Senate Select Committee - XXXV

Conclusion: Conspiracy Theories and Myths

Chairman Kerry: The reason I measure it against you years of service is that the minute somebody draws that kind of conclusion or says there is not evidence, I cannot find the evidence, some people in this country immediately take that person and, rather than look at the evidence objectively or rather than analyze how you may have come to that conclusion, they jump and suggest that you are there for part of a conspiracy because you have not come to the conclusion they want you to come to.

Now how do you feel with that? What is your advice to us as a former battlefield commander and general? How do you speak to that? You are obviously not a traitor to your country , and you are obviously, at least in my judgment, not somebody joining in a conspiracy. But you have sat here, after dedicating years of your life in retirement, to finding answers. And you cannot find credible evidence, correct?

General Vessey: Thus far, we have not. That's right.

Chairman Kerry: So what do you say to those people who throw you in a conspiracy?

General Vessey: I guess what I would say, what I've said to those who have confronted me personally, is this is not a religious issue. It's not a religious issue of faith. It is something -- it's a human issue, a material human issue on this earth. And there are facts that will disclose the answer to the questions we are seeking. Let's find the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.

In the meantime, you can have all the hopes that you want. But don't turn it into a religious faith that somebody's alive when we don't know whether or not they're alive.

Cries of "cover-up" or "conspiracy" are used often by people dissatisfied with the U.S. Government's progress on accounting for missing servicemen. The conspiracy charge is an easy one to make, but difficult to prove.

A prominent investigation of whether a conspiracy exists or existed on POW/MIA issues was conducted by Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, whose efforts are praised by the very activists who subscribe to the conspiracy theory. The Tighe Commission found:

no evidence that anyone in DIA (or anywhere else in the U.S. government) has intentionally covered up anything about the POW/MIA issue.

Its first conclusion was, "We have found no evidence of cover-up by DIA."

For a conspiracy theory to be valid, it would entail hundreds or even thousands of people from the military services, from the very lowest-rated enlisted person (E-1) through four-star admirals and generals; and in the civilian sector it would encompass civil servants from a GS1 through the Cabinet level. This would have been accumulated since 1973 and by this time would have encompassed in the millions of people that had access to sensitive information on the POW/MIA issue.

Gen. Vessey, a widely praised 46-year veteran, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President's Special Emissary to Vietnam since 1987, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, shares this view:

Senator McCain: In order for there to be a conspiracy or a cover-up of this issue, do you agree with me that it would have required the active participation of hundreds of members of the military?

Vessey: Yes, sir. And I think that's an improbable sort of thing. American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are not conspirators. It's hard to keep military secrets long enough to get the operation going along without the enemy knowing what's going on. Even at the time when we were at low ebb, we still had 100-and-some-odd people involved, and those rotated. Many of them rotated every two or three years. So I'd say the prospect or probability of a conspiracy being kept without it being blown wide open is almost zero.

Senator McCain: Have you ever seen any evidence of any conspiracy or cover-up?

Vessey: No, sir, I have not.

Senator McCain: Did you when you were in your position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Vessey: No, sir.

Senator McCain: Or at any other time in your military career?

Vessey: No, sir.

Another witness, the ranking officer in the Hanoi Hilton, was equally incredulous:

Senator McCain: We have had witnesses, Admiral, that there was after that a conspiracy, and that is why I was interested in the part of your statement that you remained involved in this issue for some years afterwards, that there was a conspiracy or a cover-up orchestrated by various administrations in the intervening years. Have you ever seen any evidence of that?

Admiral Stockdale: No.

Senator McCain: Do you believe that it would be possible?

Admiral Stockdale: No, I think . . . to go into it as a venture, you'd be a fool because there are so many possibilities of leaks and so forth.

Nor did Henry Kissinger place any credence in the idea:

There is no excuse, two decades after the fact, for anyone to imply that the last five Presidents from both parties, their White House staffs, Secretaries of State and Defense, and career diplomatic and military services either knowingly or negligently failed to do everything they could to recover and identify all of our prisoners and MIA's.

Howard Baker, formerly President Reagan's White House Chief of Staff and Senate Majority Leader, testified similarly:

I cannot think of a single thing that suggests to me that there was a conspiracy of silence or any active conspiracy or any other kind of conspiracy. . .

Others with long experience found charges of a conspiracy to be baseless as well. Maj. Gen. George Christmas:

Mr. Chairman, my experience is that most people who become well-informed on this issue have no trouble agreeing that the accounting of our missing men means obtaining information from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Those who maintain that there is some secret set of files being kept by misguided U.S. Government personnel intent on maintaining some bizarre cover-up are deluding themselves and the American people. The answers are in Southeast Asia and that is where the U.S. Government is, correctly in my view, putting its emphasis.

General Leonard Perroots:

Senator McCain: In order for a cover-up to be successful as has been alleged, it would have taken the active participation of hundreds if not thousands of military personnel?

General Perroots: Yes, sir.

Maj. Gen. Richard Secord:

Senator McCain: Do you believe that there was any conspiracy to cover up existence of any live Americans either in Laos or anywhere in Southeast Asia?

General Secord: No, sir, I don't. I've never seen any evidence of that.

