Hanoi Gives U.S. Delegation a List of War Prisoners

A team of U.S. congressmen obtained new documents from the Vietnamese government in Hanoi on Monday, including a list of Americans and other servicemen taken prisoner during the Vietnam War.

For the first time, Vietnam also let the Americans into an archive of more than 220 military films of prisoners of war. Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) said the U.S. delegation saw five films that might offer leads on missing servicemen.

More than 2,200 Americans are missing. Washington has demanded a full accounting from Hanoi before it normalizes relations.

The congressional trip comes one month after retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. visited Vietnam to try to determine the authenticity of a Russian document that suggests Hanoi kept 614 U.S. prisoners after the war ended in 1975.

To improve cooperation, Vietnam opened a new archive center where U.S. and Vietnamese investigators will have access to documents relevant to the search for missing servicemen, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said, speaking by telephone from Hanoi.

“They gave us 12 new documents,” Kerry said, “one of which is a very detailed statistical breakdown of people who were captured: Americans, Thais, South Vietnamese, South Koreans.” He said the list contains no prisoners’ names but includes the numbers and ranks of servicemen captured from 1964 to 1972.

The group is to meet today with former North Vietnam army Gen. Tran Van Quang, the reported author of the Russian document, and with Vietnam’s Communist Party general secretary, Do Muoi. Quang denies writing the report and says he never carried the title ascribed to him in the document.