Vietnam Deceived U.S. on POWs, Report Says

A secret document found in Soviet Communist Party archives may prove that North Vietnam withheld information about U.S. prisoners in the 1970s, a newspaper reported.

North Vietnam was holding 1,205 American prisoners of war in 1972 while officially saying that the number was only 368, the New York Times reports in today’s editions, citing the document.

The document was written by a senior North Vietnamese general and delivered to the Communist Party Politburo in Hanoi in September, 1972, the newspaper said. A copy of the report, marked “top secret” in Russian, was recently discovered in Moscow in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party.

The report has been authenticated by experts and circulated among U.S. government officials. Some of those experts have called the document a “smoking gun” that proves Hanoi has been keeping back information about the fate of American POWs in Vietnam, the paper said.

Discovered in January by a Harvard University researcher, the document provides details about 1,205 prisoners held in 11 North Vietnamese prisons when peace talks were under way in Paris.

The author of the report, Gen. Tran Van Quang, then-deputy chief of staff of the North Vietnamese Army, wrote: “1,205 American prisoners of war located in the prisons of North Vietnam--this is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368 prisoners of war, the rest we have not revealed.”

Several months later, under the peace accord between North Vietnam and the United States, 591 prisoners of war were released from North Vietnam. Hanoi then claimed no other Americans were imprisoned and has maintained that position since then.

Stephen Morris, 44, a researcher for the Harvard Center for International Affairs who found the document, said that more than 700 Americans were held back by the Vietnamese at that time.

The document is authentic, say members of a joint American-Russian commission investigating the fate of other U.S. prisoners of war captured by the Soviet Union or its allies.

The White House announced Saturday that a retired U.S. Army general would visit Vietnam on April 18 to assess Hanoi’s cooperation in accounting for missing servicemen.