June 19th, 1996
Chairman Dornan, Committee members and other distinguished guests, I wish to express my deep appreciation for your invitation to testify before this Committee on the POW/MIA issue, an issue that continues to create controversy in our country. As a private citizen and a researcher who has spent a considerable amount of time studying captured enemy documents, wartime interrogation reports, Oral History interviews, and Signal Intercepts of PAVN Air Defense communications, I welcome the opportunity to convey some of the information I have learned to this Committee for its review and discussion. I will limit my opening remarks to two areas that I believe the Committee should investigate when considering whether the Vietnamese are cooperating on solving this contentious issue. At the end, I would also like to make some recommendations that I hope you will undertake to improve the ability of interested citizens like myself to conduct POW research.
First, Mr. Bill Bell and I recently completed a one-year study of POW handling organizations and Vietnamese POW cooperation entitled "POWS and Politics: How much does Hanoi Really Know." This paper was presented at the most prestigious academic conference on Vietnam, which was recently held in April at Texas Tech University. Our findings were that the Vietnamese Communist Party, despite much rhetoric in their media to the contrary, undoubtedly continues to view this issue as not only an Intelligence and Security issue, but an Economic/Political one. Mr. Bell and I provide a large body of evidence to show that Vietnamese POW policies were formulated to exploit POWs for communist intelligence requirements and propaganda designs. These policies are revealed through reviewing the wartime interrogations of communist soldiers and cadre, along with examining dozens of captured POW policy documents. This policy, part of a broader program termed "Proselytizing," used the POW issue as one facet of a vast propaganda effort to influence the civilian masses and the military forces of the South Vietnamese and the U.S., along with the remainder of world-wide public opinion, to turn against the war, or at minimum, take a neutralist position. Like the French before us, the North Vietnamese believed our "rear" was vulnerable to political manipulation, while theirs was secure. We believe their approach of attempting to influence U.S. political policies towards Vietnam, such as lifting the embargo and gaining diplomatic recognition through control of the POW/MIA issue, continues today.
We can debate whether the proselytizing programs fostered or even had a measurable impact on the anti-war movement. The Vietnamese often tried hard themselves to quantify the success of their proselytizing programs. But regardless of the relative success or failure of their propaganda programs, there can be no doubt that the Communist Party completely controlled all types of proselytizing, and that two types in particular, Military and Enemy Proselytizing, were deeply intertwined with their Security forces.
By way of a brief explanation, Enemy Proselytizing cadre were Political officers assigned to PAVN forces and who reported through PAVN channels to the General Political Directorate, the Communist Party organization that controlled the PAVN. These Enemy Proselytizing cadre handled routine POW matters while also engaging in interrogations for information of an immediate tactical or propaganda value. However, the other type, Military Proselytizing cadre, were under the direct control of the Communist Party and reported directly through Party Channels. These cadre had the responsibility for both penetration operations, i.e., agents, and convincing POWs or enemy soldiers to desert and collaborate. Since many experts believe the best opportunity for finding any U.S. MIAs still alive, short of discovering a secret prison, comes from the ranks of the deserters, and if the deserters were handled by cadre directly reporting through Party channels, it seems apparent to us that the U.S. focus in this area should be as important as crash site recovery.
Therefore, Mr. Bell and I believe that, in addition to deserters, many of the answers to the ultimate fate of our soldiers can be found in the records of the Communist Party, as opposed to the JTF-FA's Archival Research Teams sole concentration on PAVN records. Further, since unilateral Vietnamese archival research efforts studied by us do not meet Western academic standards, it becomes difficult to determine whether Vietnamese research results of PAVN records are accurate and thorough, let alone honest. However, given the combination of the well-known Vietnamese penchant for record keeping and the communist mentality towards bureaucracy, we suspect that the Party records are more complete and well-indexed. Anyone who has studied communist systems knows that what the communists most fear within their system is the rise of a charismatic military leader, a fear known as Bonapartism, and so consequently maintain a close control over the military. This control, along with the traditional rivalry between the Security services and the military, indicates to us that a search combining Party, Security, and PAVN records would hold a greater potential for answers than a search strictly of PAVN records and the current limited examination of MOI materials. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the Vietnamese have not been asked by the U.S. government to search Party records, nor have any of the documents unilaterally turned over come from Party Archives.
