Appendix 6 : Selected Excerpts From Hearing Testimony - Part 13

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

... in 1990... I broke with the KGB and went public and denounced the organization as cruel, repressive and inhuman... What I am doing now is simply a continuation of my old story, for which I was sued... and deprived of my rank and pension and everything else. So I am not doing anything new...

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

Chairman Kerry: ...can you help us to understand why Mr. Nechiporenko allegedly said one thing to you at one moment and straight-out denies that he talked to anybody subsequently? Do you have an explanation for that?

General Kalugin: ...my explanation is that he had consulted his former superiors and they would tell him, just say one... I think that's a premeditated lie on the part of the former intelligence organization, and I know the reason... Vietnam remains to be probably one of the last listening posts in the Far East, and to lose a relationship with them... would probably be a major setback for the Soviet intelligence, so why not keep a story which was coordinated with the Vietnamese?

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

... I do care about people at home. I'm not a defector. I'm a citizen of my country. I love my country. I want to stay in that country. I want to change that country and transform it into something far better than we have today or we had in the last 70 years. And the United States, as I know it, is a country which I always felt friendly for and I will do my best to get both countries closer together and get Russia out of this mess and standing on its feet as a proud nation, a prosperous nation. That's my only desire.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

...to take any American against his will to the USSR would require a major political decision by the Politburo and Brezhnev personally... They would never risk [the damage to Soviet/American relations... It makes no practical sense, no political or military sense. They could have been interviewed on the spot and that made sense indeed.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

I do have a lot of obligations [regarding confidentiality], according to the old rules, but I think it's time to set new rules.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

The GRU is an autonomous organization and the KGB's role in regard to the military intelligence is to protect this agency from foreign intelligence agencies' penetration, and second, to control their political health, so to speak. That was the major role of the KGB. Otherwise, they would act autonomously, do their things without the KGB's knowledge.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

At least for us, for [American POWs] to go would be the best thing, because we would have probably some potential sources. To keep them in Vietnam, it's a loss of everything, it's a complete failure as an intelligence operation.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

Two years ago, or about that time, I said publicly that the KGB was a state within a state which would do everything to disrupt the process of democratization in my country. I was denounced as a liar, as a mental jerk or something, and I was stripped of my honors and everything, but one- and-a-half years later, Mr. Gorbachev, after his return from the Crimea, said the same -- the KGB was a state within a state -- and he confirmed what I has said previously. . . . everything that I have said so far found at a later time confirmation.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

I am sure that [Soviet military interrogation of U.S. POWs] happened, because they did have a major interest in American know-how, in weaponry, details, instructions. This would be a natural thing to expect, but this is my assumption. I do not say that this really happened.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

I would reject the idea of American POWs taken to the Soviet Union. We don't have to take them to the Soviet Union. They could have been interrogated in Vietnam. The Vietnamese wanted us to interrogate them... to take any American against his will to the USSR would require a major political decision by the Politburo and Brezhnev personally... They would never risk, because of one or a handful of Americans, to be taken inside to damage the Soviet/American relations... It makes no practical sense, no political or military sense. They could have been interviewed on the spot and that made sense indeed.

Soviet Union Kalugin 01/21/92

Sen. Reid: Why couldn't your story be a continuation of the intrigue, deceit and lies and destroying records that you were involved in for some 32 years?

General Kalugin: Well, it makes no sense. I am 57 and I've lived a very interesting life. Today I want to live a different life, just an honest and simple [one]. You may believe it -- as I say, take it or leave it.

Soviet Union Kerry 01/21/92

General Kalugin's startling account has been disputed by the Government of Vietnam, discounted by the CIA and denied outright by the KGB agent who allegedly carried out the interviews. This conflict between statement and denial is precisely the type of situation the Committee expects to run into time and time again. Our intent is to build as complete a record as we can, to take neither allegations nor denials at face value, to contact original sources whenever possible, and to locate contemporaneous documentation wherever it exists. We cannot, in this way, be sure of arriving at the truth, but we can be certain that we have left no avenue unexplored in our pursuit of the truth.

Soviet Union Kohl 11/15/91

What happens in 41 years that we do not go back and re-inquire and ask whether or not there is some information that would be useful?.. We inquired about many, many people in the Soviet Union about whom we were concerned -- Soviet Jewry, rightfully so, Raoul Wallenberg and many others. Why were we not at the same time asking consistently about POWs and missing POWs in the Soviet Union that we did not have any information on, or inadequate information on?

