Some POWs May Have Been Left, U.S. Aide Admits

A senior Pentagon official admitted Wednesday that the government had evidence in 1973 that some American POWs may have been left behind in Vietnam, despite official pronouncements to the contrary at the time.

Under sharp questioning by members of a Senate panel investigating the fate of Americans still missing from the Vietnam War, Charles Trowbridge, the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs, acknowledged that the DIA had the names of 51 servicemen listed as captured who were not among the prisoners repatriated during Operation Homecoming in April, 1973, when all U.S. POWs were supposed to have been returned by North Vietnam.

The Administration of then-President Richard M. Nixon privately raised the issue of the missing servicemen with the Hanoi government, Trowbridge said.

But the fact that not all missing servicemen had been accounted for was concealed from the American people at the time by Defense Department officials, who said in the wake of Operation Homecoming that there was no indication any Americans were still being held in Southeast Asia.

“Those statements simply were not true,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, said as he interrogated Trowbridge about the possibility that some Americans had been left behind. “The last evidence we had was that some people were in captivity--yes or no?”

“Yes,” Trowbridge replied quietly. “Some people.”

While Trowbridge acknowledged that 51 soldiers who were thought to have been POWs did not come home, Kerry said that the Senate committee’s own extensive investigation had identified 244 Americans who should have been listed as POWs still in captivity after the conclusion of Operation Homecoming.

Information obtained from former prisoners later allowed officials to account for 111 of those 244 as having died, leaving “us with 133 people . . . that we should be asking questions about,” Kerry said.

While stressing that the committee has no evidence to suggest that any of those 133 missing servicemen were actually alive in 1973, Kerry said that there was also no evidence then to indicate that they were dead.

“What we have done today,” he later told reporters, “is to confirm that there was evidence that some Americans may have been alive” but that U.S. policy “ignored” it--presumably because it could have complicated the Nixon Administration’s efforts to extricate the United States from the Vietnam conflict.

Altogether, 2,266 U.S. military personnel still are unaccounted for nearly two decades after the end of the Vietnam War.

Along with newly declassified documents indicating that officials may have falsified some casualty records to conceal the covert operations the United States was then mounting in Laos and Cambodia, the testimony by Trowbridge and other current and former military officials shed a new and sometimes unflattering light on U.S. efforts to deal with the issue of servicemen still listed as missing in Southeast Asia.

Indeed, what emerged, in Kerry’s characterization, was more a picture of “disorganization and a lack of focus”--a fractured undertaking marred by inadequate funding, mistrust and a woeful lack of coordination that several of the witnesses agreed could have contributed to public perceptions of a cover-up.

“For the life of me, I don’t understand why there hasn’t been more correlation” between MIA monitoring groups and intelligence agencies, complained Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). “You might have been in different countries for all of the cooperation and coordination there was,” he told the witnesses.

Some of the most caustic criticism came not from Democrats, but from senior Republican members of the panel, which was set up last year to review the government’s handling of the POW-MIA question and to investigate the even more emotional question of what has happened to those still listed as missing.

“The documents we are collecting don’t tell the same rosy story we keep hearing from the Administration,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who dismissed State and Defense department assertions that no evidence exists to support claims of Americans being left behind. That is “simply not true,” Grassley said.