Hope Lives : Families Say Photo Overturns Belief That MIA Fliers Died

Christmas Eve, 1970, was the day Johanna Lundy lost her pilot husband. He was somewhere over Laos when his jet fighter went down.

The colonel who came to the door told her that Air Force Maj. Albro Lundy Jr. was missing in action. Two days later, he was reclassified as KIA/BNR--Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered.

For more than 21 years, the Palos Verdes woman said, she “absolutely” believed her husband was dead. Then last week her son, Albro Lundy III, showed her a photograph and other evidence indicating that the long-missing pilot was alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. In a matter of minutes, the assumption of more than two decades was erased, she said.

In an emotional press conference Wednesday at a West Los Angeles church, mother and son joined the families of two other missing American pilots to proclaim their belief that a mysterious photo widely circulated in the news media on Tuesday proves that their loved ones are alive.

The Pentagon has had the grainy photo showing three men in strange clothing, holding a sign with a cryptic message and odd lettering, since September, 1990, said a Pentagon source.

“Analysis of the photo continues,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “At no time were we able to conclude” that the men in the photo were missing American servicemen.

Many similar photos have surfaced over the years and all have proved to be unsubstantiated, or downright hoaxes, officials say.

Whatever its validity, the photo purporting to show Lundy, Air Force Col. John Robertson and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry Stevens as middle-aged men--along with a sign indicating the date May 25, 1990--has reintensified the nation’s long, drawn-out controversy over the Vietnam War’s missing.

Reacting to an onslaught of media inquiries, the Pentagon disclosed Wednesday that it had received an unconfirmed report from one source that Robertson and Stevens were being held for ransom with 60 other Americans by a Cambodian businessman somewhere in that country.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gregg Hartung, a Department of Defense spokesman, emphasized that the report was “thirdhand” and that further investigation has failed to turn up firsthand eyewitness accounts. Lundy was not mentioned by that source, Hartung said.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sens. John Kerry (D-Neb.) and Hank Brown (R-Colo.) joined other members of Congress in pushing for a more thorough investigation of MIAs.

“I don’t know whether it (the photo) was doctored, fabricated, where it comes from, who produced it, how it got here; nor does anyone else really,” Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, told a news conference Wednesday. “But this keeps the issue alive. We have got to get the answers.”

Other relatives of the more than 2,200 Americans who vanished in the war have had their hopes raised and dashed before. But seated inside a meeting hall at St. Paul the Apostle Church on Wednesday, representatives of the Lundy, Robertson and Stevens families insisted that they have at least part of the answer.

In addition to the photo, the families said they have corroborating evidence that the three men are alive, but they declined to elaborate. Complying with a State Department request, they also declined to discuss talks reportedly under way between the State Department and the Vietnamese government concerning the photo.

Albro Lundy III, an attorney, stressed that the families had been content to work through diplomatic channels but decided to hold a press conference only after the photo had been leaked to the media.

“These men’s lives hang in the balance, and other men’s lives--all the prisoners of war,” he said. “We want to do nothing to endanger those lives.”

Stevens’ mother, Gladys Fleckenstein, said “the miracle happened” last Nov. 2, when an officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s special POW-MIA office wrote her that he had received an intelligence report mentioning her son and Robertson.

Fleckenstein, who lives with her husband at Big Bear Lake, alerted Robertson’s wife, Barbara, whom she had known through POW-MIA activism.

Barbara Robertson of Santa Ana said she flew to Washington, visited the Defense Intelligence Agency and immediately identified her husband, who had been shot down more than 24 years ago and listed as KIA/BNR, in the photo.

“This was completely out of the blue,” she said.

When Fleckenstein first saw the picture, she said she was struck by the resemblance between the man shown and her youngest son, Dennis.

Dennis agreed, saying, “That’s my brother looking out at me.”

Albro Lundy III said that, although he always held hope that his father might be alive, he set out to disprove that the man in the photo was his father. But his research--including an independent analysis of the photo--made him a believer, he said. On July 11 he decided to share his secret with his mother.

“You’ve got to understand . . . I told her a week and a half ago a man who’s dead is living,” he said.

“Well, I have a logical mind,” said Johanna Lundy, who became a lawyer after her husband’s disappearance. “I said to Albro, ‘I want to hear this evidence, from the beginning, not just bits and pieces. And I want to look at this picture.’

“And I became convinced . . . that there was clear and convincing evidence that my husband was alive.”

The families expressed hope that public pressure will force full airing of the POW-MIA issue.

The government’s official position since 1981 has been that all reports are investigated, but no proof has been uncovered that any Americans were being held against their will after American forces withdrew from Vietnam and more than 500 POWs were returned in 1973.