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

DATE: THURSDAY, April 22, 1993                   TAG: 9304220147
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. GENERAL: RUSSIAN MIA FIGURES WRONG

A presidential envoy who visited Vietnam told President Clinton on Wednesday there are many flaws in a newly discovered document that says Hanoi once held hundreds more American prisoners than it claimed.

"The list [of errors] is long," retired Gen. John Vessey Jr. said, casting further doubt on the document discovered in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow.

"We know that some of the facts that are alleged in the Russian document are wrong, a lot of the facts," Vessey told reporters after talking with Clinton.

Vessey reported to Clinton on his two days of talks in Hanoi about Americans still missing.

White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos said the administration was not ready to make a final judgment on the Russian document. "But certainly, Gen. Vessey makes a lot of good points," he said.

Vessey said the Russian document was authentic but simply inaccurate. He said the Vietnamese told him it was based on "bad intelligence."

After visiting Clinton, Vessey went to the Pentagon to brief officials there. He said Vietnamese officials had shown him a document, known as the "Blue Book," which the U.S. government had requested long ago to help account for missing Americans.

Vessey said that if the Vietnamese "Blue Book" accounting is correct, cross-checking it against U.S. records of aviators lost in that period indicates the highest number that could have been held on Sept. 15, 1972 would be 467 - not the 624 mentioned in the Russian document.

He estimated it would take another five to 20 years to achieve "the fullest possible accounting" of Americans lost in Vietnam.

by CNB