Key Judgments

Since the early 1990s, we have seen evidence for increased Vietnamese cooperation on the POW/MIA issue in the strengthened staffing, increased responsiveness, and growing professionalization of the Vietnamese organizations that deal with this issue. In our view, Hanoi judges that closer ties to the United States are in Vietnam’ s own security and economic development interests, and that normalization requires progress on the POW/MIA issue. US financial support for cooperative action and willingness to agree to reciprocity on Vietnamese humanitarian concerns also encourage cooperation. Consequently, we judge that Vietnam has become more helpful in assisting US efforts to achieve the fullest possible accounting of American personnel missing in action during the Vietnam conflict. On the issue of recovering and repatriating remains of US personnel, we rate Vietnamese cooperation as excellent. Cooperation also has been good on assisting with trilateral investigations and providing documents (see table). We think the decision to be more cooperative with the United States on POW/MIA accounting has not come easily to the Vietnamese leaders. Longstanding ideological distrust, lingering animosity from the war, suspicion of American motives and fear of intelligence exploitation all have operated at times to limit Vietnam’s willingness to cooperate on recovering or accounting for US MIAs. But our reporting suggests that the POW/MIA issue no longer has the political sensitivity it once had. Incidents of outright refusal to cooperate with US investigators have decreased, but instances in which the Vietnamese raise objections to POW, MIA activities still remain. In most cases, the Vietnamese cite considerations of sovereignty—for example, in refusing to make internal Politburo documents accessible to US investigators; security, such as not allowing US officials to enter classified locations and facilities; or technical problems, such as difficulty in locating documents or records. Occasionally the Vietnamese state that local villagers are concerned about the intrusive nature of investigations and recovery activities.

Moreover, although Vietnam’s performance generally has improved with respect to the US POW/MIA issue, we think Hanoi has not been completely forthcoming on certain POW/MIA matters:

• In some instances, we believe full disclosure would prove embarrassing to the regime. For example, Hanoi continues to deny that US POWs were mistreated while in captivity in the North.

• We think Vietnam still has records it could make available to US investigators but which would discredit its denials of mistreatment.

• A few reports of transfers of US POWs to Russia and other countries are unexplained, and the books remain open.

Although 120 live-sighting investigations have been carried out by US teams, none has generated any credible evidence of American POWs left in Vietnam. Hanoi protests having to investigate such cases, but reports appear regularly – most recently on five POWs possibly being held in Laos – and established procedures for resolving them continue to be in effect.

Although Vietnam’s overall performance in dealing with the POW/MIA problem has been good in recent years, the unresolved issues noted above suggest the need for continued close attention by the US Government.

We assess continued progress in POW/MIA accounting will require overcoming two types of obstacles:

• Technical problems, such as difficulty in retrieving archival materials, contacting leads, and conducting field activities by the Joint Task Force-Pull Accounting (JTF-FA), are more amenable to resolution than political obstacles. Not all can be overcome—the passage of time and geographic change increase the difficulty of recovery operations—but some can be resolved through improving technology, maintaining US financial support, and continued professionalization on the part of the Vietnamese.

• Overcoming political obstacles—such as Vietnam’s sensitivities about infringements on its sovereignty and obstructionist tendencies on archival research and live-sighting reports—will be more difficult. In the past, Vietnam has reacted best to straightforwardness combined with respect and US acknowledgment of Hanoi’s own MIA accounting efforts.

We have reviewed the so-called 1205 and 735 documents, which purport— falsely in our view—to be reports to the party leadership containing statements that Hanoi held large numbers of US POWs above those acknowledged to the United States. We believe the judgments in the 1993 Department of Defense (DOD) assessment remain valid: that the documents are probably authentic GRU-collected documents (Soviet Military Intelligence). But many of the details of the documents, including dates and other facts, are implausible or inconsistent with reliable evidence. In particular, the numbers of POWs allegedly held by Hanoi at the times mentioned are inconsistent with reliable US Government statistics and far outnumber the actual total of open cases. We believe that neither document provides a factual foundation upon which to judge Vietnamese performance on the POW/MIA question.