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VOICE in the News

Meet Jennifer
Gonnerman, Voice staff writer and author of "Life on the Outside:
The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett" at Barnes & Noble Astor
Place Wednesday, 3/24 at 7:30 pm. For a complete listing of events,
please visit: lifeontheoutside.com

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Senator Covered Up Evidence of P.O.W.'s Left
Behind
When John Kerry's Courage Went
M.I.A.
by Sydney H.
Schanberg
February 24th, 2004 1:00
PM

Related Articles:

"Did
America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" by Sydney H.
Schanberg

"Follow
the Microfiche"

Vets Demonstrate Against
'Jane Fonda Kerry' on Park Ave ( 2 min. 8
sec.)

enator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was
courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not
so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up
voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American
prisoners—perhaps hundreds—were never acknowledged or returned after
the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.

The Massachusetts senator, now
seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a
decade ago— shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and
sanitizing the committee's final report—when he was chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs.

Over the years, an abundance of
evidence had come to light that the North Vietnamese, while
returning 591 U.S. prisoners of war after the treaty signing, had
held back many others as future bargaining chips for the $4 billion
or more in war reparations that the Nixon administration had
pledged. Hanoi didn't trust Washington to fulfill its pro-mise
without pressure. Similarly, Washington didn't trust Hanoi to return
all the prisoners and carry out all the treaty provisions. The
mistrust on both sides was merited. Hanoi held back prisoners and
the U.S. provided no reconstruction funds.

The stated purpose of the special
Senate committee—which convened in mid 1991 and concluded in January
1993—was to investigate the evidence about prisoners who were never
returned and find out what happened to the missing men. Committee
chair Kerry's larger and different goal, though never stated
publicly, emerged over time: He wanted to clear a path to
normalization of relations with Hanoi. In any other context, that
would have been an honorable goal. But getting at the truth of the
unaccounted for P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s (Missing In Action) was the
main obstacle to normalization—and therefore in conflict with his
real intent and plan of action.

Kerry denied back then that he
disguised his real goal, contending that he supported normalization
only as a way to learn more about the missing men. But almost
nothing has emerged about these prisoners since diplomatic and
economic relations were restored in 1995, and thus it would
appear—as most realists expected—that Kerry's explanation was
hollow. He has also denied in the past the allegations of a
cover-up, either by the Pentagon or himself. Asked for comment on
this article, the Kerry campaign sent a quote from the senator: "In
the end, I think what we can take pride in is that we put together
the most significant, most thorough, most exhaustive accounting for
missing and former P.O.W.'s in the history of human warfare."

What was the body of evidence that
prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600
firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand
reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within
Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their
captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that
continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals
carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive
by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners
from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence
agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints
by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly)
that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof
that the Pentagon and other keepers of the "secret" destroyed a
variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families
and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major
public outcry.

The resignation of Colonel Millard
Peck in 1991, the first year of the Kerry committee's tenure, was
one of many vivid landmarks in this saga's history. Peck had been
the head of the Pentagon's P.O.W./M.I.A. office for only eight
months when he resigned in disgust. In his damning departure
statement, he wrote: "The mind-set to 'debunk' is alive and well. It
is held at all levels . . . Practically all analysis is directed to
finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective,
active follow-through on any of the sightings . . . The sad fact is
that . . . a cover-up may be in progress. The entire charade does
not appear to be an honest effort and may never have been."

Finally, Peck said: "From what I
have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even
inadvertently, was in fact abandoned years ago, and that the farce
that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with
'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural
death."

What did Kerry do in furtherance of
the cover-up? An overview would include the following: He allied
himself with those carrying it out by treating the Pentagon and
other prisoner debunkers as partners in the investigation instead of
the targets they were supposed to be. In short, he did their
bidding. When Defense Department officials were coming to testify,
Kerry would have his staff director, Frances Zwenig, meet with them
to "script" the hearings—as detailed in an internal Zwenig memo
leaked by others. Zwenig also advised North Vietnamese officials on
how to state their case. Further, Kerry never pushed or put up a
fight to get key government documents unclassified; he just rolled
over, no matter how obvious it was that the documents contained
confirming data about prisoners. Moreover, after promising to turn
over all committee records to the National Archives when the panel
concluded its work, the senator destroyed crucial intelligence
information the staff had gathered—to to keep the documents from
becoming public. He refused to subpoena past presidents and other
key witnesses.

When revelatory sworn testimony was
given to the committee by President Reagan's national security
adviser, Richard Allen—about a credible proposal from Hanoi in 1981
to return more than 50 prisoners for a $4 billion ransom—Kerry had
that testimony taken in a closed door interview, not a public
hearing. But word leaked out and a few weeks later, Allen sent a
letter to the committee, not under oath, recanting his testimony,
saying his memory had played tricks on him. Kerry never did any
probe into Allen's original, detailed account, and instead accepted
his recantation as gospel truth.

A Secret Service agent then working
at the White House, John Syphrit, told committee staffers he had
overheard part of a conversation about the Hanoi proposal for
ransom. He said he was willing to testify but feared reprisal from
his Treasury Department superiors and would need to be subpoenaed so
that his appearance could not be regarded as voluntary. Kerry
refused to subpoena him. Syphrit told me that four men were involved
in that conversation—Reagan, Allen, Vice President George H.W. Bush,
and CIA director William Casey. I wrote the story for
Newsday.

The final Kerry report brushed off
the entire episode like unsightly dust. It said: "The committee
found no credible evidence of any such [ransom] offer being made."