Soviet Union Mooney 01/22/92

The interest in Moscow Bound is totally surprising to me... It's an intelligence given... The Soviets do take our people... Unlike World War II and Korea, the Soviets did not need a bunch of people for labor. They were after the minds... They were not stealing them by the hundreds. They were few and rare.

Soviet Union Shields 06/25/92

Some early releases came home from Vietnam via Moscow, but we never had any indication that prisoners were transferred to the Soviet Union and detained there.

Soviet Union Smith 01/21/92

General Kalugin's comments have produced admissions from the CIA, the KGB, and even Vietnam, that at least one American POW was interrogated by the Soviets. For seven years, I was told just the opposite.

Soviet Union Vessey 06/25/92

Vessey: And Colonel Nechiporenko who was Kalugin's source, said that isn't what I told Kalugin. I told him I interviewed one person in 1973... The Vietnamese say yes, that's what happened... Now, surely the Soviets gave questions to the Vietnamese. There are al sorts of information that the Soviets desperately wanted from our people, and surely they had worked out some sort of arrangement to try to get that information from our people. As far as we know, from debriefing the prisoners returned, none of them reported having been interrogated by the Soviets. There were some Cubans involved, but none were interrogated by Soviets.

Senator Kassebaum: Any Chinese?

Vessey: And so far as I know, none by the Chinese.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Sen. Grassley: Mr. Andrews, I want to ask about Morse code K. DIA determined that the Dong Manh facility was a re-education center, yet the CIA analysis shows it to be one of the most security facilities that they have seen, and we have had reference to that in the CIA memo. Can you back up your assessment and indicate to us why the CIA's analysis is wrong?

Mr. Andrews: Senator, as I said in my statement and in subsequent questions already, that initial analysis was their best estimate at the time. This was mad prior to the extensive interviews we have had of inmates of the facility where we got a lot more information on the security and the nature of the facility. That's our best judgment.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

The USA and possible K remain unexplained despite extensive tasking of information collection activities of the intelligence community. No correlation to a know, unaccounted for individual -- to a known, unaccounted for individual -- has been made. And unless an unexpected lead develops, there is little more that can be done other than continuing to monitor the situation.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: Now that, to say the least, is pretty outrageous, based on this Senator's opinion. You teach people to communicate, you teach them how to communicate, you teach them what to communicate with, and then you do not keep the number so that you can identify them when they communicate. You are going to have a hell of a job identifying them, are you not?

Mr. Andrews: Absolutely.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Every image that I am aware of that we have taken, we've analyzed and the committee has been made aware of, and we've talked about today...

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

...of all the millions of square kilometers of territory in Southeast Asia that we've examined over the years, we really only have two unexplained sets of symbols which were clearly intended to communicate something to an observer from above. And that's the 19 or 1573 TH and the USA with the possible K.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...let us assume that a number appears on a photograph. Let us assume that you cannot make any determination any way, shape, or form, that thing was created by a natural object. Your analysts say there is nothing that we can find anywhere in any of the imagery in any way we analyze this, that in any way that this number that we see was made by natural objects.

You then see that number. What is going to be your recommendation if you cannot determine for sure that it was a man-made object? What is going to be your recommendation? What are you going to do?...

Mr. Andrews: Sir, I will offer you a personal opinion. We always, when we have reason to believe that something may be an indicator, we follow up, as Mr. Erickson says or as Mr. Dussault said. The first thing you do is go collect more information. So that's exactly what we would do. Until we could resolve it, we would follow up. And that's what we've done with these others.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

I think that it's -- it's very hard when you're trying to go back a number of years to try to put yourself in the place of an imagery analyst or an analyst in that time frame tho know why he concluded what he concluded. We've done the best we could, at the committee's request, to reexamine all this imagery and bring in multiple people to look at it. And what we looked at, we saw a possible 52 that we believed we could explain.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Mr. Andrews: If there was a number on the ground that an escaped prisoner made and we detected it, we would not dismiss it until we had done everything we could to resolve what the case was.

Vice Chairman Smith: Well, you may not be able to.

Mr. Andrews: Well -- and that's our problem. So we keep it unexplained. It would immediately go on my unexplained list, Senator Smith.

Vice Chairman Smith: Well, it sits on the unexplained list, what happens to the poor guy down there that is making the number?

