Vietnamese to Help U.S. Track MIAs

[HARDCORE]

In a message dated 9/22/2003 436 PM Pacific Daylight Time, RHall8715 writes:
Vietnamese to Help U.S. Track MIAs

By ROBERT BURNS
.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - 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.

On the Net:

Pentagon's POW-MIA office: http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/

American League of Families at http://www.pow-miafamilies.org/



09/22/03 15:13 EDT