COLUMN ONE : Prisoners of Not Knowing : The issue of MIAs and POWs in Southeast Asia has been called a top priority. But frustrated families of the missing tell of government errors and misrepresentations.

Mary D. Matejov happened to have her television set tuned to “Good Morning America” in August, 1978, when she was stunned to hear news that would turn her emotions inside out and forever shake her faith in her government.

On the program, investigative reporter Jack Anderson disclosed that U.S. interception of Laotian radio traffic had shown that four Americans who had survived the crash of an EC-47Q electronic surveillance plane over Laos on Feb. 5, 1973, had been captured by the Pathet Lao and turned over to the North Vietnamese.

“I said, ‘My God, they are talking about Joe!’ ” Matejov recalls.

Five years earlier, the government had told her there was no evidence that anyone survived that crash. They even encouraged her to hold a memorial service for her son, 21-year-old Sgt. Joseph A. Matejov, at Arlington National Cemetery.

She has since learned that transcripts of the Laotian communications were in her son’s Pentagon file all along. She has obtained copies of them and a sworn affidavit from the person who intercepted them.

Although the military never confirmed that those radio reports were accurate, Matejov is now convinced of one thing: “I was lied to,” she says.

Such stories are not rare among the families of the 2,273 missing Vietnam War servicemen.

In a speech to the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia this month, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said that “resolving the issue of prisoners of war and missing in action is, and will continue to be, a matter of highest national priority.”

Many families complain, however, that over the years the government has repeatedly misled them, failed to follow up on legitimate leads and even sent home remains that they later discovered were not those of their missing relatives after all.

Distrustful of the official effort, many of these families have made their own way into a murky world where they are vulnerable to cruel scams.

Their fragile hopes often have been kept alive far too long by counterfeit dog tags, forged letters, bogus photographs and other hoaxes perpetrated by unscrupulous people seeking rewards. The families and their sympathizers spin elaborate conspiracy and cover-up theories involving the highest levels of government.

But in recent months--with startling new accusations from a Pentagon insider and the release of much-publicized photographs purporting to show missing servicemen alive in Southeast Asia--their complaints are receiving fresh attention on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

“Never, in all my years working on this issue in Congress, have I encountered such skepticism, cynicism and virulence as I have in these past few months,” said Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), chairman of a House subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs.

What’s more, many on both sides are saying the government itself is largely to blame for the problems it now faces on the POW-MIA issue. At a minimum, they say, Washington is guilty of hypocrisy, hyper-secrecy and insensitivity to the legitimate concerns of families and others who want to know more about what happened to the missing.

In a battle that continues today, Matejov, who believes her son may still be alive, is seeking to reverse the official finding that he was killed in action. She claims a top-ranking Pentagon official admitted to the family that the names of Joseph Matejov and the other EC-47Q crewmen were removed from a prisoners-of-war list during the Paris peace talks of 1973, in order to speed resolution of the issue.

“They weren’t killed in action--they were killed on paper at the peace talks,” said Matejov, a Hampton, Va., mother of 10 whose husband and daughter were graduated from West Point. “I blame the leadership from the military all the way up to the presidents. It does not matter if they are Republican or Democrat. They call MIAs the highest national priority, but I think it is lip service and nothing more.”

Sedgwick D. Tourison Jr., a former intelligence officer and senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs, agreed that the government has never taken the MIA issue seriously. “I don’t think that the National Security Council ever believed there was one live American (still in Southeast Asia)” he said.

Tourison, who resigned from the POW-MIA office in protest three years ago, said he shares the belief that not one of the missing is still alive, but he added: “I really care about these families that are being jerked around because Washington doesn’t have the guts to tell it like it is.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former POW respected on both sides of the issue, said he also is concerned about the government’s handling of the issue. “I have talked to many, many family members who clearly have had big problems,” he said.

McCain, who contends that the Pentagon is “overprotective of many of its sources of information and the information that it has,” is sponsoring one of several “truth bills” that would open up decades-old files.