Mr. Andrews: Senator, we do everything we can with the resources available to us to follow up on these various numbers.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Viewing a poor-quality print with a magnifying glass is just not how imagery exploitation should be done...When the JSSA personnel viewed the original quality imagery of the printed photography on a light table using high resolution optics the nature of all the supposed evader symbols became clear.

They were simply vegetation, shadows, or artifacts of the photography production process. Some possible symbols were even in the tops of 200 foot tall tress, an unlikely place for an evading POW to leave a signal. When shown photographs of other locations -- and I think this is very significant -- other locations in Africa and one in Utah, the JSSA personnel also saw the same kinds of symbols, symbols which again disappeared on the light table.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

No one -- not DIA, not CIA, and not the JSSA -- can correlate the USA and possible K symbols to an unaccounted- for individual.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...in spite of all that information, in spite of the fact that they were taught to provide identifying information to imagery from above, we do not have the list of those identifier numbers to find them if they signal. Is that correct?...

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir. As far as I know right now, yes, sir.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: I think the laws of probability would indicate to you that if there are a series of numbers that identify with an individual or individuals who are missing in action in Southeast Asia and those numbers correlate with individuals, the laws of probability would tell you that it is a very high probability that those people are, in fact, identified with those numbers.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: Is it your position that these symbols are -- well, to use the term, is it your position that what you say on the imagery is valid until proven otherwise?

Mr. Andrews: Yes, sir.

Vice Chairman Smith: Is it your position, as well?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

...the other point that Senator Smith made that I would like to respond to regarding circling the wagons and directed that everybody get in line...

None of the players, and you have deposed them on this particular subject, none of the players were asked or directed or forced in anyway to change their minds...

We simply brought them together so that we could better serve the committee. We're not circling the wagons. We want to get the information to you. We believe there's a good story to tell if we get the accurate information and not the incomplete information on the table.

Symbols Andrews 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...nobody said to this Committee when we showed you this [information on symbols], thank you... We will take a look at that. Maybe we missed something. That is not what we heard.

What we heard was immediately circling the wagons, pulling everybody together, saying we will have one position on this. No one is to talk to the committee. We will have one position to the committee, and we are telling you now that position is that those are not symbols and those people are not missing. And I find it outrageous that is the way this issue is being treated...

Andrews: Senator, if I could, first of all, we do take them very seriously. When the USA came to our attention, we had an analyst on an airplane within a couple of days to Southeast Asia to try to follow-up on actions that we could take to determine what was there. We collected additional intelligence information and continued that process.

Symbols Chagnon 10/15/92

Ms. Chagnon: The gentleman here before us said that here was one possibility of these being written by POWs, one being that it was a ruse by resistance people. Those letters could be Lao letters.

Vice Chairman Smith: What would it say in Lao? Does it say anything?

Ms. Chagnon: ...it could be ba ra hoi, which means don't wait. It could be the abbreviation for those three words...I have a Lao friend staying with us...I said what would these letters stand for if you saw them anywhere, and she immediately picked out ba ra hoi...

Symbols CHECK QUOTE

He also stated under oath, that although Committee investigators suggested he contact JSSA to become educated in the distress symbol program, he did not arrange for such a briefing until June; page 21.

Symbols Clapper 12/01/92

The joint investigation team travelled to Sam Nuea Province on 29 November '92, located the rice field where the USA symbol was made, interviewed it's owner, and discovered that the owner's eldest son made the USA symbol by copying it from an envelope because he liked the shape of the letters.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

Sen. Grassley: Mr. Dussault, did you also think that you saw a name faintly scratched in the field?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir.

Sen. Grassley: Without telling us the name, did you try to match it with the names on the missing list?

Mr. Dussault: About three days later, yes, sir. At first I didn't realize it was a name.

Sen. Grassley: Did it match any names?

Mr. Dussault: To my recollection, it did.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

And in this case, in my mind, it's a possibility that the individual may have tried over the last 15 years various signals. None of those got any attention, so he's going to go with a blatant USA.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

Chairman Kerry: And it has the walking appearance, whatever that extra -- I don't want to get into any classified area. Do you believe it's distinctly a K?

Mr. Dussault: It to me looks like a K, and that's how I think we ought to consider it. And I've said that in writing, I think, and I've really done that for a reason. My position is...Give the benefit of the doubt to the operator. That's always been my concern.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

Sen. Grassley: Did you see, 72 TA 88?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir. To my recollection that's what I saw.

