among POW/MIA families. It also found that the DOD's decision to conceal actual loss sites during the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia "contributed to the mistrust expressed by some next of kin."
The Montgomery Committee's report strengthened the view of those who felt that no American POWs had been left behind, but failed to persuade others. Representatives Joe Moakley, Benjamin Gilman and Tennyson Guyer, all Members of the Committee, questioned the Committee's basis for concluding that no American prisoners were alive in Indochina and the National League of Families released a 25 page report criticizing the Committee's methodology and its overwhelming reliance on data provided by the U.S. Government.
During its own investigation, the Select Committee interviewed Angus MacDonald, who served as staff director for the Montgomery Committee. Mr. MacDonald said that the Montgomery Committee's inquiry was focused almost solely on the question of whether American POWs remained alive at that time (1975-1976) and not on whether some may have been left behind after Operation Homecoming in 1973. Mr. MacDonald also confirmed that the Montgomery Committee did not receive access to many of the Executive branch documents made available to the Select Committee, particularly intelligence information and those dealing with the negotiation and aftermath of the Paris Peace Accords.
The Woodcock Commission
In February, 1977, shortly after taking office, President Carter appointed a Presidential Commission on Americans Missing and Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. The five member Commission was chaired by Leonard Woodcock, President of the United Auto Workers, and was designed to help the President gain greater cooperation on the POW/MIA issue from the governments of Southeast Asia.
Although the Commission was not empowered to negotiate, it was instructed to seek all available information from the Governments of Vietnam and Laos and to listen carefully to the concerns of those governments on other matters of interest, including possible U.S. economic aid. The hope was that the Lao and Vietnamese would be more forthcoming on POW/MIA matters if they sensed a willingness on the part of the U.S. to consider such issues as normalization of relations and reconstruction aid.
The centerpiece of Woodcock Commission activities was a visit of several days in mid-March, 1977 to Vietnam and Laos. The delegation was told by leaders in both countries that they were willing to cooperate on POW/MIA matters, but that the United States should also take steps concerning economic aid and reconstruction. In Vietnam, the Commission received the remains of 12 U.S. airmen and was informed that a specialized office would be established by the government to receive information on POW/MIA related matters. In Vientiane, government officials emphasized the difficulty of looking for the remains of MIAs in a nation as rugged, remote and impoverished as Laos, and said that all U.S. POWs captured in Laos had already been returned.
Like the Montgomery Committee, the Woodcock Commission concluded that "there is no evidence to indicate that any American POWs from the Indochina conflict remain alive." The Commission found that the Vietnamese "have not given us all the information they probably have," but cited "a clear, formal assurance" from the Vietnamese that they would look for MIA information and remains. The Commission also concluded, pessimistically, that "for reasons of terrain, climate, circumstances of loss, and passage of time, it is probable that no accounting will ever be possible for most of the Americans lost in Indochina. Even where information may once have been available, it may no longer be recoverable due to the ravages of time and physical changes."
It is worth noting that the Woodcock Commission's task was more diplomatic than investigatory. It did not seek to replicate the work of the Montgomery Committee, to review files, hold hearings or develop new sources of information. Instead, it relied almost entirely on briefings from U.S. agencies, POW/MIA activists and others. The Commission clearly operated on the assumption that further POW/MIA information could not be gathered without cooperation especially from the Vietnamese, and that cooperation would most likely be forthcoming if overall U.S.-Vietnamese relations were improved.
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