Odysseys of an MIA’s Daughters MIA’s Family in Odysseys of Hope : Vietnam War: The sisters--one a Chatsworth resident--travel to Southeast Asia pursuing what they believe is photographic evidence of his captivity.

Air Force Col. John Robertson was a classic fighter jock, a handsome, cocky jet pilot who was so happy the day he was ordered to Vietnam that he did cartwheels around his pool.

Stationed in Germany in the late 1950s, he won top awards in NATO air reconnaissance competitions. Reassigned to Indochina, he liked to show off by zooming low over the jungle--upside down--while returning from bomb runs over North Vietnam.

For all his flying skill, Robertson was shot down by a North Vietnamese MIG fighter Sept. 16, 1966, as his squadron of F-4s attacked a railroad outside Hanoi, and the U.S. government later declared him dead.

But the question of whether Robertson may be alive, still a prisoner in Southeast Asia, is at the heart of a running quarrel between the Pentagon and his family over the authenticity of a widely publicized photo.

And hope that the controversial photo is authentic prompted his daughter in Chatsworth and her sister, both suburban mothers in their 30s, to conduct a daring search for him spanning three Indochinese nations.

Their hunt began two years ago when Robertson’s family received an intriguing tip: A Cambodian man in Orange County had a photograph purportedly showing Robertson and two other U.S. fliers in captivity in Vietnam.

Released to the news media last year, the photo touched off headlines around the country, debatable evidence in the long, bitter national argument over whether missing Vietnam-era servicemen like Robertson are still secret captives. It also unleashed a war of words between the Pentagon, which said it was an apparent phony, and the families of Robertson and the other servicemen, who still think it may be real.

The Pentagon went a step further last month, saying it has evidence that the picture was actually a doctored version of a 1923 photo showing three Soviet farmers. The military said it was reprinted in a Cambodian edition of a magazine called Soviet Union Today and later retouched.

The U.S. is trying to trace the original photograph through archives in Moscow, but officials are satisfied the version purportedly showing Robertson is a fake, Pentagon spokeswoman Capt. Susan Strednansky said last week.

The family of Robertson and the others, however, continue to question the government’s information, saying they believe the picture may actually show captured Americans.

They say that quick research performed in Moscow shows that the Soviet magazine was printed in 22 languages, but not Khmer. The Pentagon contends that the edition in question was a regional one published in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, not Moscow.

Nevertheless, the photo sent the Robertson sisters on an unusual odyssey in search of information about their father.

In the past two years they have--between them--traveled to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, questioned numerous U.S. and Southeast Asian officials and provided information to a Senate committee investigating the adequacy of U.S. government attempts to locate servicemen missing in action.

Robertson’s oldest daughter, Deborah Robertson Bardsley of Chatsworth, talked her way into the notorious Son Tay prison near Hanoi, where captured U.S. fliers were once imprisoned, and poked through cells at night with a flashlight. She visited the site where her father crashed and found a Vietnamese peasant she believes recognized Robertson as a downed pilot he captured alive.

Robertson’s youngest daughter, Shelby Robertson Quast, of Oakton, Va., drove across the countryside of Vietnam and Cambodia for 18 hours to Phnom Penh after hearing her father had been smuggled there. She wangled special permission to ride in a 1,500-m.p.h. F-4 fighter--the type her father flew--at March Air Force Base to get a better idea of why he loved flying so much.

“I hope my daughter would do the same for me . . . I think it’s an extraordinary effort on the part of the sisters to do that,” said Eugene McDaniel, a retired Navy aviator and former prisoner of war who heads the Virginia-based American Defense Institute, which is active in POW and MIA issues.

The Cambodian who provided the picture, said Bardsley, also turned over a letter that said her father had been smuggled to Phnom Penh and would be released if his family showed up there before the end of November 1990. Quast said the letter was written by a former member of the Cambodian government who fled his native land.