Sen. Grassley: How did you interpret that?

Mr. Dussault: At first, my first interpretation of that is -- 72 was the year the guy went down. TZ was his E&E code letters. And 88 could have been the year he arrived there or the year he left. And that was my interpretation. I don't know if that's even close. That's just speculation.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

Sen. Grassley: When you saw 72 TA 88, did it match a person that was missing?

Mr. Dussault: Sir, again, we are talking a year, two letters, TA -- and those are E&E code letters that applied during 1972.

Sen. Grassley: when you found the name, though, did it match when that person went down?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir.

Symbols Dussault 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...we cannot assume that is made while the person is in captivity, can we? The person could have escaped, is that not correct?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir, that is correct.

Vice Chairman Smith: And made it while he was escaping?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, that's one of the possibilities. He could be an escapee hiding out in that area, made a K, went back into hiding, for a couple of weeks, stayed close by, within a kilometer, which is his training, and then goes back and does the USA. Again, maybe even at night, under a moonlit night, or something like that, he gets out there and works for three hours.

Symbols Dussault/ Erickson 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...we have an agency that teaches pilots escape and evasion procedures and identifying or authenticating numbers in order to locate them. Those people who taught that were not sent any imagery until at least, at the minimal, 1985; most of it was seen after this committee showed it to them in 1992. Is that correct?

Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir.

Mr. Erickson: Yes.

Symbols Elder 10/15/92

Vice Chairman Smith: ...If you could remove yourself from what you heard here this morning, did you ever hear any information from anybody regarding that, any indigenous person in Laos or anybody else who was in Laos regarding the USA?

Mr. Elder: I did not.

Symbols Erickson 10/15/92

Chairman Kerry: Now, we have discussed this previously, and this is not classified. But how long would it take a person to dig out a USA of that size?

Mr. Erickson: At least and hour per letter for one individual.

Chairman Kerry: So, three hours of work?

Mr. Erickson: At least.

Symbols Erickson 10/15/92

Chairman Kerry: Now, with respect to the K up there, it has been referred to occasionally as a walking K. Without getting into great details about walking, does that appear to be a walking K?

Mr. Erickson: To me, it does.

Symbols Godley 09/24/92

We had one very peculiar incident. Some random aerial photography happened to take a picture of a rice paddy or some cultivated area, and we thought we saw USAF spelled out in this field, even with an arrow. We got very excited about it, and we sent an intelligence team of local American irregulars -- these were Hmong. They went there and they said there was absolutely no evidence of any American or any other prisoners in that area.

Symbols Grassley 10/15/92

On October 2 and 5, the Committee received a full court debunking from DoD on the pilot code numbers in two closed sessions. They said that numerous sets of numbers seen in a photo and which match code numbers of know MIAs were shadows and vegetation. They made the numbers disappear, presto, just like that, by some sort of high-technology equipment.

Symbols Gray 12/04/92

Mr. Gray: Yes, sir, exactly. The owner was brought out. We talked to him about the symbol being seen in his field several years before. At first he didn't understand what we were talking about. As the conversation went on, he laughed when they showed him the line drawing of the USA. He said I know now what you're talking about. My sons did that 3 or 4 years ago and they did that based on letters that we got from our relatives in the United States.

We said we'd like to see those letters. They brought them out and written under the sender's address on these envelopes in big letters was USA. The owner of the rice field said my sons saw this. They went down, one of them wrote it in a hut. The other said I can do better than that, and he went out into the middle of the field, stacked up rice straw, and burned it in the shape of a USA.

We asked if we could speak to his sons and he said absolutely. They were brought out. They were 20 and 17-years-old. They admitted that they had made the symbol. The older son that he had done it by stacking up the rice straw. He was asked if he had written anything else and he said, yes, I made a stick airplane and he drew that for us. And he said he also did a dragon's head in the same area either days before or day after he burned the USA into the rice field.

We have pictures of the letters that came from the United States. It turns out most of the villages in Ban Hui Hindon have letters from the United States and all of them have on them in big letters USA. So he says -- the long man said that's where he got the idea for the USA.

Symbols Gray 12/04/92

Vice Chairman Smith: Mr. Gray, I have no reason to doubt what the individual told you. On the other hand, I do not have any reason to believe him either. So let me just ask you a tough question. Was he [given a polygraph test]?

Gray: He was not [given a polygraph test].

