POW Inquiry Ends, but Questions Don’t : Investigation: Senate panel’s hearings failed to find if Americans had been left in Asia. Officials say there’s no evidence any MIAs still alive, though.

The Senate’s special POW committee concluded more than a year of hearings Friday still divided over the question that has haunted the nation for two decades: Were Americans left behind in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War?

After interviewing hundreds of witnesses and examining tens of thousands of pages of classified documents, the consensus on the Senate’s Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs appeared to be that only partial answers will ever be found.

The uncertainty was underlined at the final hearing by Ted Schweitzer, an American researcher who was first given access to some of Hanoi’s long-secret archives on prisoners of war. Schweitzer told the committee that most of the evidence about missing Americans that has survived the passing of time is in private hands and scattered across Vietnam, making it virtually impossible to gather.

“There is a mountain of information all over Vietnam,” but it is not part of the official archives and the central government “cannot order it to be brought to Hanoi,” said Schweitzer, a Pentagon consultant who has been in Vietnam conducting research for a book for the past three years. For real progress to occur, he added, villagers in possession of pilots’ remains and other artifacts “have to be made to feel in their hearts that this is something they ought to do for America.”

Schweitzer added that he does not believe any Americans remain alive and in captivity in Vietnam today.

That assessment was echoed by retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., President Bush’s special emissary to Vietnam for POW/MIA affairs. He said that while the possibility that war prisoners are still in captivity cannot be ruled out, “it is very, very low.”

All of the evidence so far suggests “nothing to indicate that people are alive. On the contrary . . . all of the evidence gathered so far points to death,” Vessey said.

That grim assessment is not likely to sit well with relatives of those listed as missing in action and POW activist groups who have long believed that at least some of the 2,226 men officially listed as missing in Indochina remain alive and in captivity today.

Only one member of the Senate panel, committee vice chairman Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), has indicated that he shares that belief, which is based primarily on reports of possible POW sightings trickling out of Southeast Asia over the years.

But wider divisions remain over other key questions. Among them: Were any POWs held back after the exchange of prisoners in 1973, how long might they have survived and did U.S. administrations do enough to account for them?

In its final report, due Jan. 5, the committee is likely to agree that scores of men known to have been in captivity at the end of the war were never accounted for. Moreover, some of them could have been alive in 1973, when former President Richard M. Nixon prematurely declared that all POWs had come home.

Two former defense secretaries, James R. Schlesinger and Melvin R. Laird, testified earlier this year that they believed some men had been left behind. Roger Shields, the Pentagon official then in charge of POW/MIA accounting, admitted under questioning that he had been “dismayed” by Nixon’s statement because contemporary intelligence indicated that some men remained in captivity.

The committee also appears unanimous in its view that the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to account for the missing men has, at least until recently, been inept and inadequate at best. At worst, the committee believes, the Pentagon was beset by a “mind-set to debunk” important clues pointing to the possibility that men were left behind.

Critics of the efforts, who included former senior military officers as well as family members, complained that for many years the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office was underfunded and staffed by no more than 10 people, belying official claims that the accounting effort was one of the nation’s highest priorities.

But while it will represent the most exhaustive effort yet undertaken to resolve the bitter POW/MIA controversy, the final report now being drafted is also likely to reflect the deep differences that surfaced in sometimes stormy fashion throughout the committee’s tempestuous life.

Although Smith and committee chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) sought to maintain a veneer of unity, it was clear that the committee was at war with itself almost from the beginning.