Lawmakers Pledge Cash to POW Reward

Twenty-one Republican members of Congress have pledged to contribute $100,000 each toward a $2.4-million reward for any citizen of Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia who defects and brings along any American prisoner of war to the United States, organizers of the effort said Wednesday at a press conference near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“Once one POW has come out of Southeast Asia, then he could provide information about what happened to him and to others,” Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne) said in an interview.

In April, Dreier and seven other GOP congressmen, including Reps. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove and Duncan L. Hunter of Coronado, pledged to provide $100,000 each once a prisoner of war is released. Since then, 13 additional Republican members of Congress have joined the effort.

Pentagon Opposes Plan

The others contributing $100,000 are former Rep. Billy Hendon (R-N.C.), Navy Capt. Eugene (Red) McDaniel and a private North Carolina company. Hendon and McDaniel are heads of the POW Policy Center, which is organizing the effort as an arm of the American Defense Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington.

Such reward efforts have been attempted in the past but have not resulted in the release of any POWs. The Pentagon opposes such projects, contending that official efforts to gain information about POWs might be hampered if sources withheld knowledge of prisoners in hope of monetary compensation.

But Hendon argued that current economic conditions in Southeast Asia “are so bad that the reward will be a temptation for any Vietnamese and his family.” In addition, he said, “the previous rewards have not been publicized in Southeast Asia the way we plan to do it.”

The reward would be paid in gold or cash within seven days of the delivery of an American prisoner, Hendon said, so long as he is on the official list of “U.S. Personnel Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia,” which includes 2,413 names.

Moreover, a coalition of conservative groups, spearheaded by the National Conservative Political Action Committee, has been formed to raise $500,000 for Vietnamese-language advertisements of the reward in publications and on radio stations throughout Southeast Asia.

Sightings Reported

There have been periodic reports in the last 10 years of sightings in Vietnam of Americans who might be listed as missing from the war. Although the Defense Department has not been able to verify those individual sightings, a 1986 report by a Pentagon panel found evidence that American prisoners of war are indeed alive in Southeast Asia.

“I myself spent six years as a prisoner of the Vietnamese communists,” McDaniel said. “For 10 years after my release, I believed that we all had returned home. . . . Today, I am absolutely convinced that we have a large number of Americans in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

Under the reward plan, each contributor will individually choose how to raise the $100,000. Several of the congressmen said they plan to seek donations from individuals and organizations in their constituencies.

A spokesman for Dornan said the congressman hopes to receive donations from people in his constituency, the 38th District, as well as from private organizations around the country.

“It’ll be no problem,” said Brian Bennett, spokesman for Dornan. “Since we’re not talking about campaign contributions, people may give as much as they wish. There are a lot of people out there who want to help get the POWs home. They’ll help out in a heartbeat.”