A newcomer to this subject matter
might reasonably ask why there was no great public outrage, no
sustained headlines, no national demand for investigations, no
penalties imposed on those who had hidden, and were still hiding,
the truth. The simple, overarching explanation was that most
Americans wanted to put Vietnam behind them as fast as possible.
They wanted to forget this failed war, not deal with its truths or
consequences. The press suffered from the same ostrich syndrome; no
major media organization ever carried out an in-depth investigation
by a reporting team into the prisoner issue. When prisoner stories
did get into the press, they would have a one-day life span, never
to be followed up on. When three secretaries of defense from the
Vietnam era—James Schlesinger, Melvin Laird, and Elliot
Richardson—testified before the Kerry committee, under oath, that
intelligence they received at the time convinced them that numbers
of unacknowledged prisoners were being held by the Communists, the
story was reported by the press just that once and then dropped.
The New York Times put the story on page one but never
pursued it further to explore the obvious ramifications.

At that public hearing on September
21, 1992, toward the end of Schlesinger's testimony, the former
defense secretary, who earlier had been CIA chief, was asked a
simple question: "In your view, did we leave men behind?"

He replied: "I think that as of now,
I can come to no other conclusion."

He was asked to explain why Nixon
would have accepted leaving men behind. He said: "One must assume
that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United
States . . . was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out
and we were not going to roil the waters . . . "

Another example of a story not
pursued occurred at the Paris peace talks. The North Vietnamese
failed to provide a list of the prisoners until the treaty was
signed. Afterward, when they turned over the list, U.S. intelligence
officials were taken aback by how many believed prisoners were not
included. The Vietnamese were returning only nine men from Laos.
American records showed that more than 300 were probably being held.
A story about this stunning gap, by New York Times Pentagon
reporter John W. Finney, appeared on the paper's front page on
February 2, 1973. The story said: "Officials emphasized that the
United States would be seeking clarification . . . " No meaningful
explanation was ever provided by the Vietnamese or by the Laotian
Communist guerrillas, the Pathet Lao, who were satellites of Hanoi.

As a bombshell story for the media,
particularly the Washington press corps, it was there for the
taking. But there were no takers.

I was drawn to the P.O.W. issue
because of my reporting years for The New York Times during
the Vietnam War, where I came to believe that our soldiers were
being misled and disserved by our government. After the war,
military people who knew me and others who knew my work brought me
information about live sightings of P.O.W.'s still in captivity and
other evidence about their existence. When the Kerry committee was
announced (I was by then a columnist at Newsday), I thought
the senator—having himself become disillusioned about the Vietnam
War, and eventually an advocate against it—might really be committed
to digging out the truth. This was wishful thinking.

In the committee's early days, Kerry
had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator.
He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in
captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more
than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he
stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full
alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other
Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure
and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had
not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in
credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior
North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by
an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the
specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial
intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some
intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos
calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F.
McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that
the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime
Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the
injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the
unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo
continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's
classified."

Kerry defended the shredding by saying the
documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was
that with the destruction of the copies, the information would
never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had
promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the
committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the
committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and
independent researchers reported that many critical documents were
withheld.

Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal
Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig
[Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of
Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted
information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have
been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other
agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks
were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two
witnesses."

A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's
close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was
supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense
secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others
close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a
dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and
agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information
over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being
orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of
potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the
period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for
the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this
investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly
investigating."

The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many
other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the
committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and
George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during
the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical
to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly
briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W.
developments. It was a huge issue at that time.

Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes,
the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the
P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and
the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee
requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped
out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had
been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent
Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi
was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently
decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately,
even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other
chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the
peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591
acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on
national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their
way home."

The Kerry committee's final report,
issued in January 1993, delivered the ultimate insult to history.
The 1,223-page document said there was "no compelling evidence that
proves" there is anyone still in captivity. As for the primary
investigative question —what happened to the men left behind in
1973—the report conceded only that there is "evidence . . . that
indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number"
of prisoners 31 years ago, after Hanoi released the 591 P.O.W.'s it
had admitted to.

With these word games, the committee
report buried the issue—and the men.

The huge document contained no
findings about what happened to the supposedly "small number." If
they were no longer alive, then how did they die? Were they executed
when ransom offers were rejected by Washington?

Kerry now slides past all the radio
messages, satellite photos, live sightings, and boxes of
intelligence documents—all the evidence. In his comments for this
piece, this candidate for the presidency said: "No nation has gone
to the lengths that we did to account for their dead. None—ever in
history."

Of the so-called "possibility" of a
"small number" of men left behind, the committee report went on to
say that if this did happen, the men were not "knowingly abandoned,"
just "shunted aside." How do you put that on a gravestone?

In the end, the fact that Senator
Kerry covered up crucial evidence as committee chairman didn't seem
to bother too many Massachusetts voters when he came up for
re-election—or the recent voters in primary states. So I wouldn't
predict it will be much of an issue in the presidential election
come November. It seems there is no constituency in America for
missing Vietnam P.O.W.'s except for their families and some veterans
of that war.

A year after he issued the committee
report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate
floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to
lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate,
Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed
in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he
declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and
exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are
trying to do here."

Kerry's resolution passed, by a vote
of 62 to 38. Sadly for him, the passage of ten thousand resolutions
cannot make up for wants in a man's character.

Additional research: Jennifer
Suh

Related Articles:

"Did
America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" by Sydney H. Schanberg

"Follow
the Microfiche"

Letter
to the Editor   |   E-Mail
Story   |   Voice Newsletter   |
Printer

Recent stories by
Sydney H. Schanberg

Follow
the Microfiche

When
John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A. Senator Covered Up
Evidence of P.O.W.'s Left Behind — Senator Kerry may have
been courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War, but,
alleges Sydney H. Schanberg, he was not so brave more than two
decades later, when he covered up evidence that a significant
number of live American prisoners—perhaps hundreds—were never
acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was
signed.

Did
America Abandon Vietnam War POWs? Part 2 A Closer Look at
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