Report Blames Nixon for MIAs Left in Vietnam

A draft of a Senate report to be released next week has concluded that President Richard M. Nixon and his senior advisers bear some blame for the scores of Americans believed held captive in Southeast Asia but never accounted for at the end of the Vietnam War.

The draft, obtained by The Times, also harshly criticized former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. A subsequent version of the draft toned down the criticisms of Nixon and Kissinger after vigorous protests by both men.

Besides protesting the committee’s historic account of Vietnam matters, Nixon has quietly registered his opposition to current efforts within the Bush Administration to normalize relations with Hanoi, The Times also learned Friday.

In response to questions from the Senate POW-MIA committee, Nixon has written a letter, not yet made public, detailing why he believes normalization would be a “tragic mistake.” His opposition, and other factors emerging in recent weeks, has dimmed prospects that Bush will act on the issue before leaving office in 11 days.

The draft report’s contention that the Nixon Administration did not do all it could have to account for missing U.S. servicemen is expected to be one of two controversial conclusions drawn by the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs as it winds up a yearlong investigation into the fates of 2,226 Americans still officially listed as missing after the Vietnam War.

The committee also is expected to find, in the words of the draft, that there is “no compelling evidence that missing Americans are alive or that there are firm reasons for anticipating (their) return.”

In a judgment certain to be denounced by groups who believe that POWs are still being held in Southeast Asia, the committee said all of the evidence obtained over the years, from live sighting reports to satellite imagery, is “inconclusive at best.”

The long-awaited report is based on hundreds of interviews and millions of pages of newly declassified documents. It represents the most exhaustive effort yet to answer the question that has gnawed at the nation for nearly two decades: Were prisoners left behind in Vietnam and could any possibly still be alive today?

While it places most of the blame for the failure to account for the missing on Vietnam and Laos, the draft also faults earlier American administrations for not giving the issue a high priority. It is particularly critical of Nixon for ignoring warnings by the Pentagon that Vietnam and Laos had not accounted for all POWS they were believed to be holding.

Kissinger, who as national security adviser negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, mounted what sources close to the committee characterized as an intensive behind-the-scenes effort to moderate its criticism of his handling of the Paris Peace Accords negotiations with Vietnam as they pertained to POWs.

“He (Kissinger) has been talking to people on the committee practically every day,” one source said. “He is making point-by-point rebuttals of the conclusions and driving staff crazy.”

Republican sources confirmed that Kissinger had also enlisted the help of Sen. Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and other senior Republicans to head off what Lloyd N. Cutler, Kissinger’s Washington attorney, complained were “totally unfounded” and “distorting” conclusions.

A subsequent, though not final, draft, also made available to The Times, revealed that many of Kissinger’s points were incorporated in the text. In several cases, revisions were striking. For instance, the earlier draft sharply questioned Kissinger’s contention that North Vietnam had given the United States unwritten but “ironclad” guarantees that prisoners captured in Laos would be repatriated.

“Dr. Kissinger . . . insists to this day that the DRV (North Vietnamese) assurances (on the Laos prisoners) were more sweeping and declarative than the record would seem to indicate,” the draft states. He “insists that he received an assurance from the DRV that there would be a full accounting for American POW-MIAs not only in Vietnam, but throughout Indochina. This is contrary to the State Department’s own legal interpretation of the agreement and is not supported by statements during the negotiations by the North Vietnamese.”

In the subsequent draft, dated Jan. 5, this paragraph was replaced by one that read:

“Dr. Kissinger pressed (chief Vietnamese negotiator) Le Duc Tho for a direct assurance that U.S. prisoners in Laos would be returned within the same 60-day period as other prisoners covered by the (Paris Peace) Accords. On Jan. 9, he succeeded. On that date Le Duc Tho assured Dr. Kissinger for the first time that U.S. prisoners captured in Laos would be returned within the same time frame as those captured in Vietnam.”

A committee spokeswoman acknowledged that Kissinger had sought this and other changes to correct what Cutler, in a Dec. 30 letter to committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) characterized as the report’s endorsement of “conspiracy theories and Monday morning second-guessing of negotiations that occurred 20 years ago.”

But the spokeswoman strongly denied the changes were made because of pressure brought to bear by Kissinger, Nixon or their Republican allies in the Senate.

“There were a number of staff drafts circulating as we tried to grapple with all the information, drafts that senators hadn’t seen yet . . . and that in some cases were factually inaccurate,” she said. Many changes would have been ordered by the senators, even if someone had not “leaked” the draft to Kissinger, she said.

Both the earlier and later versions of the 500-page report note that about 100 Americans who were known or believed to have been captured alive in Vietnam and Laos were never repatriated or otherwise accounted for on the list of prisoners that Vietnam said had died in captivity.

Concern about these prisoners was shown in a classified memo at the time, but rarely reflected in public comments by Nixon Administration officials.

The gap between the private and public assessments was evident from the contrast between a March 28, 1973, memorandum by then-Assistant Defense Secretary Lawrence S. Eagleburger and the public statements Nixon himself made the next day.

The Eagleburger memo, which remained classified until late last year, was written to then-Defense Secretary Elliot Richardson and said that Pentagon intelligence believed the Laotians “may hold a number of unidentified U.S. POWs, although we cannot accurately judge how many.” The U.S. Embassy in Laos, Eagleburger added, “agrees with this judgment.”

The memo recommended that the United States tell the Laotians that it “knows they hold American prisoners and demand their immediate release.” In the event the Laotians refused, it recommended a series of escalating military options up to a resumption of U.S. air strikes. Richardson testified that he forwarded the memo to Kissinger the same day.

But the next day, Nixon, in a White House address, declared to the nation that “all our POWs are on the way home,” while a senior Defense Department official told reporters, “We have no indication at this moment that there are any Americans alive in Indochina.”

Nixon, in his memo to the committee, protested that while “everyone was aware of the possibility that the release was incomplete, I had no personal knowledge that any U.S. serviceman still alive had been kept behind.”

He also complained that Congress had taken away all the leverage he and Kissinger had to negotiate with the Vietnamese or pressure the Laotians by voting to cut off all funding for further military operations in Indochina.

“To convey the impression to the hundreds of families of MIAs that an American President deliberately left behind their loved ones and that some of them might still be alive can only be described as obscene,” he wrote.

“The responsibility for denying to our Administration the means to force the North Vietnamese to comply with the agreements concerning the accounting for MIAs lies squarely on those who opposed the use of military force to bring the war to a conclusion,” he added.

HANOI TRADE OPPOSED: Nixon urges U.S. not to normalize ties with Vietnam. A12