Senators Lash Out at U.S. Conduct in Vietnam

While about a dozen former South Vietnamese commandos looked on stoically Wednesday, U.S. senators used words like “atrocity,” “betrayal” and “indefensible” to describe the men’s treatment by the U.S. government. In an apparent move to avoid continuing to pay their salaries, the government had declared them dead, even though most of them had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms in North Vietnam.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a decorated Vietnam veteran, described the commandos’ treatment as a “bureaucratic Phoenix program,” a reference to a clandestine CIA operation that is widely believed to have eliminated opponents of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government by assassinating them.

A few hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the commandos’ treatment, Kerry introduced legislation that would authorize a $20-million reparations program. The bill would provide about 450 former commandos, whose plight came to light in recently declassified documents, with a lump sum payment of $40,000, based on an average of $2,000 a year for “services” over a 20-year period.

Kerry said the Clinton administration supports the legislation, and the Senate passed it on a voice vote as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill.

But the Pentagon, Justice Department and CIA have urged the U.S. Claims Court here to dismiss a related lawsuit. In the suit, 281 former commandos, many of them now living in Southern California, are seeking $11 million in benefits.

Kerry’s bill applies specifically to South Vietnamese commandos who infiltrated North Vietnam to gather intelligence and conduct sabotage as part of a program called 34-alfa. The CIA started the program in 1961, but it was transferred to Pentagon control in 1964 before being phased out in the early ‘70s.

The declassified documents show that most of about 500 34-alfa commandos were captured by the North Vietnamese within days or even hours of their infiltration. About 50 were killed; many survivors of the operation were tried in Communist courts and sentenced to long prison terms.

Supporters of the former commandos say that despite ample evidence indicating that most of the commandos survived, the U.S. government paid token “death gratuities” to their families and forgot about them. The commandos were left off the lists of prisoners of war that Washington sought to have released as part of the Paris agreement that ended the Vietnam War.

All the senators at the Intelligence Committee hearing agreed that the commandos are entitled to back pay. Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) went much further.

“This conduct [by U.S. government officials] seems to be totally indefensible,” Specter said. “I have grave doubts that this money is enough. This conduct is criminal.” Specter also said the officials responsible should be punished.

But retired Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, who as a colonel in 1965 headed the Saigon-based Defense Department unit that wrote off the commandos, told the committee that the 34-alfa members were not entitled to compensation because they were South Vietnamese citizens in a program directed by the South Vietnamese government. He said the United States only subsidized the cost of the program, the same way it subsidized all other South Vietnamese army units.

“They were recruited by the Vietnamese,” Singlaub said of the commandos. “We were less than a full partner in this particular operation.”

Singlaub said the 34-alfa program was an almost total failure, because a high-level “mole” within South Vietnam’s government tipped off the North Vietnamese each time a team of commandos was dropped into North Vietnam. But the Pentagon was reluctant to terminate the program because it wanted to be able to claim to have “intelligence assets” in North Vietnam, he said.

Of the former commandos attending the hearing, only one spoke. Ha Van Son, 48, who moved to Atlanta in 1994 after being released from 20 years in prison, said he felt betrayed when he learned that after his capture the U.S. government had paid his father only a small death gratuity. During his captivity, he believed his monthly salary was going to his family, he said.

But documents given to the committee showed that Son was not part of 34-alfa. He was recruited by a much larger unconventional-warfare group, identified as Operation 35, that conducted cross-border operations in Laos and Cambodia. Singlaub said commandos in Operation 35, unlike those in 34-alfa, were U.S. government employees.

Asked by Specter if Son had been treated unfairly, Singlaub said: “I can’t say he was fairly treated. Until this case came up, I thought we had done very well in taking care of team members from Operation 35.”

Still, Singlaub defended the Pentagon for declaring Son dead.

“We assumed he was killed in the fight that ensued when his team encountered the enemy,” Singlaub told the committee.

Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), another decorated Vietnam veteran, said Washington’s failure to demand the release of the commandos along with other POWs reflected what was at the time American public sentiment, which supported getting the U.S. out of Vietnam and forgetting about the whole war.

“America shut the door,” he said.