Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 9, 1993 TAG: 9309090093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The latest documentation, released by the Pentagon, is in the form of a purported transcript of a decades-old session of the Vietnam Workers Party in which up to 367 previously unaccounted-for American captives were described as still being held in North Vietnam.
The transcript was obtained this month by U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon from Soviet military intelligence files. It was provided by his counterparts on the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POW/MIAs.
Word of its existence Wednesday prompted some public and private officials pushing for a full accounting of all the Americans missing in Vietnam to brand it as further evidence that North Vietnam never returned all of the U.S. prisoners captured during the war.
Sen. Robert Smith, R-N.H., and a member of the joint commission, described the new document as "dramatic and deeply troubling."
Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families, said, "This document lends credence" to a growing body of evidence that North Vietnam held many more POWs than it admitted capturing.
But Secretary of Defense Les Aspin cautioned that Pentagon officials are just beginning to study the transcript. He said that while the material "may be an authentic document in that it came from the right people at the right time," its accuracy remains to be proven.
In contrast, the North Vietnamese acknowledged holding 368 POWs in spring 1973. A few months later, as the war ended, 591 American prisoners were repatriated.
by CNB