Vietnam Agrees to Visit by U.S. Envoy on MIAs

The White House announced Friday that Vietnam has agreed to a visit next week by Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Reagan’s newly named envoy on servicemen listed as missing in action in Southeast Asia.

The announcement warned that Vessey’s three-day mission, to begin next Saturday, cannot be linked to any normalization of relations or other political subjects. It said that the Hanoi government had agreed to this. Vietnamese officials have frequently indicated that their cooperation on MIAs is tied to normalization of relations and even the granting of U.S. economic aid.

Earlier Session Postponed

This will be the first high-level mission to Southeast Asia since last August. A session scheduled for Hanoi in May was postponed because of the change in Vietnam’s leadership following a major Communist Party shake-up. Thirteen Cabinet ministers were dismissed as a result of the shake-up in February.

Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which has a membership of about 50,000 relatives and friends of Vietnam War MIAs, is among those who will accompany Vessey.

Also accompanying Vessey to Vietnam will be Maj. Richard Childress of the White House National Security Council staff and representatives of the State and Defense departments.

Griffiths, whose brother is listed as missing, praised the Administration’s search for MIAs and singled out Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s speech to the league’s convention July 18.

Shultz declared then that the Administration seeks “the return of any and all live Americans, the fullest possible accounting for the missing and the repatriation of all recoverable remains.” He said that the governments of Vietnam and Laos have “considerable information” about hundreds of Americans who are still unaccounted for.

“Some have said that the POW/MIA issue is part of a history that we must put behind us, that we must forget,” the secretary said. “That counsel is unacceptable--to the President, to me, to the government and to the American people. We, too, are anxious to move on, but not at the expense of the missing, their families and our history.”

2,413 Still Missing

The league counts 2,413 American servicemen and civilians as still missing and unaccounted for, all but 631 believed to have disappeared in Vietnam. Since 1975, Vietnam has returned the remains of only 149 Americans and reported the identities of 37 others who died in Vietnam.

Another 549 are missing in Laos, which since August, 1978, has returned the remains of 22 servicemen. No accounting has been made of the 82 Americans listed as having been lost in Cambodia.

The league says it has confirmed 965 sightings of live Americans in Southeast Asia. But the Defense Department has identified 624 of them as involving persons such as missionaries or civilians who were detained after the fall of Saigon and who subsequently left the country. It has judged another 205 reports as false and is still investigating 136 sightings, with 80 cases regarded as “active.”