By Peter McGregor
The USA has been underwriting or waging war against Vietnam ever since that nation declared its independence in 1945. After the Paris peace agreement in 1973, direct military attacks were replaced by devastating economic and political warfare. Only one justification for the continued US hostilities has spanned the period from 1969 to 1993: the POW/MIA (Prisoners of War/Missing in Action) issue.
First concocted by Richard Nixon and Ross Perot in 1969 in order to prolong armed conflict, this pretext has been employed by each "postwar" administration to renege on key terms of the 1973 accords, to justify an economic embargo and political quarantine, and to block normalised relations.
Once the Vietnamese had withdrawn from Cambodia in 1989, even the Bush administration had begun to move towards normalisation. In April 1991 the US reached an agreement with Vietnam on a timetable.
However, subsequent events have resurrected the MIA issue.
Within a week of each other, in July 1991, two separate photographs were discovered, allegedly showing different US POWs still held captive in Indochina. An immediate opinion poll revealed 69% of the US people (now) believed POWs were still being held. The US Senate promptly voted unanimously to establish a Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, which proceeded to beat up the issue.
However, the photos were soon proved to be as bogus as all the other "evidence" of POWs produced since the 1973 peace agreements. The Senate committee concluded, somewhat reluctantly, that there were no living POW/MIAs in Vietnam.
Then, on June 15, 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin told NBC that "our archives" showed some US POWs from Vietnam "were transferred to the territory of the former USSR and were kept in labour
camps. We don't have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive."
Yet on June 12 Yeltsin had reported to the US Senate committee that Soviet archives had disclosed absolutely "no data" about any "US citizens listed as missing in action". Does Yeltsin's left brain know what his right brain is doing? Or is he merely dancing to the tune he thinks his benefactors want to hear ?
No Soviet or Russian officials could be found to substantiate Yeltsin's June 15 claim.
By March 1993 Clinton administration officials were acknowledging improved cooperation by Vietnam on the MIA issue. For example, secretary of state Warren Christopher said: "Considerable progress has been made. That [issue] is the only thing stopping us from lifting our sanctions."
On March 23 US and Vietnamese experts ended their 22nd joint MIA search, having found no evidence that any servicemen missing from the war are still alive. Lt. Col. Jack Donovan, head of the 90-member US team, stated: "Vietnam at this point in time is increasing the level of cooperation. They are bending over backward to help us."
Enter the scholar
It isn't often that a scholar armed with a single historical document creates an international incident. This may make one wonder about both the document and the scholar.
On April 12, the New York Times reported the discovery of a document purportedly detailing a secret September 1972 briefing on US POWs to Vietnam's Politburo by General Tran Van Quang. The Russian-language translation was found in January 1993 in the files of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow by researcher Stephen Morris.
According to the document, Vietnam held 614 more US POWs than were released in 1973. Some observers saw the document as a "smoking gun" proving that Vietnam kept hundreds of US POWs after the exchange of
prisoners in 1973.
Henry Kissinger said such deception was typical of the Vietnamese he had dealt with. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski even suggested the Vietnamese massacred hundreds of POWs. Ross Perot, one of the few public figures in the US who actually believes Americans are still held captive, threatened to campaign to thwart any normalisation of relations with Vietnam.
However, there were others, including US government analysts, who were sceptical of the document's authenticity and/or its accuracy, citing a number of glaring inconsistencies.
The government of Vietnam immediately claimed the document was a fabrication, noting that Gen. Quang was a mere commander of a military region in central Vietnam at the time, and was not in a position to report to the politburo on POWs. Also, no Politburo meeting had occurred on the date in question.
US intelligence records confirm that Gen. Quang was a regional commander, not deputy chief of staff at that time.
Contradictions
According to the Soviet document, after the US raid on the Son Tay prison camp in September 1970, Vietnam expanded the number of prisons from four to 11. Returning US POWs reported the opposite, saying prisons were consolidated.
The document says prisoners were segregated according to rank, and three were "cosmonauts". Returning POWs said officers, enlisted men and civilians were held together. No astronauts were among US POWs.
The document refers to 1205 US POWs being held in 1972. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, government analysts believe "the number 1205 could be an accurate accounting of total [i.e., US and allied] prisoners held". He added, "Numbers in the document cannot be accurate if discussing only US POWs." A former DIA analyst
told the Washington Post that North Vietnamese propagandists always referred to South Vietnamese (and other Asian) commandos and agents who infiltrated into the north as "Americans".
The report described 368 prisoners as holding "progressive" views (i.e., opposing US policy) and said these prisoners were to be released first. In fact, with a few exceptions, POWs were released according to dates of capture.
Hoang Van Hoan was a member of the Politburo in 1972. He defected to China in 1979, where he died several years ago. Chinese officials, who might have been anxious for information embarrassing to Vietnam at that time, said he had no new information on US POWs.
Professor H. Bruce Franklin, author of MIA, or Mythmaking in America (1991) and an authority on the MIA issue, called the report "a clumsy fabrication".
Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate, and himself a former POW in North Vietnam, claimed "the North Vietnamese were not good enough at prisoner management to have been able to keep groups of prisoners totally sealed off from one another, in such a fashion that men could have been held back in 1973 about whom none of the 591 released had any knowledge".
A presidential emissary, retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., promptly held discussions in Hanoi on April 18-19 about the document and the MIA issue. Armed with Vietnamese documents and extensive US intelligence assessments, Vessey unequivocally declared that he believed Gen. Quang, and that the Soviet report, while authentic, was of little factual value: "In the details we haven't found any of the [document's] facts to be accurate" (my emphasis).
The mud sticks
Despite Vessey's report, by April 23 Clinton had shifted, saying that improved relations could only follow "open and unrestricted" access to information the Vietnamese might have. "We're not there yet ... I cannot say that I'm fully satisfied
that we know all we need to know."
Stephen Morris is currently a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Centre. Formerly a fellow at the US Naval War College, he had come to the US in 1976 after graduating from the University of Sydney, where he had been a prominent anticommunist and supporter of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, whose journal Quadrant was funded secretly by the CIA.
His research in Russia is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center's Cold War History Project, and he is being paid to produce a report. He says he has planned a book on the history of the Vietnam War, using the Soviet archive as a primary, dominant source.
According to Bill Herrod, editor of the Indochina Digest in Washington, DC, a project of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Morris is a "controversial and not an unbiased scholar".
As a direct result of Morris' "discovery", the US has once again asked the IMF to delay clearing up Vietnam's arrears, thus delaying loans, and has derailed plans to normalise relations. Sloppy scholarship and/or disinformation, combined with sensational journalism, has turned back the tide.
[Peter McGregor is a lecturer in humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, and secretary of the Sydney Branch of the Australia-Vietnam Society. This article has borrowed from the book and articles by H. Bruce Franklin, a forthcoming article by Stephen O'Harrow and articles in Indochina Digest.]