Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993 TAG: 9301050162
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
LEAVING OF POWS SUSPECTED
A special Senate committee report concludes that prisoners of war probably were left behind in Southeast Asia when the United States pulled out of the Vietnam War in 1973.The carefully worded report, prepared by the staff of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs after more than a year's investigation, says the panel found no hard evidence that specific prisoners were "consciously left behind," according to portions of the draft document obtained by Newsday.
Nevertheless, it asserts that the committee's review of data compiled by consecutive administrations over the past two decades found information supporting the likelihood of the "survival at least for some [POWs], at least for a while," after the repatriation on April 12, 1973, of 591 American prisoners.
Vietnam has insisted it returned all POWs.
The draft report concludes: "There remains the troubling question of whether the Americans who were expected to return but did not were, as a group, shunted aside and discounted by the government and population alike. The answer to that question is essentially yes. It is in this sense that a form of abandonment did take place."
The committee bases its conclusions on these indicators:
Intelligence reports of Americans known to be in captivity before the repatriation but not among the 591 returnees.
Claims until recently by officials of the Pathet Lao, the Hanoi-linked communist rulers of Laos, that they were holding American prisoners.
A Pentagon estimate before repatriation that 40 Americans were held in Laos. Twelve were returned.
The debriefing of returnees, who identified more than 70 fellow prisoners who were not repatriated.
Nevertheless, the document concludes that there is only a slight chance that Americans still are being held against their will in Southeast Asia.
The report lays much of the blame for the claimed abandonment of POWs on former President Nixon, who signed the peace treaty that ended U.S. involvement in the war and led to the return of the 591 American prisoners. Among them were Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is on the panel.
The document notes that Nixon was told by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that U.S. intelligence officers believed the list of American POWs provided by Laos shortly before the prisoner exchange was incomplete, but ordered the POW swap to go ahead anyway.
The report says Nixon told Kissinger that Laos' "failure to account for the additional prisoners [after the prisoner exchange] would lead to a resumption of bombing." But Kissinger told the panel that Nixon "was later unwilling to carry through on this threat."
The document, which is being reviewed by committee members and is expected to be released in final form next week, is unlikely to please POW activists. They contend that neither the panel nor the Pentagon has been diligent in pursuing reports of live-sightings of POWs in Southeast Asia.
Ted Sampley, the head of Homecoming II, a militant POW organization that publishes a monthly newspaper on POW issues, said, "We've already been getting various tidbits about the report and most of us are devastated right now. We trusted the committee to do just one thing for us, give us the truth, and they failed."
By saying that Americans likely were left behind, the panel contradicts several earlier congressional studies that concluded that all Americans were returned.