With Vietnam's Cooperation, U.S. Team Pursues 'Live Sightings'
By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Foreign Service
From Washington Post (11/21/92)
AN DIEM, Vietnam, Nov 20 - Who were those men, four white and one black, whom a
Russian geologist reported seeing with armed guards outside this remote prison
compound in March 1987?
Were they visitors, or engineers from the Czechoslovak hydroelectric projecta mile away? Or is it possible that they were American servicemen from the
Vietnam War, still captive after all those years? William Hutchinson came to
the prison today to try to find out.
Hutchinson is a "live sighting investigator" with the Pentagon's Hanoi-baseddetachment assigned to answer as many of the remaining questions as possible
about the 2,265 Americans still officially listed as unaccounted for from the
Vietnam War. His job is to evaluate reports about possible sightings of live
Americans and work with a Vietnamese team to check them out.
The process is expensive, time-consuming and never has turned up a live
American. But it is politically essential for both nations as they try to closethe issue of the missing and put the war's bitterness behind them.
"As long as they're bona fide," said Sen. Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) after
riding with Hutchingson on his gruelling trek today, the reports must be checkedto satisfy the demands of families of the missing, members of Congress and some
veterans groups that oppose a reconciliation between the United States and
Vietnam.
There have been more than 1,000 live sighting reports since 1973, when all
U.S. prisoners held by the Vietnamese communists were supposed to have been
returned. About a third of the reports concern Marine private Robert Garwood,
who returned in 1979 and remains the only verified sighting of a serviceman
from the war. Most of the rest, according to Defense Inteligence Agency
analysts, has proved to be frauds, mistakes, repetitions of previous repprts or
sightings of missionaries, relief workers or technicians from the former Soviet
Union, Vietnam's ally.
But a few credible reports from the 1980s remain, and Vietnam has promised
to help the United States resolve them by Dec. 10-in time for a U.S. Senate
panel examining the issue of missing Americans to wrap them up in its final
report. Vietnam expects the report to praise its cooperation and lead to
lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against it.
Hutchinson's journey to An Diem, 47 bone-jolting miles on a rutted muddy
track soutwest of Da Nang, had two purposes: To interview the prison commander
and other Vietnamese about the incident, and to show Daschle, a member of the
Senate Select Commmittee on POW-MIA affairs, how the process works.
Some members of the committee have charged that Pentagon analysts approach
all sighting reports with a "mindset to debunk." Having senators accompany
evaluators, and inviting a reporter to ride along, is part of the effort by the
committee's majority to close this credibility gap.
Hutchinson, Daschle and Ho Xuan Dich, a Dien Bien Phu veteran and chief of
the Vietnamese MIA investigating team, headed for An Diem because of a report bya Russian geologist and mining prospector who visited the area several times in
the 1980s. The Russian recentlly told U.S. investigators running a parallel
operation in Russia that he saw five to seven people, including a black man,
wearing identical work clothes and appraently in the custody of rifletoting
Vietnamese guards.
When the Russian asked his Vietnamese military escort who they were, the
escort said they were "state prisoners" and refused to discuss it further,
according to a Pentagon report.
The prison camp is at the end of a narrow, rutted dirt road at the point
where Vietnam's timeless landscape of rice paddies and water buffalo yields to
the forbidding western mountains. To get here, Hutchinson, Daschle and Dich
flew to Da Nang from Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, in a U.S. Air Force
plane sent from Bangkok. From there, they rode in four-wheel-drive vehicles
that were barely able to navigate a road rendered almost impassable by the
rainy season.
Hutchinson, who is fluent in Vietnamese and had been here on and off since
1956, had developed an "action plan": interview the camp commander; find and
interview the Russian's escort and driver; check the prison's 1987 roster for
foreign names; and find out about the reported Czechoslovak hydroelectric
project.
Because the journey took so long, he was barely able to begin today before
impending darkness forced the group to go back to Da Nang, but the Vietnamese
agreed to let him return for more research.
The camp commander, Maj. Nguyen Ngoc Anh, told Hutchinson that there was
indeed a Russian geologist here, but he said it was in 1984, not 1987. Czech
engineers had been in the area building a dam in the 1980s, he said. None of
them was black, and there have never been any Americans in the camp. The
prisoners now housed in the one-story barracks are common criminals and Viet-
namese accused of helping others emigrate illegally.
Hutchinson, who has been doing this for a long time, gave no hint in his
facial expressions about whether he believed all this or not. He accomplished
what he needed to do, he said: make initial contact with the camp commander
and pave the way for a more thorough inquiry.
Daschle said he recognizes that this process is inherentlly flawed in the
sense that the Vietnamese must give permission for the inspections and always
know about them in advance, so they could hide prisoners if they had them. But
he and the committee chairman, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), have said there is
no alternative because Vietnam is a sovereign nation with the right to decide
who goes where.
"This is a very laborious, difficult and expensive process," Daschle said.
Asked if he thought the investigations are futile, he said, "I don't think
they're chasing their own tails. There are credible reports" that have to be
checked. But he also said the time is fast coming when the process must end.
More and more foreigners are visiting Vietnam, he said, so new live sighting
