Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/011392/0113100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12KB | 256 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 10

THE MIA INDUSTRY

Bad Dream Factory


An ex-KGB man claims the Soviets grilled U.S. prisoners long
after the Vietnam War, but the hunt for missing Americans is
still mainly a hustle based on false hopes, flimsy evidence
and bereaved families' grief

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    War has always been good business for defense contractors
and arms dealers. But the Vietnam War gave rise to a dismal new
enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched
notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being
held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet
Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs
and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S.
servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended.
Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives
of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about the extremely
remote possibility that there might be any POWs still alive in
Vietnam or anywhere else.

    In recent weeks the MIA industry has been given a new lift
by retired Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of
counterintelligence for the KGB, who was forced to resign in
1990 after he became one of the agency's most truculent public
critics. Kalugin has told several U.S. news organizations,
including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News,
that the KGB questioned "at least" three American POWs in
Vietnam in 1978, five years after Hanoi said it had returned all
living prisoners.

    Among those questioned, according to Kalugin, were an
agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. Navy officer
and a U.S. Air Force officer. He also told the Daily News that
two of the POWs later returned to the U.S. -- an astounding
claim, if true, because the only former POW known to have been
repatriated after 1973 was Marine PFC Robert Garwood, who
disappeared near Danang in 1965 and resurfaced 14 years later,
claiming he had been a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Garwood
was court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy.

    There are many reasons to be skeptical about Kalugin's
story. For one thing, he has given conflicting versions of the
year in which the questioning took place. Investigators for the
Senate's Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs are nonetheless
eager to question Kalugin, who may appear before the committee
this week. In addition, the committee's chairman, Democrat John
Kerry of Massachusetts, and its ranking Republican, Bob Smith
of New Hampshire, said they may travel to Moscow to ask Boris
Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, to open the KGB files
on POWs.

    Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales
before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA
industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish
because of the virtual impossibility of determining what
happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam.
After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar
uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington
National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of
fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and
the Korean War. Yet perhaps because of the humiliating defeat
the U.S. suffered in Vietnam, Americans have been unwilling to
close the books on the MIAs. In a recent TIME-CNN poll conducted
by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 60% of those questioned said they
believe there are still live Americans in Vietnam.

    Some U.S. officials, including Garnett Bell, head of the
U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs in Hanoi, have speculated that
as many as 10 Americans could have been left behind in 1973,
though he added that he believed they died at the hands of their
captors. That possibility, unsettling in its own right, is a far
cry from the outlandish claims by some members of the MIA
industry. Millions of dollars are raked in every year through
mailings from organizations that plead for contributions by
raising the specter of large numbers of Americans being held in
secret prison camps, waiting for rescuers who are being held
back only by a lack of funds. Not one of these efforts has
succeeded in bringing forward credible evidence of surviving
POWs, much less a flesh-and-blood American prisoner. What they
have produced in abundance is wild conspiracy theories backed
by so-called proof that is generally feeble and often false.

    Photographs that supposedly depict Americans in captivity
have a special role in the MIA industry because they make the
most direct appeal to both reason and the emotions. But many of
the most widely circulated pictures have been retouched or
misrepresented. Over the past few years, for example, several
pictures purporting to show imprisoned Americans have emerged
from Kampuchea. They turned out to be altered images of Soviet
citizens clipped from old magazines.

    Sometimes the actions of grieving relatives can
inadvertently assist scam artists in Indochina. Over the years,
a number of MIA families have arranged for printed flyers to be
distributed across Southeast Asia seeking information about
their missing loved ones. Those provide pictures and personal
information that unscrupulous operators use in the manufacture
of phony dog tags and doctored photographs.

    The exodus of Vietnamese boat people that began in 1975
brought a surge in tales of POW sightings, some of them
apparently inspired by the mistaken belief that anyone offering
such stories to immigration officials would be put on a quick
path to the U.S. For similar reasons, a macabre trade in bones
said to be the skeletons of American servicemen became a growth
industry in Vietnam: the going price for a box of purported
remains ranges from $1,000 to $5,000. Most of them turn out to
be animal bones or the skeletons of Vietnamese.

    Meanwhile, a number of MIA organizations in the U.S. keep
the issue alive by spreading unsupported allegations about
supposedly missing Americans. While they may not manufacture
false leads themselves, some have been known to make outrageous
claims. Among them:

    John LeBoutillier III, a former Republican Congressman,
heads Skyhook II. The group sends anguished fund-raising letters
detailing the conditions it claims are being endured by scores
of POWs in Asian slave-labor camps.