National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft says that opening the old records would cause more problems than it would solve. “At one time in the past, the Pentagon did allow fairly wide access to the records, and what happened as a result is that family members started getting letters from unscrupulous people who had some of the data and who were playing on those people,” Scowcroft said.

Indeed, the Pentagon has traced a recently released photograph--one in which three families have publicly claimed to recognize missing relatives--to what it describes as “a ring of Cambodian opportunists led by a well known and admitted fabricator of POW-MIA information.”

When records have been declassified, families have often been horrified by what they discovered. Errol and Madeline Bond of Fullerton, Calif., twice traveled to the military’s Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Hawaii to review what they believed were all the records relating to the 1971 disappearance of their son, Air Force Capt. Ronald L. Bond, a bombardier-navigator.

That file contained little more than the date on which Bond was shot down, his personnel records and other routine papers. Yet when further information was declassified later, his parents learned there was much that they had not seen--including evidence that beeper signals and coded messages picked up by search-and-rescue planes near the crash site of their son’s F-4E Phantom showed that he had bailed out successfully.

That same record indicated that an investigation was under way, but the Bonds have never seen the results. “Nice of them to declassify a letter they said they never had,” Errol Bond said. “We have not received anything since, but our son has not been proven dead.”

Virtually all the missing were declared presumed dead in the late 1970s, as part of President Jimmy Carter’s effort to normalize relations with Vietnam. President Ronald Reagan disagreed with that policy and sought to raise the issue’s public profile again. The Reagan Administration declassified many Pentagon files and called attention to “discrepancy cases” in which Vietnam had not accounted for servicemen known to have been captured.

“The Administration in 1981 and 1982 made a conscious decision to be very, very public on the issue, so that it would be certain to stay on the front burner and outlive any single President,” said Richard L. Armitage, who was deputy assistant defense secretary for Asian affairs under Reagan. But he conceded that “as we were not able to deliver live Americans, we bred frustration.” President Bush also has insisted repeatedly that resolving the issue of missing servicemen is of “highest national priority,” but McCain says it “clearly has not been” because “if it were, we wouldn’t be experiencing many of the problems we have been experiencing.”

Critics say the President’s words are belied by the fact that until recently much of the investigation of these supposedly high-priority cases has been relegated to a handful of overworked Pentagon analysts who lack the resources for any in-depth probe.

(The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it is sharply increasing the manpower devoted to resolving MIA cases, adding 88 people for a total of 222. Of those, 20 will be added to the Pentagon’s Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, bringing its staff to 57.)

Col. Millard A. Peck, who resigned as head of that Pentagon office earlier this year, has compared the job to running a police station without squad cars or patrolmen. Rather than gathering evidence, he said, the staff waits until it is brought to them.

“Some people worked 13 hours a day just keeping up with the mail,” Peck told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in May. “Live-sighting” reports often were not investigated until months after they came to his office’s attention, Peck said.

In a scathing memorandum last February, Peck wrote: “The mind-set to ‘debunk’ is alive and well. . . . Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source.”

And, in his most devastating criticism, Peck added: “Any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago.”

The Pentagon investigated Peck’s allegations and declared them groundless. Officials also say they had planned to fire Peck, who is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, the DIA director, said Peck was “simply, poorly suited for this position--a case of a good officer in the wrong job.”

McCain and others do not buy that. McCain says he believes Peck’s inflammatory accusations were “right on the money,” and added: “When a man like Col. Peck, with his distinguished record, resigns in disgust, then there’s clearly a problem.”

Moreover, in the view of many families, Peck confirmed the suspicions they had held for years. “People in the government are not doing what they should,” said Catherine Hastings of Baldwin Park. She said her son, missing since 1968, has been mentioned in some of the live-sighting reports. “I just wish they would put as much effort in proving the reports are true as in finding fault with them,” she said.

Days after Peck’s resignation letter was leaked to the media, the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a 117-page report charging that the government had rejected or covered up information on American prisoners who were left in Southeast Asia after the war.