Further, our examination of the Oral History interview program initially begun by Mr. Bell and later continued by less experienced, lower ranking JTF-FA personnel, has shown that the Vietnamese consistently claim that few records were kept by their military units due to the difficulties of the war. I would like to point out that if this claim were true, then why are there 954 rolls of microfilm of captured enemy documents sitting in the National Archives, which bear in mind was only 10% of the total captured and represents only those documents deemed worthy of translation. Anyone who has studied these microfilm rolls can see that they contain both mundane records such as weapons receipts, financial statements, medical records, and individual Personal History Statements, while also cataloguing high level Party and military strategic documents. Obviously, the opposing forces maintained a large bureaucracy, called the General Directorate of Rear Services, which provided all forms of logistics to their military. Along with the traditional communist insistence on ideological purity and thought control which resulted in numerous documents on Party policy, this Rear Services bureaucracy generated enormous amounts of documents, even in a jungle environment in the midst of a long and difficult war. For the Vietnamese to indicate otherwise, just as when they attempted years earlier to inform Gen. Vessey that their records had been "eaten by termites," suggests an attitude geared more towards continuing to control the process rather than genuine cooperation.
I would like to add one last point in judging Vietnamese cooperation. Many of the individuals interviewed under the Oral History Program state that remains will be difficult to find due to the severity of the American aerial bombardment, especially the B-52 strikes. Other rationale include that the remains were lost due to the scavenging of wild animals, or buried in extremely close proximity to stream beds and thus washed away by torrential rains. This occured despite long-standing Vietnamese directives, which date back to the war against the French, which require the burial of Americans in well-marked graves. One example of lost remains involves the case of Lt. James Kelly Patterson, a case you are familiar with Mr. Chairman. To quote from an earlier DIA/DPMO analysis of this case, "These requirements included precise marking of graves, usually in well-defined cemeteries, not on-the-spot burial locations. The locations were recorded and sent to higher, central command along with any personal effects and a full report on the circumstances surrounding the incident. That Lt. Patterson's ID card was returned to U.S. authorities indicates that this policy was apparently followed in this case. Also, in numerous recent reports the VNOSMP have stated that graves containing remains of U.S. personnel have been destroyed by wild beasts, natural calamities, reforming of the terrain, and U.S. bombings. The mounting incidence of such alleged loss of graves borders on the incredible. This report contains still another such claim."
In the second area I want to bring to the Committee's attention, I wish to remind the Committee of the many statements from former NSA analyst Jerry Mooney, and to draw the Committee's focus to one claim in particular by Mr. Mooney. Mr. Mooney has stated in the past that in July 1972, NSA intercepted a PAVN communication which indicated that a PAVN Air Defense Battalion had orders to execute 10 Americans. Over the years, in various affidavits and in Congressional testimony, statements like this by Mr. Mooney have either been ignored or ridiculed by DIA/DPMO. However, in November of last year, I found confirmation of Mr. Mooney's claim when I located the pertinent message, exactly as Mr. Mooney described it, in the POW/MIA records of the Library of Congress. With your permission Mr. Chairman, I would like it to be entered into the record along with my opening statement.
I shared this information with DPMO, hoping that DPMO would take the opportunity to research this incident thoroughly, and then publish a study on the intercept. In this way, I thought, a good faith effort by the government might begin a process of bridging some of the obvious differences between both sides. However, DPMO has as usual simply denied that this incident took place. If they conducted any analysis at all, it has remained hidden. In fact, they have again refused to meet with Mr. Mooney, even though he has offered on many occasions.
