Hanoi Once Withheld Remains, Official Says

Defending President Clinton’s decision to establish normal relations with Vietnam, a Clinton Administration official conceded before a hostile House committee Wednesday that the Hanoi government had secretly withheld the bodies of U.S. service personnel but ceased the practice at least five years ago.

Responding to charges by California Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) that a Vietnamese warehouse contains the remains of as many as 400 U.S. fighters, Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said there is no evidence that such a facility still exists.

“There’s no question that for a good period after the war, there was the equivalent of warehouses in which some remains were held or at least treated,” Lord said. “We have not received any remains for the last five or six years with such treatment. . . .

“We’ll continue to pursue every lead,” he said. “But if we thought there was such a warehouse with remains, we of course would not have recommended to the President, he would not have decided” to establish diplomatic relations.

Appearing before the House International Relations Committee, Lord and the Pentagon’s chief POW/MIA investigator, Gen. James Wold, asserted that Hanoi has cooperated fully in recent years in efforts to determine the fate of more than 2,200 military personnel still officially listed as missing in action two decades after the end of the war.

Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), an outspoken opponent of ties with Vietnam, had scheduled the hearing before Clinton’s announcement Tuesday. Gilman made no secret that his objective was to torpedo the Washington-Hanoi relationship, possibly by withholding the funds needed to carry it out. Many Democrats skipped the hearing, which some Republicans used as a forum to attack the Administration.

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.), who was a prisoner in Vietnam for seven years, called the move “a slap in the face carried out by an Administration whose foreign policy acumen leaves a lot to be desired.”

Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-San Diego), a Navy pilot who served in Vietnam, seemed to fight to control his emotions. “It’s not political with me,” he said, “it’s emotional.”

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said that Vietnamese authorities have created an illusion of cooperation in the search for missing Americans. “They are laughing at us in Hanoi again,” he said.

Although Gilman and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) vowed to throw obstacles in the way of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship, the State Department announced that Secretary of State Warren Christopher will visit Hanoi Aug. 5 and 6, becoming the first secretary of state in a quarter-century to travel to Vietnam and the first one ever to go to Hanoi.

Lord said Christopher’s trip and the establishment of a U.S. Embassy in Vietnam will aid efforts to resolve the fate of missing service personnel.

He asserted that Clinton’s decision to open diplomatic relations was based on the Administration’s assessment of U.S. national interests and not as a reward to Hanoi.

Describing the difficult task of trying to identify remains after more than 20 years, Wold said: “The United States government has committed more resources, deployed more personnel, used more equipment than ever before in any other conflict to resolve the remaining cases of unaccounted for Americans in Southeast Asia. Never before in all the history of warfare has so much been done to get this kind of an accounting.”