Quast, 30, immediately booked a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, accompanied by Bill Hendon, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina active in MIA issues.

Refused permission to enter Cambodia from Thailand, Quast and Hendon flew to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, got a visa and set off for Phnom Penh in a car driven by a Cambodian embassy employee.

At the time, four Cambodian factions were battling for control of the war-ravaged nation and a car trip through the countryside was a highly risky venture. At one point, the driver, facing a checkpoint manned by armed soldiers, floored the gas pedal and “blew right past them,” said Quast, a former law student and computer-security executive.

Despite five weeks of searching, however, she came up empty-handed.

Bardsley, 38, decided to try her luck last October, after Los Angeles documentary filmmaker Carol Fleischer offered to pay her way to Southeast Asia if she would allow her search to be filmed.

A onetime assistant TV director, Bardsley is an articulate, quick-witted woman married to a producer of the “Rescue 911” TV series. At home, she juggles the care of two small children with phone calls from Senate investigators, journalists and U.S. government sources she said regularly supply her with off-the-record information.

Dressed neatly in pastel-colored clothes, her blonde hair carefully combed, Bardsley looks at first glance like a Junior League hostess. But behind the polite, well-coiffed exterior lies a tireless determination to find out what happened to her father--a search that has become a full-time preoccupation.

A closet in her home fairly overflows with internal Pentagon documents, including many obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. This year, she testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs and visited several U.S. cities in pursuit of leads about her father.

Arriving in Bangkok, Bardsley and Fleischer left almost immediately for a sprawling refugee camp known as Site 2 where, Bardsley said, several copies of the photo purporting to show her father had surfaced.

At the camp, Bardsley was directed to a Cambodian “spotter”--a camp resident hired by the U.S. government to interview incoming refugees for any information they may have about missing U.S. servicemen.

The man showed her a list of Americans he had compiled, which, to her astonishment, contained her father’s name. But the Cambodian said U.S. embassy officials in Bangkok had never bothered to review the list, she said.

Pentagon spokesman Kerry Gershaneck said U.S. officials debrief Site 2 spotters “every one to three weeks.” He said the Cambodian, Thach Han, never worked as a spotter, although he had been a U.S. translator.

The Cambodian man was “let go” by the government, Gershaneck said, after he was allegedly caught selling copies of the picture supposedly showing Robertson and the other missing Americans to Indochinese refugees, telling them they could parlay the photos into U.S. entry papers.

Bardsley said Thach Han did not ask her for money. She said a Senate investigator who also interviewed him said that “not just his credibility, but his intentions were very fine.”

A few days after the Site 2 trip, Bardsley and Fleischer flew to Hanoi, where Bardsley quickly set out on an emotional odyssey to the exact spot, in a distant village, where her father’s plane crashed--a place she had thought about “millions of times before.”

“It was like a pilgrimage. I had to go there,” she said.

Bardsley had asked to be allowed to visit it in private, but a host of Vietnamese government officials insisted on accompanying her. Throughout her trip, she said, the Vietnamese seemed intent on proving that her father had died in the crash. Although Robertson’s navigator was captured alive and survived the war, he ejected after the F-4 was hit and has no idea what became of her father, Bardsley said.

At the village, Bardsley was upset to find that the entire population had been assembled to meet her. She was nervous about how the villagers would react to her because, although the crash had killed no Vietnamese, it had burned several houses.

As she walked down a shaded lane toward the crash site, a sympathetic young Vietnamese interpreter leaned over and told her: “I hope you are able to find the truth about your father.”

Bardsley burst into tears but kept walking.

Arms clutched around herself, Bardsley examined the site, a deep pit at the edge of the village, which had already been excavated by the Vietnamese. Emotions flooded her.

“It was a very intense experience,” she said. “Only two things could have happened: either he went down with the plane or he got out. If he went down with it, I was standing on his grave.”

Afterward, she talked through an interpreter with the villagers. They kept saying the pilot had been killed, but she got the feeling they had been coached. Her hopes for getting any real information sagged.

