Pentagon Debunks Alleged MIA Photo : Inquiry: Snapshot is of a German convict, U.S. says, not an American officer missing in Laos. The Garden Grove POW hunter who produced it may be prosecuted.

The Justice Department is conducting an investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing by a Garden Grove man who produced a widely publicized photograph he claimed is of an American serviceman missing in Laos but is really, Pentagon officials determined recently, a picture of a German national.

POW-MIA hunter Jack Bailey introduced a snapshot in 1990 that he maintained proves that an officer missing in action in Laos during the Vietnam War is still alive.

However, a lengthy investigation has determined that the man in the photo is a German prison inmate, Pentagon officials confirmed Thursday.

Bailey’s photograph, which was reputed to show Donald Gene Carr Jr., an Army Special Forces officer who vanished in combat July 6, 1971, is Gunther Dittrich, a German national who lived in Laos and is now an inmate in Hanau Prison.

In a statement made available last week by Vietnam’s permanent mission to the United Nations, Hanoi asked that the United States press charges against Bailey “to prevent similar activities and to build confidence in Vietnam-U.S. cooperation.”

In an interview, Bailey, a retired Air Force flier, vowed to continue his search for Carr and other missing Americans and denied knowingly participating in a fraud.

Long a controversial figure in the POW-MIA crusade, Bailey had raised more than $3.3 million for his cause over eight years before focusing on the Carr case.

Suspicions about Bailey’s photograph, as well as other purported POW-MIA evidence, had prompted some members of Congress and families of some MIAs to call for a criminal investigation of Bailey and other POW sleuths.

“They want a scapegoat,” Bailey said. “They want to discredit anyone and everyone, and they’re doing a great job of it.”

The photograph of a grinning middle-age man who Bailey claimed is Carr was publicized last summer during a flurry of renewed interest in questions concerning more than 2,200 Americans who vanished during the Vietnam War.

The photo was considered especially intriguing because of the quality of the print and the striking resemblance to photos of the young Carr. Bailey said that his Laotian contact who took the photo had told him that the man’s name was “Gar”--months before he located photographs of Carr.

A technical comparison of photographs by a forensic expert sympathetic to the POW-MIA cause concluded that the images were of the same man at different stages of life. Some of Carr’s relatives reached the same conclusion.

Investigators with the Defense Intelligence Agency traveled with Bailey to Laos in a bid to determine the identity of the man in the photo. But evidence mounted that it depicted a German national who often lived in Laos.

Air Force Capt. Sam Grizzle said Thursday that Pentagon officials found Dittrich in a German prison. Dittrich--who reportedly was convicted of smuggling exotic birds--identified himself as the man in two photos possessed by Bailey and recalled they had been taken three years earlier.

Bailey accused Pentagon officials of conspiring to embarrass him. “The whole thing was a setup,” he said. “They want to shoot any messenger involved in this issue.”