Captives of Prisoner-of-War Stories : Books: For Monika Jensen Stevenson, ‘Kiss the Boys Good Bye’ became an obsession. But did she, husband lose their objectivity trying to prove the U.S. had betrayed its POWs in Vietnam?

Monika Jensen Stevenson’s husband advised her not to get too deeply involved in an investigation of American soldiers abandoned in the jungle after the Vietnam War.

If she did, he warned, she would awaken one morning to find she was “chasing the dragon,” a reference to opium smokers in the dens of Hanoi. “When you become addicted,” Stevenson told his wife, “the dragon chases you.”

But in the end, did the dragon devour the Stevensons, particularly Monika Jensen Stevenson? Was she so engulfed by the cause of publicizing the POWs’ plight that she fell prey to what she has accused the U.S. government of doing--allowing the ends to justify the means?

Was the Stevensons’ showing how the government forgot its men so important that it justified their using anonymous sources and repeating stories told by individuals whose credibility has been tested by others and found lacking?

In their new book, “Kiss the Boys Good Bye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own P.O.W.’s in Vietnam,” the Stevensons have elected to become the advocates for families of lost soldiers and the community of former soldiers who came home but never stoped fighting the war.

They call this network, whose most prominent members include such personalities as Texas financier H. Ross Perot and Navy Capt. Eugene (Red) McDaniel (said to be the most tortured POW during the war), the Telephone Tree.

“Without question, Americans were left behind” in Vietnam, William Stevenson said in a recent interview. “But I got involved in this quagmire only after I saw what was being done to good people, to POW wives and honorable men who fought for their country in an unpopular war and are now getting discredited by their own government for telling the truth about POWs being alive.”

His wife, her eyes narrowed and angry, added: “It seemed to me, well, it seemedto us that it was time the American public were told that this is not the cause of a bunch of kooky people and Rambo-esque types.”

Their book did encounter hurdles getting into print and the strain seems to have worn on the Stevensons. Their first publisher rejected their original manuscript, claiming it was editorially and legally unacceptable. They countered with a still unresolved lawsuit, insisting the publisher was bowing to government pressure. Meantime, the Stevensons found a new publisher. Over the last two years, they have made numerous revisions of the manuscript and legal reviews.

“We have a whole basement filled with manuscripts, “ William Stevenson said wearily.

His wife grew agitated by questions about their research, methods and sources during an interview. In questioning for a radio show, she barked at a caller who claimed one of her key sources had recanted his view that Americans were still alive in Vietnam.

“That was an out and out lie!” she said later. “He never would recant! His statements appeared in the Congressional Record.”

Anger and resignation would seem odd conduct for this couple. Monika Jensen Stevenson was a producer for the prestigious “60 Minutes” television show who left in 1986 after the program would not let her do a larger story on the POW issue. Her husband, an acclaimed author of such books as “A Man Called Intrepid” and “90 Minutes At Entebbe,” is considered an expert in government intelligence.

But the couple’s book clearly shows their struggles with one of the most emotional remnants of Vietnam, the war after the war, the bitter, complex battle over the unanswered questions that remain about America’s POWs.

After the United States signed the 1973 peace accords with the Vietnamese, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the government knew of no American POWs alive in Vietnam. That line changed by the 1980s, particularly after former Marine Bobby Garwood got out.

Now officials say it is “assumed” that some of the 2,497 Americans still officially unaccounted for in Indochina may be alive but that there is no “hard” evidence of this.

The Stevensons claim throughout their book that they saw hard evidence: classified Pentagon reports of “live sightings” of American captives.

But they also show how they, too, developed deep concerns in trying to discern what was evidence of government lies and what was their own or others’ paranoia.

She describes growing edgy, irritable and suspicious that what probably were ordinary events--crank phone calls, stolen briefcases, a gas leak in their home--might have more meaning.

The POW project, as Monika Jensen Stevenson notes in the book, was her obsession initially.

Not until Page 181 of their 420-page work, which she wrote in the first person, does Monika Jensen Stevenson note that her husband has even expressed any real interest in a POW project. His curiosity was piqued only after he learned an old friend, a BBC reporter, also was investigating the subject. “Apparently you only believe men in your own line of business,” she snaps at the husband in print.

But once they began working together, the Stevensons knitted a theory of government ineptitude and cover-ups by relying on a variety of sources, some of them questionable.

