U.S. Doubted Defector’s POW Claims, Data Shows

A North Vietnamese defector told South Vietnamese officials in 1971 that Hanoi held twice as many American POWs than it was acknowledging at the time, but U.S. officials intervened to keep the defector’s claim from becoming public, according to documents released Wednesday by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Kerry, who is leading a congressional delegation to Hanoi next week, indicated he is skeptical of the two-decade-old claim. But he said it underlines questions that Hanoi must answer before the Clinton Administration considers lifting the economic embargo of Vietnam.

“We are going to Vietnam to continue to press the government to open up, to release any and all information it has that might help us to move the POW/MIA issue forward,” Kerry said, adding that the “need for answers” from the Vietnamese is now “urgent.”

The defector, a North Vietnamese army doctor described in one previously classified CIA memorandum as being “knowledgeable” about POWs, claimed that at the time of his defection in 1967 the North Vietnamese held “over 800 American POWs”--more than twice as many as the 367 it admitted to be holding. The defector was to have gone public with his claim but was persuaded by U.S. officials to omit any references to specific POW numbers at a press conference he held in Saigon in May, 1971.

The newly declassified documents indicated--and Kerry affirmed--that State Department and military officials did not believe the defector’s claim because it did not square with the number of Americans known to have been captured or listed as missing when he defected in 1967.

U.S. military records listed 353 Americans as confirmed POWs as of December, 1967. For the defector’s claim to be true, virtually all of the 470 additional servicemen then listed as missing in action would had to have been captured alive.

“His figures were discounted because they just did not jibe with the number of people we knew we had lost,” Kerry said.

According to a U.S. Embassy cable dated May 8, 1971, the defector, named Dang Tan, said Hanoi was lying about the real number of Americans it had captured because many already had died while being tortured and used for medical experiments. Others had been sent secretly to China and the Soviet Union, where they subsequently “disappeared,” he said.

Tan was to have repeated the claim in public at a news conference staged by South Vietnamese intelligence officials three days later in Saigon. But instead he omitted all references to 800 Americans being held in the North. U.S. officials said at the time that Tan’s figure was based on hearsay and was contradicted by other more reliable intelligence information.