Americans Seeking MIAs Leave Hanoi

The two Americans sent to Hanoi to set up a new office to search for missing U.S. servicemen have left the country at the request of the government, diplomats said Thursday.

Vietnamese officials, however, denied a report that Hanoi has asked the new office to close temporarily and said it will open later at an unspecified date.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday that the United States still expects the office to open in July.

Diplomats in Hanoi said Garnett Bell and Robert Destatte, both Vietnam War veterans working for the Department of Defense, left Hanoi for Bangkok last Saturday.

The two men had arrived in Hanoi in May as part of a U.S. delegation working on the issue of American personnel missing in action in the Vietnam War. They were asked to leave by June 1 and were told they would be contacted later about when they could return, the diplomats said.

The Hanoi government apparently did not want the two men, who speak fluent Vietnamese, to be in the capital during the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam, diplomats said. The congress is scheduled for June 24-27.