White House Blocking Testimony on Alleged ’81 POW Ransom Offer : Inquiry: Bush Administration says subpoenaing Secret Service agent would set ‘terrible precedent.’

WASHINGTON — The Bush Administration is trying to stop a Senate committee from obtaining the testimony of a Secret Service agent who is believed to have information about an alleged 1981 offer by Vietnam to ransom American prisoners of war for $4 billion.

Allegations of such an offer first surfaced in 1986. Neither officially confirmed nor denied, they remained among the murky rumors and speculation surrounding the question of whether American servicemen were held captive in Vietnam after the war.

Now, however, investigators on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, a panel set up last year to probe the fate of missing U.S. servicemen, have located a Secret Service agent who attended a 1981 White House meeting at which the offer may have been discussed.

While it is not known whether the agent can confirm the authenticity of the offer, the committee wants to subpoena his testimony as part of its effort to judge the adequacy of the Pentagon’s search for missing POWs over the years.

But congressional sources said the White House is vigorously trying to block the move, arguing that forcing an agent to testify about what he may have overheard while guarding the President would set a “terrible precedent” that could compromise the protective mission of the Secret Service.

“They’re putting a lot of pressure on senators to vote against subpoenaing this guy. They’re telling them that if an agent can be compelled to testify about what he overheard, the President and his senior advisers will not be able to discuss sensitive matters in the future unless all the Secret Service agents are out of earshot,” one source said.

The 12 members of the special committee chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) are sympathetic to the Administration’s argument--outlined forcefully in a recent letter to Kerry from Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady. In a compromise with the White House, they have agreed to delay a decision on the agent’s subpoena until they have questioned other participants in the meeting. But they reportedly are divided about what to do if those answers are unsatisfactory or inconclusive.

“Some members will want to go ahead and (take the agent’s testimony), but the Administration is working hard to get the seven votes it will need to block the committee from issuing a subpoena,” a source said.

While the Secret Service wants to avoid setting a precedent that could make it harder for its agents to protect the President, the issue is also extremely sensitive for the committee because of the many emotional allegations by relatives of missing servicemen that officials have conspired over the years to cover up evidence that American POWs may still be alive in Southeast Asia.

Few, if any, members of the committee believe in this grand conspiracy theory. But they also do not want to invite the controversy that could erupt if the POW activists suspect that the senators have deliberately avoided talking to anyone believed to have information about the possibility of servicemen being left behind in Vietnam or Laos.

Among officials responsible for tracking the POW/MIA issue over the years, there is considerable disagreement over whether an offer to ransom POWs was actually received from the Vietnamese and, if so, was considered genuine.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene F. Tighe Jr., who until late 1981 served as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon branch in charge of the POW effort, said that if such an offer had been made, he was “certainly never informed of it.”

However, another retired official, who held a senior intelligence position at the time, told The Times that soon after taking office in January, 1981, the Reagan Administration received an offer from Vietnamese officials, transmitted through Canadian diplomats. They reportedly were willing to free an unspecified number of prisoners in return for reconstruction aid they believed that President Richard M. Nixon had promised when the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973.

Asked about the offer during a closed-door deposition to the Senate committee June 23, former National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen at first said he vaguely recalled that a “$4-billion figure” was mentioned. “I remember writing something (to Reagan) . . . saying that it would be worth the President’s going along, and let’s have the negotiations,” Allen said.

But in a July 21 memorandum to the committee, Allen retracted that statement, saying he had examined his records and now realized that he first heard of the purported offer from a group of POW activists who visited his Washington office on Sept. 24, 1986, four years after he left government.

“It appears . . . there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW-MIAs for $4 billion. It becomes clear that my recollection of having written these notes referred to events of 1986, not 1981,” Allen wrote the committee.

A source close to the Senate committee indicated that some investigators were not completely satisfied with that answer, however, because of their understanding of what the Secret Service agent is prepared to say if he is subpoenaed to testify. The issue, they added, is expected to come to a head within the next two weeks.

In another development Thursday, a senior Vietnamese official ridiculed claims by Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) that Vietnam held missing U.S. servicemen in an underground detention center beside the tomb of Ho Chi Minh until the late 1980s.

Smith said 22 sources with supposed firsthand knowledge and 48 citing hearsay had described the alleged construction and operation of the facility over the past 15 years.

Ngo Hoang, deputy director of the Vietnamese office in charge of seeking missing people, said in an interview with Reuters news service that the Vietnamese had built a big underground water drainage system beneath Ho’s mausoleum, not a detention center.

Hoang also denied allegations by U.S. Army Col. John Cole, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Bangkok-based office, that Vietnam had reneged on a promise to allow U.S. teams to pursue, with very short notice, leads in his country about missing servicemen.

He said Vietnam, at Washington’s request, had helped U.S. experts make about 40 short-notice trips this year to about 20 provinces in the north, south and central parts of Vietnam, including trips to Vietnamese prisons and former POW camps.