Fired Staffer Alleges POW Panel Cover-Up

A former congressman who was fired by a Senate committee investigating the fate of U.S. servicemen missing after the Vietnam War accused the committee’s chairman Wednesday of suppressing evidence that proves that American POWs were held by Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989.

The allegations by Billy Hendon, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina and long a POW activist, created an immediate uproar on Capitol Hill. Angry committee members and staff members depicted Hendon as a disgruntled former employee who had alienated virtually everyone else on the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs by consistently “misrepresenting and sensationalizing” the emotional POW issue for personal gain.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the committee who himself was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, took the unusual step of denouncing Hendon on the Senate floor in a deeply emotional address. A scathing statement later released by the committee also denounced Hendon in unusually heated terms and dismissed his allegations as “garbage.”

But while most lawmakers and other officials involved with the POW issue vigorously disputed Hendon’s assertions, it seemed inevitable that they would add more fuel to the already heated debate over whether American POWs were left behind in the wake of the Vietnam War--and whether successive U.S. Administrations sought to cover up or ignore evidence of that possibility.

Hendon, who was dismissed from the committee staff last month after Senate security officials accused him of mishandling classified materials, charged at a news conference that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee chairman, was at the center of a “bipartisan conspiracy” to suppress evidence about POWs who might still be alive in Vietnam and Laos.

Hendon said that Kerry ordered the shredding of a report prepared last April by panel investigators.