Panel Grills Pentagon Over POWs : Southeast Asia: Defense Department’s debunking of live-sighting reports draws intense scrutiny from senators.

Members of a Senate panel clashed with Pentagon officials Tuesday over the Defense Department’s handling of hundreds of live-sighting reports indicating that U.S. servicemen may have been imprisoned in Southeast Asia long after the end of the Vietnam War.

The newly declassified reports and the Pentagon’s rationale for debunking them came under intense scrutiny on the first of two days of hearings by the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the special committee set up last year to investigate the fate of the 2,266 Americans still listed as missing in Vietnam and Laos.

Earlier hearings have uncovered evidence that the Nixon Administration, preoccupied with the unfolding Watergate scandal and eager to extricate itself from Vietnam, prematurely closed the books on as many as 133 servicemen who could have been alive and in captivity after the last POWs were repatriated during Operation Homecoming in 1973.

Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) announced that 90 of those prisoners have now been accounted for, with further investigations determining that many of them died before 1973. But “valid questions” remain concerning 43 servicemen who at one time were known to have been POWs but whose fate remains a mystery, Kerry said.

With most of the senators now clearly inclined to doubt the Pentagon’s longstanding assertion that there is no evidence that any POWs were held after 1973, the new hearings were called to analyze the Defense Department’s handling of more than 1,500 live-sighting reports of possible POWs received since Operation Homecoming. The reports were among some 30,000 pages of POW/MIA documents declassified and released by the Pentagon last week in response to an executive order signed by President Bush.

In one of several testy exchanges, Sen. Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire, the panel’s Republican vice chairman, accused the Pentagon of failing to properly investigate scores of reports from about 70 different sources about a secret underground prison in Hanoi where U.S. POWs were allegedly held as recently as the late 1980s.

“The story of American POWs long after the war ended sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, but these reports are not from fictitious people,” Smith said. “They are from real people telling us what they said they have seen and heard.”

The reports came from Vietnamese refugees who claimed to have either worked on the construction of the prison--said to have been located beneath a Hanoi military complex known as the Citadel--or to have seen Caucasian prisoners there as late as 1988.

While speculation about the prison’s existence is not new, Smith said the panel’s analysis of live-sighting reports over the last 20 years shows that a large number of them are clustered around Hanoi in a pattern that could only be explained by the existence of a secret detention facility.

“The presence of a secret underground facility for American POWs in Hanoi at the Citadel is the only rational explanation for all of these sightings and reports over the years,” he said.

But a panel of senior Pentagon officials and analysts, including Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, disputed Smith’s assertion, saying most of the reports have turned out to be false, with many of them fabrications by refugees seeking financial rewards or help in immigrating to the United States.

“We can find no evidence that will sustain the belief that there is an underground prison in Hanoi,” said Gary Sydow, the chief of the DIA’s office of analysis, who argued that the water table in Hanoi precluded the construction of either tall buildings or large underground complexes in the soft soil under the city.

Smith and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said the sheer number of the reports suggested that at least some must be valid, especially because more than 600 of them turn out to be clustered around Hanoi and three other areas.

The DIA analysts, however, disputed this “cluster analysis,” saying the size of the clusters shrink when the individual reports that compose them are determined to be false. In the case of one cluster of six reports that all seemed to corroborate one another, it turned out that “one of the six sources had told the same story to the other five . . . and that the one source admitted lying about his original story,” said Lt. Paul Maguire, one of the DIA analysts.

Robert DeStatte, another DIA analyst who recently returned from a 10-month tour of Vietnam, said he found no evidence of the prison’s existence.

Bob Sheetz, director of the DIA’s POW/MIA Office, sought to discredit one report from a Vietnamese doctor of herbal medicine, who said he saw four or five tall Caucasian men in prison uniforms standing behind a locked gate when he was called to a house in the Citadel complex to treat a general for kidney stones in December, 1986. The doctor said he was informed by the general’s 30-year-old son that the prisoners were U.S. pilots and were among more than 30 POWs being held at the compound.

The doctor, however, also told interrogators that he had extrasensory perception and conversed with the dead, Sheetz said.