Early POW Information Wasn’t Pursued : Vietnam: Investigations confirm initial reports of Americans being held after war, senators are told.

The United States began receiving reports in 1973 that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Southeast Asia, but the information was not pursued at the time, Garnett E. Bell, chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs in Hanoi, said Wednesday.

“We had information that there were Americans being held at the time, but it was not correlated to any specific individual,” Bell told members of a Senate select committee that is looking into the fate of missing Americans.

After the Vietnam War ended, there was no “hard evidence” that some Americans had not been released, Bell said. The unconfirmed reports of stranded POWs were received from 1973 to 1975, he said, but the United States did not have access to Vietnam to pursue the matter.

Bell, who has been involved in the POW and MIA search for 23 years and was chosen to run the Hanoi office opened earlier this year, said that subsequent investigations conducted in recent years have confirmed initial reports that American POWs were still being held in Vietnam and Cambodia after the war ended.

“After we began to interview refugees, and based on the investigations that were conducted in the field, and overall, I think we can say that with certainty now,” he said.

Bell declined to discuss in open session details of the information compiled by government officials. He said he has seen no evidence to suggest that any of the captured servicemen might still be alive.

Two other witnesses, Army Col. John Cole, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and William Gadoury, head of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Laos, said they are not aware of any evidence confirming that some POWs remained in Southeast Asia after the war, which ended in 1975.

Both men said they do not believe that any prisoners were left behind after U.S. troops were withdrawn.

Almost two decades after the war ended, more than 2,000 U.S. servicemen are still listed as missing in action or as prisoners of war. Over the last 18 years, the Defense Department has received 1,519 first-hand reports of live sightings; a number of people recently have produced photographs that they claim show missing U.S. servicemen.

Asked by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the select committee, if government officials had ever attempted to conceal information in an MIA or POW investigation, Bell said that it had happened occasionally over the years. “I don’t think there’s been a cover-up, but I think there have been occasions when information was not acted upon,” Bell said.

He complained that some of his reports were edited in a way that created a different impression than he had intended. He said he also encountered an occasional lack of support and objectivity from some U.S. officials during his investigations.

“I think you probably could best describe it as a difference of opinion,” he said.

But Bell said these problems had occurred more often in the past than in recent years.

Bell also said he knows of some Vietnamese citizens who are holding the remains of missing U.S. servicemen, hoping to receive money for turning them over. U.S. government policy prohibits payment for the return of remains.

As the panel conducted the second of three days of scheduled hearings, the leaders of five U.S. veterans groups criticized the government’s handling of the POW-MIA search.

Among them was Robert Wallace, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who said he is dissatisfied with government’s efforts to recover missing colleagues.