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

DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994                   TAG: 9401020018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

DOCUMENTS SAY LAOS KEPT POWS

From a huge archive of recently declassified documents about the Vietnam War, new evidence is emerging that some American pilots held prisoner in Laos were not released at the end of the war, and that U.S. officials might have known where some of them were.

The Defense Department lists 330 Americans, almost all pilots and crew, as missing in action in Laos. Most were certainly killed when their planes crashed in the remote jungles of the mountainous, sparsely populated country.

Officially, only two American fliers, Col. Charles Shelton and Lt. Col. David Hrdlicka, are known for certain to have been alive in custody of pro-communist Pathet Lao rebels. Shelton and Hrdlicka died in captivity in the 1960s, Pentagon officials believe. No other reports, whether from human sources or aerial photographs, of Americans held prisoner by the Pathet Lao have ever been verified, according to the Defense Department.

But declassified documents from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency provide some support for those who argue that the number of prisoners was considerably higher, perhaps as high as 41 Americans.

Some military intelligence specialists and prisoner of war activists have believed for years that U.S. prisoners may have been left behind in Laos. Senior officials of the Nixon administration, in anguished testimony before a Senate committee in 1992, acknowledged that they feared it was true at the time but said they decided then there was little they could do.

None of the Americans released by North Vietnam in 1973 had been held by the Pathet Lao in areas where, according to some intelligence documents, groups of downed U.S. fliers were kept prisoner. Aside from Shelton and Hrdlicka, the identities of such fliers taken prisoner, if in fact that occurred, and their ultimate fates remain unknown.

The United States never acknowledged officially participating in a war in Laos, and Laos was not a party to the Paris accord. U.S. negotiators believed the Pathet Lao communists would deliver their prisoners if ordered to by Hanoi.

U.S. officials were shocked when only nine were delivered from Laos, according to declassified documents and testimony at the 1992 hearings.

Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon in 1973, was furious in 1992 at being accused, in effect, of having knowingly abandoned U.S. prisoners.

Nixon said in 1973 that all POWs were on their way home and later that all had returned.

But the declassified documents show there was U.S. intelligence information that the Pathet Lao held some U.S. fliers in caves near the border with Vietnam.

If any of the intelligence information was correct, the apparently inescapable conclusion is that some men were abandoned to their fates when the last U.S. troops left Indochina, unless the Pathet Lao killed them, as some U.S. officials believe.

by CNB