Then she got what she believes was a break.

As Fleischer wrangled with Vietnamese government representatives, Bardsley quietly talked with a peasant who told her the startling information that he had personally captured an American flier with “bright hair,” saying it looked like hers.

Fleischer captured the moment on film. As Bardsley shows the peasant a photo of her father, the man smiles broadly, in apparent recognition.

As soon as he did so, however, Vietnamese officials surrounded him and had a “very angry” conversation with him, Fleischer said.

“A BBC reporter was there the next week,” she said, but the man’s “story had changed.”

Bardsley later went to a provincial storehouse and viewed wreckage from her father’s plane.

The following day, Bardsley was scheduled to meet with the Vietnamese prime minister, Vo Van Kiet. Figuring the audience probably had great propaganda value to the Vietnamese, she thought carefully about how to conduct herself.

She had planned to greet Vo with a bouquet of flowers. But she realized that even such a simple gesture could be used against her, if Vietnamese propagandists used photos of the exchange to imply that she was thanking the government.

In the end, she merely shook his hand.

During their meeting, which attracted many Vietnamese news reporters, Bardsley said she emphatically told Vo that she was unsatisfied with the information the Vietnamese had given her.

Nonetheless, a Vietnamese newspaper carried a story the next day saying she had thanked Vo and the Vietnamese people “for telling her the truth about her father.”

Throughout her five-day trip to Vietnam, Bardsley implored virtually every official she met to be allowed into Son Tay prison to check information she’d been given that an American POW had been seen there.

At the time, Vietnamese officials were urging MIA relatives and other Americans to “come and travel freely” in their country. But they staunchly resisted letting Bardsley into Son Tay.

While in Hanoi, Fleischer interviewed Nguyen Co Thac, a former Vietnamese foreign minister, telling him on camera it would look bad to the American people if Bardsley were barred from Son Tay. It was only then, Bardsley said, that she got permission to go.

Late on her last day in the country, Bardsley and the filmmaker were provided with a government van, government driver and government translators.

It was night by the time Bardsley arrived. The prison, surrounded by a high stone wall topped with barbed wire, lay under a full moon. Denied permission to film inside, Bardsley and Fleischer were given only a dim flashlight to examine the prison. A watchman refused to unlock most cell doors.

But in an open cell, bare except for a metal bed frame and locker, Bardsley found a photo that startled her. Taped to the locker, it pictured a jet fighter and a pilot.

Heart pounding, Bardsley whipped open the locker door. There, in the faint glimmer of her flashlight, were personal papers, clothing and a rice bowl.

“I was really overstepping every bound and pressing to the limit,” she said. “But I felt like I had nothing to lose. For this American lady to barge in and demand that they open locked rooms--when they hadn’t even ever seen a Western woman before--they just didn’t have a clue about what to do with me.”

In the poor light Bardsley couldn’t make out the writing on the papers or any details of the pilot in the photo, which she knew she would not be allowed to take. She was told by Vietnamese officials that a man had been living in the cell, but had been forced to leave hurriedly “because there were termites.”

She concedes that given the prison’s history as a POW compound, “It could have been anybody. The only thing that made me suspicious was that they didn’t want me to go into that room.”

But the incident convinced her that if the Vietnamese had been holding any POWs at Son Tay, they could have moved them very quickly.

After her return to the U.S., there was one more aftershock from Vietnam. Last December, Bardsley got a call from a reporter seeking comment on the Vietnamese government’s announcement that it had found her father’s remains.

They consisted, the Vietnamese said, of teeth, bone fragments and pieces of a helmet.

She immediately called one of her U.S. government sources and was told that the claim was false, that it had been determined at the crash site that the teeth were not human.

And so her search for her father goes on.

“Somewhere in the world, there’s someone who knows exactly what happened. And that person knows what we want to know,” she said. “We just want to know what happened to him, whatever that is.”