Some MIAs Alive in Indochina, McFarlane Is Quoted as Saying

President Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, told a forum of businessmen that he believes some of the 2,500 Americans still listed as missing in action in Indochina are alive and in Vietnamese hands, a former Republican congressman said Tuesday.

Former Rep. John LeBoutillier of New York, who served on a House task force on prisoners of war from 1981 to 1983, said McFarlane also acknowledged that the Administration has failed to rebuild an intelligence network in Vietnam that could help verify numerous POW reports filtering in from refugees and other sources.

“I do think there has to be--have to be--live Americans there,” LeBoutillier quoted McFarlane as saying. The one-term lawmaker said he recorded and later transcribed McFarlane’s comments, made Oct. 9 at a semiannual gathering of executives and political consultants sponsored by syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

Different Understanding

LeBoutillier said McFarlane obviously thought he was speaking off the record when he made the remarks. But the ex-congressman insisted that his understanding of the ground rules was different. A spokesman for McFarlane declined comment.

Administration officials, when speaking in public, are usually careful to sidestep the emotional issue of POWs, typically saying they are investigating live sighting reports, but declining to say if they believe them or not.

Pentagon spokesman Robert Sims told reporters Tuesday that the Administration has always considered the POW question a matter of high national priority and never ruled out the possibility that Americans were still alive in Indochina.

In June, Cmdr. Thomas A. Brooks, a high-ranking official of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that his agency was looking into 63 alleged sightings of Americans still held captive in Indochina. But Brooks cautioned that many of those were based on information that is years old, vague, or from second-hand sources.

In the transcript provided by LeBoutillier, McFarlane acknowledged that American intelligence sources “haven’t yet found the evidence” to prove whether any Americans are alive in Indochina.

No Reason to Lie

But the White House adviser also contended that many of the live sighting reports are coming from sources who have no reason to fabricate them.

“They have no reason to lie, and they are telling things that they have seen,” McFarlane was quoted as saying.

In the transcript, McFarlane insisted that some pretext could be found in negotiations with the Vietnamese to give them a face-saving way of producing prisoners whom they have repeatedly denied exist.

He acknowledged that the Administration had done very little to construct a spy network in Vietnam to help pinpoint POWs, saying: “And that’s bad, and that’s a failure.”