    Billy Hendon, also a former Republican Congressman,
currently heads the POW Policy Center. For several years, the
group has offered -- over U.S. government objections -- a $2.5
million reward to anyone in the region who can deliver a live
American POW to safety. This effort has so far produced no
results.

    Eugene ("Red") McDaniel, a retired Navy captain who heads
the American Defense Foundation and its educational arm, the
American Defense Institute, came to the POW issue the hard way
-- he was once one himself. After his release in 1973, he
resumed his military career, ending up at the Pentagon, where
he concluded that "the U.S. government would never do the job"
of tracking down the POWs who he became convinced were left
behind. McDaniel's group has been the conduit for a number of
photographs of alleged POWs that have been made public recently,
including the now famous picture that purports to show three
U.S. servicemen standing before a background of The Pentagon
says the picture shows signs of having been altered.

    Ted Sampley, head of Homecoming II, is a Vietnam Special
Forces veteran from Fayetteville, N.C. Among other things,
Sampley three years ago offered anticommunist insurgents $5,000
to destroy a government building in Laos, arguing that the only
way to liberate American POWs from that country was to topple
the communist regime.

    Jack Bailey, a retired Air Force colonel, heads Operation
Rescue (no connection with the antiabortion organization of the
same name). For much of the 1980s, Bailey's chief project was
raising funds to support the Akuna, a freighter that he said
patrolled the South China Sea rescuing Vietnamese refugees. By
most accounts, the ship was unseaworthy and spent 90% of its
time in port.

    In 1989 the National League of Families, the largest group
representing close relatives of MIAs, accused 14 of the
self-styled MIA rescue groups, including Operation Rescue,
Homecoming II and Skyhook II, of distributing "false or
distorted information" or supporting "counterproductive"
activities. "It's a mystery how these guys have survived," says
League of Families official Louise Van Hoozer, the sister of an
Air Force pilot shot down in Vietnam. "All the leads offered by
these guys evaporated."

    One of the main reasons for the MIA industry's persistence
was the government's initially sluggish effort to get to the
bottom of the mystery. For years, the Pentagon turned over the
question of missing Americans to defense-intelligence agencies
more accustomed to concealing secret information than to guiding
bereaved relatives through a thicket of classified and often
conflicting reports. This heavy-handed approach not only angered
relatives of missing servicemen but also fueled the suspicion
and frustration that the MIA industry exploits.

    Sensitive to criticism that they once acted too slowly to
resolve the MIA riddle, Pentagon investigators beginning with
the Reagan Administration have taken a more aggressive stance,
seeking quickly and publicly to investigate all reports of MIAs,
even from the most dubious sources.

    Last summer Operation Rescue's Bailey brought to light
what he claimed was a photograph taken in Laos last year of
U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Donald G. Carr, who was shot
down over Laos in 1971. The resemblance between pictures of the
young Carr at his 1961 wedding and the weathered face in
Bailey's picture was sufficiently unnerving to move the Defense
Department, after being prodded by some members of Congress, to
fly Bailey to Bangkok. There he promised to supply more
information and introduce Pentagon investigators to the source
for his pictures.

    But according to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who
described the incident in November testimony before Congress,
after several fruitless days Bailey came up empty-handed. Then,
Cheney testified, Bailey had second thoughts. Perhaps, he
suggested, the picture had been taken in Burma. Bailey now
claims he was set up by Cheney. The Pentagon, he insists, drove
a wedge between him and his mysterious source by getting to the
man first and convincing him that Bailey was attempting to cheat
him out of a sizable reward for his information.

    The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs has begun
its own effort to close the books -- or open them more fully --
on the MIA issue. During a 14-month inquiry that is expected to
cost $1.9 million, the committee hopes to establish whether any
American servicemen are alive in Southeast Asia, as well as make
recommendations for ways in which the government can improve its
process for resolving unsettled cases.

    Unlike earlier bodies that have looked into the question,
the Senate committee has subpoena power, and witnesses who
appear before it must testify under oath. For those reasons, its
probe stands a better chance than previous investigations of
unearthing enough evidence to determine whether the search for
missing Americans should be continued. Moreover, the replacement
of the Soviet Union by a new Commonwealth of Independent States
seeking good relations with the U.S. could permit American
investigators to learn at last what Moscow knows about the MIAs.

    Even so, it is likely that the Senate investigation, like
10 prior official inquiries, will leave unanswered questions
that the MIA industry can prey on. Illinois Republican
Congressman Henry Hyde has suggested that given the cost of
disproving counterfeit assertions about MIAs, anyone who makes
one should be charged with defrauding the government. Perhaps.
But the real victim is not the government. It is the MIA
families, whose grief and uncertainty have been exploited.