COUNTYWIDE : MIA’s Son Insists His Father’s Alive

Albro Lundy III is convinced that his father, who was reported missing in action in Laos in 1970, is still alive--and his wife wears a T-shirt to prove it.

Cathi Lundy was among several dozen people who turned out for a POW-MIA Recognition Day at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda on Friday. Her T-shirt featured a grainy photo of three men holding a sign which reads, among other things, “25.5.90,” which could be the date that the photo was taken. The black-and-white photo drew controversy when it was released this summer but has since been denounced by some experts as a fraud.

Lundy, an attorney for a Beverly Hills law firm, presented his case Friday morning at the ceremony that one of the three men in photo is his father. “I can convince a jury of 12 people that this is my father,” he said.

But the U.S. Defense Department is not convinced and said the photo may be a fake.

Charles Palmer, chairman of the Orange County POW-MIA program for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, conceded that “it could be that black market people (in Asia) are making these pictures, getting paid, and running it through channels (that make it difficult to locate the source of the picture).”

Lundy believes one of the men in the photo is his father, Maj. Albro Lundy Jr., an Air Force pilot reporting missing in 1970 during a search-and-rescue mission over Laos.

“That is my father,” Lundy repeated, adding that any image of his father, whether or not it is on a doctored photo, is reason to believe he is alive.

The U.S. government has classified Maj. Lundy “killed in action,” although his body was never recovered.

For many years, the younger Lundy said he believed that his father was killed while flying a mission over Laos on Christmas Eve, 1970. The photograph changed all that. But the government’s inaction, he said, signifies that the government is either too reluctant, too incompetent or too determined to suppress new information to help him bring his father home.

“I feel like I am fighting my own government,” he said.

Wearing a blue suit and speaking eloquently to the assembled onlookers and media, Lundy described a web of witness accounts, intercepted Vietnamese radio transmissions and CIA documents that he believes will provide a trail of paper and evidence that may lead him to his father.

He also cited a recent Senate Select Committee report on MIAs and POWs in Southeast Asia which cites documents that may detail a transfer of missing Americans to China and the Soviet Union.

Lundy said that in the meantime, he wants to keep telling his story to the public in hopes of pressuring the government to act.

Even his 9-month-old son, Albro IV, joined forces with his father by wearing a red bracelet with his grandfather’s name, rank and the date he was reported missing.