Symbols Gray 12/04/92

Vice Chairman Smith: Now do you have proof that he made this?

Mr. Gray: Do we have proof that he went out and burned a symbol into the field? We have his word.

Vice Chairman Smith: Well see the point I am making -- I am not doubting what you say, I am really not. I am just trying to make a point here that we make these quantum leaps when it relates that is not live Americans. We draw the conclusion the man is telling the truth. He may be, I do not know.

But I guess what frustrates me in trying to get to the bottom of the issue...is that when we get live- sighting reports, which are [given polygraph tests] and pass some, we do not believe them. And we do not have any evidence to contradict it in some cases. In many cases we do, but in some cases we do not, and we do not believe those reports.

So I mean I guess I get concerned about -- DIA and intelligence people are supposed to be strict and tough on methodology.

Symbols Santora 10/15/92

...when you're not looking at the original imagery and you're trying to detect something on anything else, any other form or copy of that imagery, then all bets are off on what you might see or might not see.

Symbols Sheetz 12/04/92

I share the Senator's concern about the need to be as careful as you can given the situation that you are in, to make sure you are collecting accurate information. And I would point out that I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about this and the first thing I asked Warren when he came back was there any indication at all that these kids had been coached or that someone had sort of prepared the war for Warren's entry and had pushed these people out.

Because I will admit, we have had experiences in the past in Southeast Asia in investigating cases where witnesses appear to have their story coached. But in this case we did not even know who we were looking for and it was only through happenstance that they were able to track these kids down. And basically they dug the kids out on the their own. They weren't pushed out there by a local Lao official saying ha, we found the person who made these symbols.

Symbols Shields 06/25/92

Sen. Robb: Let me just go back to the question that I think has troubled the panel... it has to do with the whole question of compartmentalization of information during a critical period and what appeared to be the lack of sharing of information and/or critical questions being directed to those who might have been able to help in that reconciliation process.

General Tighe observed during his testimony yesterday that when policy makers in the early 1970's made statements about no Americans being left behind, that the intelligence analysts tended to believe them, despite contradictions with most current intelligence, simply because they felt that the policy makers had access to compartmentalized information not available to them.

Shields: Senator, to my knowledge, all of the intelligence agencies, including the NSA, were part of our process. That information was fed in... into the DIA.

Symbols Smith 10/15/92

...it would be my position... that if information like this was provided to me, I would want to take the position that these symbols should be treated as valid until proven as otherwise. But that is not the position that has been taken here. The position that has been taken here is that these symbols are not valid.

Symbols Smith 10/15/92

...what do we need this agency for? If we have signals and we are training people to do is, and then when we get the signals but we do not have the capability to determine whether it is a signal, it does not make any sense to me.

Symbols Smith 10/15/92

[to Andrews] ...But basically, what you are saying here is that the analysis on 52, by your early analysis, is incorrect, or may have been incorrect. Therefore your analysis today very well may also be incorrect. And yet you are taking the emphatic position that you are correct.

Symbols Smith 09/24/92

if we are talking about negotiating an end to a war and accounting fully for all of our prisoners of war, and we have photographs like that -- if somebody has presented you an analysis of those photographs and they say they are not true, they are not accurate, they are not Caucasian, they are something else or somebody else, fine. But your testimony is not that you got that testimony. Your testimony is that you never saw the photographs, and that very well may be the case. But the point is, it shows there is a communication breakdown somewhere, in terms of information that we had on POWs.

Symbols Smith 10/15/92

Second, if a pilot were to attempt to communicate by ground signal, letter or whatever means, by using his authenticator number, the U.S. government will be unable to identify the individual if his number happened to be among those numbers DIA can't account for. This could be potentially tragic.

Vessey Cases Ford 11/15/91

The way we define a discrepancy case is, a case about which the United States Government has convincing evidence that the Governments of Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia should have specific knowledge. The term 'discrepancy case' includes not only individuals who were last known alive, but also individuals who we are not certain of their fate, or who were known dead but for whom the Indochinese Government should be able to provide information or remains.

Vessey Cases Trowbridge 06/24/92

...the 97 who were listed as prisoner that have not subsequently been accounted for. They have made their way into the General Vessey list as priority cases. And those are the cases that are the core of the search efforts that are ongoing right now.

Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92

It was not to mean that we weren't going to investigate the other cases. We were going to investigate all the cases, but these were the priority cases because they appeared to be the cases of those people had the best chance of being alive.

