 Former Vietnamese intelligence officers
to be hired to help in MIA search
WASHINGTON, September 23, 2003 - In a
bid to learn more about American servicemen who may have been held captive
in Vietnam after the war, the military plans to hire retired senior
Vietnamese intelligence officers to search classified Vietnamese
government files, the Pentagon said Monday.
The unusual, if not unprecedented, arrangement has been approved by
Vietnam and should get started within months, said Jerry Jennings, head of
the Pentagon's office of POW-MIA affairs.
Jennings said in an interview he is
willing to trust the Vietnamese government to make the effort succeed.
"We're assuming good faith on one
thing: that the government wouldn't sign on for this just to rip us off
for the pay for a retired individual for three months; that there is good
faith in terms of this guy conducting an honest search," he said.
The retired Vietnamese officials would
submit regular summaries of their findings, but documents that contained
relevant information about POWs or MIAs would not be turned over to the
United States.
Jennings, who was a CIA intelligence
officer in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, said there has not yet
been a selection of the one or more retired Vietnamese officers who would
work under U.S. contract. He said U.S. authorities would have some say in
the selection, but the pool of potential candidates would be vetted first
by the Vietnamese government.
"We're going to have a right to
look at the individual before he's signed on, and we're going to have the
opportunity to ensure he has a background that would enable him to do what
amounts to an archival study," Jennings said. He said he would be
prepared to end the program in as little as three months "if we come
up with a dry hole," or no new leads on missing Americans.
The Pentagon says 1,882 Americans are
unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, but none is listed as a POW.
The Vietnamese government has insisted
it held no American servicemen after the war ended in 1975, but U.S.
veterans groups cite U.S. intelligence reports that indicated Americans
were known to have been alive in captivity in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
and were not returned at the end of the war.
Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director
of the National League of POW-MIA Families, said she is encouraged by
Jennings' initiative, although she has some doubt that the Vietnamese will
make it work.
"It has potential, if the
Vietnamese government wants to take it seriously," she said in an
interview. She complained, however, that Vietnam in the postwar years has
had a "pretty sketchy" record of cooperation on MIA matters.
Jennings said he believes that an
arrangement like the one he worked out with the Vietnamese might also work
in Russia, where U.S. officials have been stymied for years in trying to
gain access to sensitive KGB and other intelligence files of the former
Soviet Union.
The work with the Russians has been
aimed at determining whether American servicemen, captured in Korea during
the 1950-53 Korean War, were transferred against their will to the Soviet
Union and never heard from again. The Bush administration also has pressed
the Russians to declassify materials in their Vietnam War archives that
may relate to U.S. POWs or MIAs.
Another major focus of work by Jennings'
office is recovery of U.S. servicemen's remains from North Korea, which in
1996 began allowing U.S. field searches of known burial sites. Since then,
25 recovery operations on North Korean territory have yielded 178 sets of
remains believed to be those of American servicemen. Of the 178, only 14
have been identified positively.
A U.S. recovery team currently is in
North Korea and has found an undisclosed number of additional remains,
Jennings said. Their work is scheduled to end Tuesday, then resume on
Sunday and continue until Oct. 28. The United States is paying North Korea
$2.1 million for support for the missions.
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