In my many conversations with Mr. Mooney, I have come to have a great respect for the capabilities of the National Security Agency. To sum up Mr. Mooney's position for you, PAVN Air Defense's used old style Soviet codes to communicate, used Soviet weapons and tactics to fight, and organized and trained under Soviet guidance. Because of this, PAVN Air Defense's were completely exploitable by NSA crypt systems and analysts, so exploitable that we achieved what Mr. Mooney calls the "Crown Jewel" of intelligence, Prior Knowledge. NSA collected and analyzed an enormous amount of information about the PAVN into a tremendously effective technical and product database, which included not only SIGINT, but HUMINT, ELINT, RADINT, and PHOTINT, along with additional information collected by other non-U.S. intelligence agencies under Third Party Agreements. This database was so effective that we could predict their responses, and just as importantly, we could follow their reporting on events down to the gun crew level, which provided us the ability to discern what was the truth, and what was not. This database enabled NSA to easily discriminate between the different message categories of Emulation, "Hot B," and Control/Dummy Traffic, versus information NSA initially judged to be reliable, and which was then later confirmed. According to Mr. Mooney, NSA judged this execution message to be accurate. For DPMO to now dismiss this wartime NSA analysis without releasing the unredacted contents of the message, conducting a search for Collateral and other SIGINT related material on the Vietnamese officer who signed the message, or engaging in a range of other research efforts to discern the validity or non-validity of this message, simply adds fuel to the conspiracy fire.
Therefore, if NSA was able to effectively exploit PAVN Air Defense communications, and possesses a vast database that enabled NSA to make outstanding intelligence estimates of the target's communications, it logically follows that if the man judged to be the leading expert on the PAVN Air Defenses says that the Vietnamese possess more knowledge on U.S. air losses and the fate of our pilots than what they have given us, those claims should be seriously investigated, not brushed off by DIA/DPMO as "intellectual musings" or allowed to be dismissed because NSA is afraid of revealing the extent of its capabilities. I would like to remind the Committee of the recommendation of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that further research in the NSA Archives should be conducted. If such research has been done, it has not been released. In addition, every time DIA/DPMO has gone to NSA to search for POW related material, NSA has discovered additional information. Indeed, it was Mr. Mooney who provided NSA with the computer codes that enabled them to recover the records presently on file in the L.O.C.
Lastly, I would like to offer some recommendations to the Committee that would hopefully further your understanding of the issue, and that would also assist the research efforts of private citizens like myself who are struggling to understand this difficult issue. First, investigate the Legal Agreement signed by Mr. Mooney and the Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with NSA that called for NSA to locate and release certain documentation. According to Mr. Mooney, the records in the L.O.C. represent only one portion of that agreement, which indicates that NSA has not fulfilled the terms of the Legal Agreement it signed with Mr. Mooney and the Senate Committee, or the data still remains classified. Second, create a Joint Documentation Center in which all the Vietnamese documents that have been turned over, their English translations, and their DPMO/JTF-FA analysis are present. The Vietnamese currently have such an archive center located in the Central Military Museum in Hanoi. Regardless of DPMO "concerns" over privacy laws, it seems odd to me that ordinary Vietnamese citizens can view these documents rather easily, yet no such program exists in the U.S. Third, release the files of the House Select Committee on POW Affairs from 1976. These files are currently housed at the National Archives. While the Senate Select files are open, due to normal restrictions the House files remain closed. If the Senate files are open, there is no need for the House files to be closed. Fourth, join with your Senate colleagues in amending the McCain Amendment to allow for the release of all the POW files maintained by DPMO. The McCain Bill was written so that only those files of individuals still missing at the time of the legislation, minus any families that didn't want their case released, were sent to the L.O.C. Thus, while DPMO maintains close to 3750 case files, only 44% of those were sent to the L.O.C. Additionally, those case files sent to the L.O.C. were the same case files that were "streamlined," i.e., stripped of much of the relevant all-source intelligence data, when the "Brightlight" database was given to the Vietnamese in 1989.
Again, thank you for your invitation. I will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Suggested Reading by AII POW-MIA: By the Author:
POWS and POLITICS:
How Much Does Hanoi Really Know?
Testimony of George J. Veith - June 19th, 1998
Before the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel
Testimony of George J. Veith - September 17th, 1996
Before the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel
The '1205 Document': Another View
The 'Real' Tailwind: The First POW Raids and the Tear Gas Controversy of 1965