“After examining hundreds of documents relating to the raw intelligence, and interviewing many families and friends of POW-MIAs,” the report said, “the minority staff concluded that, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the real internal policy of the U.S. government was to act upon the presumption that all MIAs were dead.”

Obtaining access to that information proved extraordinarily difficult for the committee’s staff. When Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) requested that investigators with security clearances be given access to the raw intelligence, the Pentagon refused. After four months it relented, but insisted that Grassley himself be present and that no one be allowed to take his notes outside the room where the documents were. Grassley persisted and, ultimately, he and his staffers spent more than 36 hours over four days poring over the records.

Backing the Pentagon in its efforts to block Senate investigators from seeing the documents was Ann Mills Griffiths, the controversial head of National League of Families.

Griffiths, whose organization is private, has often been criticized as being too close to the Pentagon. In a memorandum to Defense Undersecretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, she wrote that she was “appalled” to learn that Grassley would be granted access to the records.

“Squandering (DIA) time and efforts to participate in a ‘witch hunt’ against themselves does nothing to help resolve the issue and, in fact, lends credence to those most involved in accusations that a ‘mind-set to debunk’ exists in that office,” Griffiths warned.

The Pentagon contends that Vietnam holds the key, and that public anger should be directed there. The U.S. government has beefed up its efforts in Southeast Asia and recently opened a Hanoi office devoted to the POW-MIA matter. Vietnam, trying to smooth the way to normal relations with the United States, has been returning what it says are remains of American servicemen.

On that issue, too, the Pentagon’s own credibility is under attack. Last October, the Defense Department buried with full military honors what it claimed were the remains of four U.S. servicemen missing in Laos since 1971. The Pentagon later acknowledged, however, that two of the coffins were empty and one contained only tiny, unidentifiable fragments of bone and a tooth.

The Pentagon said it had “resolved” the cases of the four missing men because it had matched the manifest of their last flight with crash site wreckage.

The Army’s central identification laboratory in Hawaii, which analyzes remains and other evidence to identify the missing, also came under harsh criticism in the mid-1980s, after some of the nation’s top forensic experts disputed some of its identifications.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing in 1986, a group of nationally known physical and forensic anthropologists testified that the lab in Hawaii was plagued with incompetence, inadequate equipment, poor training and unscientific techniques, and that it fabricated conclusions. Among the identifications criticized were that of an Air Force sergeant that was based on chips of two teeth, the reconstruction of a missing Navy aviator’s face without facial bones or eye sockets, and those of 13 Air Force personnel using bone fragments no bigger than a quarter.

Kathryn Fanning of Oklahoma City had accepted military assurances that her husband, Marine flier Hugh Michael Fanning, died in the crash of his A-6 Intruder in 1967. In 1984, she and their three children buried what the government said were his remains.

“All available evidence, both biological and circumstantial, support the reasonable conclusion that the remains are those of Maj. Fanning,” the government identification laboratory wrote.

But 11 months later, she had an opportunity to see the official file and discovered, to her astonishment, that there had been several reports that he had been seen alive.

She exhumed the remains, only to learn that what she thought was an entire skeleton was actually only one-fifth of one--lacking a skull and other parts the military had allowed her to believe were there, Fanning says. Two forensic specialists told her it was impossible to know whether the remains were her husband’s.

Fanning refused to claim the remains, and now, the government has gone to Hugh Fanning’s parents as well as the Fannings’ children, seeking permission to bury the remains as his.

Marine Corps spokeswoman Maj. Nancy LaLuntas said the live-sighting reports in Hugh Fanning’s record are based on “some pretty tenuous information.”

But Fanning has vowed, in a statement that echoes the sentiments of many other families: “I am not going to walk away from this. . . . I can certainly accept it if my husband’s dead. What I can’t accept, and what is railed about, is the government lying to me.”

Tumulty reported from Washington and Weikel reported from Orange County.