There were, for example, government officials who asked to remain nameless and to whom they gave false titles. The book refers to them simply as “The Preacher” at the Pentagon, or “Casino Man” of the CIA. By their very anonymity, their credibility is difficult, if not impossible, to judge.

They liberally quote Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from June, 1977, to September, 1981, said he “repeatedly” stated his belief that Americans were alive in Vietnam. “Habitual fatigue sets in among some bureaucrats,” he told the Stevensons. “Instead of saying ‘Let’s work out how we get them out of there,’ they discard reports and prevent very valuable intelligence going for evaluation and action.”

But Tighe is one of the few sources they employ with unsullied credibility.

Meantime, they give equal or more weight to individuals like James “Bo” Gritz, a retired Green Beret commander best-known for his unsuccessful missions into Southeast Asia in search of American POWs, and CIA operative Scott Barnes. The Stevensons give considerable space to telling their stories and making them into heroes.

But Gritz has damaged his credibility over the years by going to Indochina, claiming he would rescue POWs and coming back empty-handed. Once he brought back what he said were the remains of POWS, but they turned out to be pig bones.

Barnes went to Thailand as part of a team hunting for men missing in action. He claimed he entered Laos with a mysterious American who was not a team member. Barnes said they photographed two white men in a Laos prison camp. He claimed the team subsequently received a message order that the white men would be assassinated.

But all other members of the team denied Barnes’ story. Two Los Angeles Times reporters who checked hotel registers and telephone and telex records found no gap in Barnes’ stay in Thailand. Moreover, Laotians in the Thai village of Ban Don Phaeng, who Barnes claimed had accompanied him into Laos, said that Barnes had not crossed the Mekong River into Laos.

Monika Jensen Stevenson concedes she had doubts about both Barnes and Gritz. But she asserts that their stories were worth retelling in her book. Why? Because she had checked them with intelligence sources she trusted in the U.S. government.

This is not the only problematic section of their book.

The Stevensons, for example, assert--but only in passing--that 86 POWs were spirited out of North Vietnam in 1986 and kept in special wards in a Philippine military hospital. But they dwell not on the 86 POWs but on a military chaplain who told them the story and who was discredited for retelling other stories of lost soldiers.

But what about those 86 POWs? Is the chaplain’s story true? What about POW families whose hopes might be raised by the Stevensons’ printing of the padre’s tale?

“We don’t know if that story is true,” Monika Jensen Stevenson conceded. “We took it as far as we could. But the real point was to show what the government did to (that young chaplain) when he tried to tell the truth.”

To buttress their credibility, the Stevensons, while on their book tour, have carried around a list of 70 men who they assert the government has known to be alive in Indochina.

The list, which they say they received from a government source, does not appear in their book (in which only one soldier allegedly still held as of six weeks ago in Vietnam is named--in a photo caption).

But it does not trouble them to pass around the list--like the information in their book--before weighing its credibility or effects, they said. Again, their argument is that the discussion it prompts is what is more important than whether it holds true information.

And, to some degree, at least one individual whose life might be affected by the list’s release, agreed.

“The Stevensons and this book have raised our hopes,” said Doris Alfond, whose brother is on the list of 70 missing-but-possibly-alive POWs. “Maybe some of the stories are true in this book, maybe they are not. But the Stevensons have worked long and hard on this and we know they are dedicated, which is more than I can say for our government.”

Toward the end of an interview, Monika Jensen Stevenson pulled a package of color photographs from her purse of Mark Smith, a former POW who sued the government for ignoring lost POWs, and a troupe of Asian men in green fatigues standing around in the jungle of Southeast Asia. The Stevensons said the men were preparing a mission to rescue two POWS from a Laotian village where they are held captive.

“Smith is paying his men in rice which he buys with his government pension,” Monika Jensen Stevenson said with admiration, adding, “People in the government tried to tell me that Mark Smith was a gold smuggler and a fanatic. But Mark is just a true hero who won’t give up.”

And neither can she. Like the soldiers who came home from the war but could not stop fighting it, she is still a captive of the unknowns about POWs, she said, adding, “There was so much we could not put in this book that still needs to be looked into. . . . “

But her husband is ready to move on. “I don’t ever want to get involved in this bloody issue again,” he said, smiling as he looked at his wife. “She pressured me, rather, got me into this and I’m glad to be done with it.”