A Wary U.S. Will ‘Definitely Explore’ Hanoi MIA Offer

A senior State Department official said here Saturday that the United States, while wary of Hanoi’s intentions, “will definitely explore carefully’ the latest Vietnam proposal to speed the search for Americans missing in action in Indochina.

The proposal, disclosed Friday in Washington by the State Department, expressed Vietnamese “willingness” to hold direct, high-level talks with the United States aimed at resolving the issue over the next two years.

The official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, said here that “if the Vietnamese really mean resolving the issue in two years as they say, it will be a very substantial acceleration of the process” of accounting for U.S. servicemen missing in action.

“But if they mean just doling out a few more remains (of MIAs),” he said, “well, we’ve been burned like this before.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, while en route to Hong Kong to begin a two-week visit in Southeast Asia, said Friday that Hanoi’s proposal was not “particularly new.”

Wolfowitz, who is traveling with Shultz, characterized the proposal as “very vague.” He also indicated that the United States would resist Vietnamese attempts to gain political mileage out of what is a humanitarian issue.

“But we will explore it (the proposal) at a high level,” Wolfowitz said, perhaps with a visit by a senior State Department official to Hanoi later this year. “Until then, we can’t dismiss it.”

Such senior-level visits occurred in 1982 and again in 1984. In March, the Vietnamese agreed to increase from four to six the number of visits per year by U.S. technical teams, who helped search for and identify the remains of U.S. servicemen.

The United States then publicly said it would welcome a further increase in tempo, suggesting that a U.S. technical team could be based in Hanoi permanently. The teams are now stationed in Honolulu.

The latest Hanoi proposal may be a response to this U.S. idea, Wolfowitz said.

While the Vietnamese proposal appears promising, however, similar offers in the past have “melted away when we tried to get our hands on them,” one official said.

Political factors complicate the search for the estimated 2,450 Americans missing or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.

The latest Hanoi overture, for example, came to the United States through Indonesia, which is a leading member of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations. These countries have been actively seeking a negotiated settlement in Cambodia between Vietnamese occupation forces and the various Communist and non-Communist guerrillas there.

The Asian states want the United States to become a party to negotiations on a settlement in Cambodia, but Washington has said it will not deal with Hanoi until the MIA issue is settled.

So, the Asian bloc has been pressuring Hanoi to be more forthcoming on the MIAs in order to engage the United States in a dialogue on the Cambodian issue, officials said.