Senator McCain: Do you believe that it would have been possible, without the knowledge of a number of military officers and enlisted people such as yourself who were in some way in the loop?

General Secord: No. There are so many people in that loop that it would not have been possible, in my opinion.

And witnesses who recently have spent time in the field testified about the possibility of a conspiracy:

Chairman Kerry: I want to ask you a question. You are under oath. You are either ex-service people or people committed to this effort. But there remains at large in this country a body of suspicion about people involved in it, and it comes largely from the way it's been handled and resourced in past years. I ask you this question under oath so that people can have some sense of where you're coming from.

And I want to know whether anyone here has ever seen any evidence or believes that there was a conspiracy to actually tube this or cover it up. Mr. Sydow?

Mr. Sydow: No, sir.

Chairman Kerry: Mr. Sheetz?

Mr. Sheetz: You've always seen me in civilian clothes. I've been in the Navy. I'm still in the Navy Reserves since 1965, so I consider myself sort of also a uniformed person. I've seen nothing to indicate conspiracy or cover-up.

Chairman Kerry: Colonel Cole?

Colonel Cole: Certainly not, sir.

Chairman Kerry: Mr. Gadoury?

Mr. Gadoury: Never.

Chairman Kerry: Mr. DeStatte?

Mr. DeStatte: Never, sir.

Chairman Kerry: Sergeant Deeter?

Sergeant Deeter: No, sir.

Chairman Kerry: Mr. Bell?

Mr. Bell: No, sir, I don't have any indication of a cover-up, but I think we should always stress objectivity in our work.

The Select Committee examined allegations of conspiracy and heard testimony about the allegation. No witness gave credible evidence that a conspiracy ever existed on the POW/MIA issue; nearly all called the notion an impossibility and found it highly unlikely that military personnel would ever be involved.

Myths

Another difficulty in separating fact from fiction in POW/MIA efforts has been the prevalence of myths. The amount of information on the issue overall is monumental and fictitious claims often contain just enough shards of truth to make them believable. Oft-repeated myths have become popular lore in the vast collection of stories about the Vietnam War and the POW/MIA issue in particular.

Island of Syphilitic Souls Theory

One of the stories perennially told in Vietnam and remembered today by many veterans, is about a secret island to which were sent, there to spend the rest of their lives, persons who had contracted a dangerous and incurable sexually-transmitted disease.

The premise was that the consequences of the disease were such that society could not risk the possibility of an epidemic in the United States. The existence and location of the island needed to be kept secret, so the story goes, so people sent to the island were listed as MIA or KIA/BNR.

Logic exposes the story's flaws. Veterans were not routinely given physical examinations immediately before leaving Vietnam or upon arrival to the U.S. -- foiling the island's purpose, because persons contracting a disease would carry it back to the USA undetected. As immediate "social" contact was common for many vets returning from Vietnam, the spread of any disease would have been inevitable -- and yet no such disease has surfaced in the U.S. population (AIDS' origins having been traced elsewhere). Logic notwithstanding, the myth prevails to this day as an explanation for the fate of some unaccounted-for Americans.

Systematic Lie Theory

Other stories are more difficult to disprove, but even their defiance of common sense does not stop their spread, which in turn mainstream media, fuels these rumors. For example, one persistent story is that the U.S. Government has been bringing POW/MIAs back secretly and providing them with new identities such, as is done in the federal witness protection program or, in the alternative, incarcerating them in mental hospitals. The ostensible reason for this secrecy is presumably to avoid contradicting official policy since 1973 that all live POWs were returned home. Another theory argues that since no amputees or mentally deranged people returned at Operation Homecoming, these men have been smuggled back and are kept hidden.

Committee investigators interviewed a newspaper reporter who printed this story as fact, his sources, and others with variations of this story; they found no factual support for it. One supposed "source" summoned to testify, and subpoenaed, was the victim of his ex-wife's fantasies.

"Black Ops" Theory

Another publication printed a suggestion that 2,454 men should be added to the list of 2,265 POW/MIAs -- because the additional 2,454 was the number involved in highly classified operations whose inclusion on the list of missing would have compromised the operations' secrecy.

"Crazies" and Amputees Theory

This belief and the belief about secretly smuggling individuals into the country and providing new identities assumes that no family members or friends who would miss these men or else that they willingly participated in a conspiracy of magnitude -- ideas that flout common sense. It is also belied by the testimony of Admiral James Stockdale, who testified about the return of at least one amputee.

Perhaps the most persistent kind of rumor grows out of events with simple, straightforward explanation:

The opening of a bigger, permanent office with the standing in the military hierarchy needed to get things done fueled suspicions that the move was designed to silence an investigator. Garnett Bell, a key player before Hanoi agreed to U.S. terms' full-time presence in-country, remained a key player after the office was changed to take advantage of the new opportunities.

In another case, the illness of a senior Vietnamese diplomat was twisted into accusations that he had been killed trying to defect over the POW/MIA issue and blaming Congressional offices for botching the defection. The diplomat's efforts to correct the story, through a letter to the editor, were then manufactured into a story that the diplomat only wrote the letter because there was a "gun to his head."

The Committee investigated both charges and found them baseless.