CIVILIANS MAY BE KEY TO POW DISCREPANCY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 15, 1993                   TAG: 9304150067
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
CIVILIANS MAY BE KEY TO POW DISCREPANCY
North Vietnam held several hundred Asian civilians in 1972 whom it counted as American prisoners of war, a likely explanation of the discrepancy between the 1,205 POWs a Russian document says Vietnam held and the 591 released after the war, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst said Wednesday.
The Asians were captured while on covert missions for U.S. forces from 1961 to 1968 and were kept in North Vietnamese prisons along with American military personnel. These Asian agents always were referred to as Americans in North Vietnamese documents and broadcasts, said Sedgwick D. Tourison Jr., who was a senior analyst in DIA's POW-MIA office for five years.
The Russian document, purportedly a translation of a senior Vietnamese general's Politburo briefing about U.S. prisoners in September 1972, was obtained by the United States last week and is being evaluated by U.S. officials, who appear inclined to support Tourison's analysis.
Some family groups, veterans' organizations and members of Congress have seized on the document as evidence that Vietnam has deceived the United States about its prisoners for 20 years and may still be holding some of the 1,166 U.S. servicemen whose fate remains officially undetermined.
Those groups are unlikely to be swayed by the views of Tourison, who has a position to defend: He has said publicly since 1988 that no prisoners remain alive, although "there were a lot of unanswered questions in 1973," the year Vietnam returned all the U.S. POWs it said it was holding.
Tourison, a former intelligence officer and prisoner interrogator in Vietnam and Laos, also was an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, which spent last year examining the issue of missing Americans.
North and South Vietnam exchanged prisoners in the spring of 1973, but according to Tourison, the South Vietnamese and other Asian agents captured on the covert missions were not included because they were civilians. They were essentially forgotten during the peace negotiations and remained in North Vietnamese prisons for years after the war.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB