Up to 100 MIAs May Still Be Held in Indochina, Officials Say : U.S. Admits Possibility for 1st Time

Two high-ranking Reagan Administration officials said today they believe that at least some Americans may still be held prisoner in Indochina, possibly as many as 100.

Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, interviewed on the NBC-TV “Today” show, said:

“We’ve had over 800 reports of live Americans in Vietnam in the last 10 years. We’ve checked out a lot of them. . . . There are roughly 100 that we believe hold up under this best scrutiny we can put to them.”

Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Armitage, who led a U.S. delegation that met with the Vietnamese last week over the issue of Americans still listed as missing in action, told reporters that the Pentagon has 95 “live-sighting reports” of Americans on file that it cannot dismiss as fabrications.

Armitage said the United States had received 806 “first-hand live-sighting reports” from Indochinese refugees since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the most recent one in 1983.

‘Continuing Investigation’

Of those reports, all but 95 have been dismissed as either fabrications or reports involving men who have been accounted for. The remaining 95, however, “are under continuing investigation in an attempt to confirm the information,” Armitage said.

Seventy-nine of the 95 reports involve sightings in what were formerly North or South Vietnam, with 14 of the remainder coming from Laos and the remaining two from Cambodia. Roughly half of the 95 unresolved reports fall into the category of alleged prisoner-of-war sightings, while the remainder involve reports of Americans living inside Vietnam of their own free will, he added.

Earlier today, Armitage said on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” that the Administration “acts under the assumption that at least some Americans are being held against their will in Indochina. . . . There may indeed be some Americans held against their will.”

That was a reversal from Armitage’s position last Tuesday, when he said the United States had no proof that any Americans remained alive in Vietnam a decade after the war ended. He then characterized the reports of live POWs as “specious” and “absurd” and complained that they hampered efforts to resolve the issue.

The Vietnamese deny holding live Americans, but affidavits filed to a lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, N.C., allege that some of the plaintiffs personally saw POWs as recently as last October in Vietnam and Laos. A Thai gold merchant claimed he saw Americans working in gold-mining details in Laos.

Will Check Information

The Armitage group, which included Wolfowitz, met in Hanoi with Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. Wolfowitz said today that, as a result of the meetings, the Vietnamese “at least agree that when we give them information to check” on unaccounted-for Americans, “they’re willing to check it out.”

Armitage noted that the Vietnamese have launched an internal “public awareness campaign” among their own people and have already received 50 reports involving American servicemen. The Vietnamese government has promised to provide a review of those reports during another round of meetings in late February, Armitage said.

The two officials’ statements were the most forthright to date by the Reagan Administration that some of the Americans missing for more than a decade might still be alive.

Previously, Administration officials had played down such speculation except for Robert C. McFarlane, the President’s national security adviser until his resignation last month. McFarlane told a private gathering late last year that he believed that there might be some surviving POWs.