Vessey Cases Vessey 11/05/91

. . . my approach with the Vietnamese is that we are not trying to reconstruct the past or come up with war crimes trials or any such thing as that. We want to know what happened to our people. First, we want to know, are there any live Americans there? We are not going to ask the question about what you said in the past, that you said there were not any, and now there are. Fine, if there are some, let us have them and we are just going to ignore the past statements. If people have been killed under circumstances that are embarrassing, we are not going to make an issue out of that. What we want to know is where are our people, what happened to them?

Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92

So in early 1989 I asked DIA and JCRC to work together to refine the list and include all cases where the evidence showed that the person involved was alive when he last knew of him and we had evidence that he likely came under Vietnamese control or was captured and for whom we had not yet had an accounting.

I also asked that the border areas be searched for the same sort of cases. And as a result of that effort we added 39 people lost in Vietnam and came up with 49 so-called discrepancy cases in the border area.

Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92

I wanted to be able to confront that assertion that they had held no live prisoners with the sort of glaring examples that led Americans to believe that there may well have live American prisoners held. So at that time, the Defense Intelligence Agency officials gave me a list of about 70 cases... they were the cases for those individuals for whom the Vietnamese should have been able to account readily, some of them were not cases of people we thought had been reported to have died in captivity, but the remains had not been returned and we believed that the Vietnamese government should be able to account for them.

Most of them were in fact people who the U.S. believed we had the evidence to show that they were alive when we last saw them, they were captured or about to become captured.

Vessey Cases Vessey 11/05/91

The people who are missing are my comrades, as they were comrades of many of the people on this committee.

Watergate Kerrey 09/22/92

The question today for this committee is how could this have happened? Several witnesses who were appointed policymakers in 1973 have identified Watergate as the culprit. They believe the United States would have forced North Vietnam to abide by the terms of the peace treaty had President Nixon not been weakened and distracted by the scandal of Watergate. Perhaps this is true.

It also seems likely to me their attitude towards informing the public, coupled with their obsessive desire and need for secrecy, led to information about our missing being withheld from the American people. While they were trying to keep information about Watergate secret, they were also trying to keep information about our missing in action secret. The faulty judgment which resulted in one tragedy also produced a second.

Watergate Kerry 09/22/92

It is clear also that paramount among the pressures of that time, when the agreement was signed and implementation began, was the energy and attention- sapping saga of Watergate.

Watergate Kissinger 09/22/92

Now on the impact of Watergate, I think it is only fair to point out that the opposition to using any kind of military force strongly antedated Watergate. If you read the media of February and March when the Administration was repeatedly saying that it preserved the right to enforce the agreement, we were constantly told that we had no right to enforce a cease-fire. And it was something we always objected to on the ground that under those conditions any time America ends a war and makes a cease-fire, it has, in effect, surrendered because it cannot enforce what it has fought for.

Watergate Kissinger 09/22/92

...it is quite possible that President Nixon did not have the same strength to resist that pressure as he might have had without Watergate. He never said that to me. I think the position he took, which was that he wanted one more negotiation before considering military operations, was a perfectly reasonable position. I had a somewhat different view, but I had always a somewhat more professorial view and he had a somewhat more understanding of the political situation; that's why he was President.

Watergate Rodman 09/21/92

I think knowing all the risks that we were heading into as 1973 began, none of us anticipated Watergate and how it would explode and totally wipe out Nixon's political leverage, and I think our analysis was that some of the crucial votes in the Congress that we used to defeat were lost this time and it was probably because of the demoralization of the President's supporters, so this was an unanticipated factor.

But I agree with what Winston said earlier, and it's very important. We signed this agreement believing that if we did the right thing we had a good chance to maintain it, and that there was a chance that the South Vietnamese -- that the struggle within Vietnam would turn into some kind of political competition. There was a chance for this agreement to survive, and a lot depended on what we did.

Chairman Kerry: Well, I accept that, and I said earlier, and I'm convinced from all the reading that I have been doing, that Watergate looms far larger in this than I had ever imagined...

Watergate Secord 09/24/92

What I think happened was we evolved through the Watergate era on this issue, and it just dragged on and on, and it was just kind of pushed off to one side, and it became less important in people's minds. And to our discredit, I think, it kind of left the consciousness of nearly everyone. But I think those of us who knew the truth, or what we thought to be truth, were always bothered by this. I don't know what else I can say.