U.S., Vietnam OK Diplomatic Missions : Agreement: The Washington and Hanoi openings are another step in normalizing relations.

Building on President Clinton’s lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam, the two nations announced an agreement Thursday for opening diplomatic missions in each other’s capital.

While Vietnam and the United States still will not exchange ambassadors, the move is “an important step toward normalization of relations,” the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry said.

The opening of missions in Hanoi and Washington underscores the quickening improvement in relations after two decades of bitterness over a 10-year war that killed nearly 60,000 Americans and as many as 2 million Vietnamese.

In Washington, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said, “It’s the furtherance of a step the president announced when he lifted the trade embargo.”

Clinton ended a 19-year embargo on U.S. trade with Vietnam on Feb. 3, citing improvements in cooperation from Vietnam’s communist leaders in accounting for American servicemen missing from the war. He said then that he planned to open a U.S. diplomatic office in Vietnam.

U.S. officials said the office would handle trade and business, tourism and culture and help in the continuing effort to determine the fate of 2,233 American MIAs. Vietnam lists 300,000 missing soldiers.

A State Department spokesman, Mike McCurry, said the date for opening the offices would depend on working out the return of each other’s diplomatic properties. Vietnam said the two sides had reached a tentative agreement and only the wording of the documents remained to be decided.

James Rockwell, managing director of Vatico, a U.S. consulting and trading company, expressed disappointment there still will not be a full U.S. embassy in Vietnam to help U.S. businesses in their efforts to cash in on Vietnam’s economic boom.

“I think it’s a very good step in the right direction, but from strictly a business standpoint, it does very little to enhance American business opportunity in Vietnam,” he said.

The Foreign Ministry said the agreement on exchanging missions was reached during talks last Friday and Saturday between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord and Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai. Lord is scheduled to visit Hanoi in late June and is expected to discuss authorities the establishment of full diplomatic relations as well as human rights violations and the MIA search.

The only official American presence in Vietnam now is the U.S. MIA office.