INS Reportedly Rejects Refuge Bid by ‘Lost Patrols’

A group of Vietnamese commandos who worked for the CIA and U.S. military behind enemy lines before being captured and held in camps for decades have been denied refuge in the United States, the New York Times reported Friday.

The commandos, known as the “lost patrols,” were captured and imprisoned in the 1960s, the Times said. Reviled as traitors, they now want to leave Vietnam and come to the United States.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has rejected their applications, however, because the agency doesn’t believe their story, the Times said.

The commandos’ claims are supported in a 25-year-old Pentagon report that was recently declassified, the newspaper reported.

The U.S. ambassador in Thailand, David F. Lambertson, also now is urging the INS to reconsider its decision.

“We believe they qualify, based on their association with U.S. policies and programs and serving long incarcerations,” Lambertson said in a recent cable from Bangkok quoted in the New York Times.

The commandos, many originally from North Vietnam, include South Vietnamese Army officers and civilians. Their history is detailed in the recently declassified Military Assistance Command-Studies and Observations Group, called the Macsog for short.

Money for their covert operations came from the United States Navy’s covert operations budget, the New York Times said. The commandos entered Vietnam by boat, or were parachuted in by the U.S. Air Force. Some were dropped over Laos, then walked into North Vietnam.

John Mattes, former investigative counsel for the Senate committee on prisoners of war, is preparing to file a lawsuit in federal court seeking the captured commandos’ back pay, the New York Times said.

Mattes, who has read the Macsog report, called the program a disaster.

“By ’69 we had lost them all,” he said. “The majority were captured alive, and we knew it. They were tried as war criminals and Radio Hanoi broadcast their sentences, up to 30 years. We went to their families and said, ‘They’re dead.’ We wrote them off. We did nothing to seek their return or release.”