Strayed AID

In the past year, a complex and ambitious program under American AID for South Viet Nam has pumped into that country an average of some $30 million worth of goods a month ranging from cement to penicillin, from sheet steel to automobile tires. This effort is essential to bolster Viet Nam's war-buffeted economy, and, of course, to support the war effort. But as of last week, no one in Saigon or in Washington had any real idea of how much of that materiel had been used for its intended purpose, how much had helped to line profiteers' pockets--or, indeed, how much had wound up in Viet Cong stockpiles.

Under the plan, known officially as the Commodity Import Program, AID allows the Saigon government to license individual Vietnamese entrepreneurs to import U.S.-approved products, about half of which are American. The U.S. pays the foreign supplier for the purchase in AID dollars; the local importer pays in Vietnamese piasters (at the official exchange rate of 60 to $1) and the piasters are channeled into the Saigon government's deficit-ridden defense budget. The importer owns the goods, to dispose of pretty much as he chooses.

"Ultimate Consumers." Resale restrictions on licensed merchants are lenient at best, and Saigon's black market is as black as that of any other wartime capital. There is also considerable pilferage of AID-approved imports both on shipboard and at dockside, though it is more limited in scope and ingenuity than the mighty orgy of looting that went on in Naples, for example, during World War II.

U.S. troops entering captured Viet Cong camps have found entrenchments enforced with American steel plates, homemade mortars fashioned from U.S.-made steel pipe. Recently, a new metal-working lathe, imported under the AID plan, was found buried under manure aboard a Viet Cong sampan. Precious American antibiotics, on sale at hundreds of Saigon pharmacies legally stocked with U.S. medicine, are easily spirited out to Communist forces, often in loaves of French bread or hollowed-out cabbage heads.

Footwear or Firepower? In mid-April, U.S. officials were surprised to note that Saigon businessmen had ordered 150 tons of Du Pont-made Unicel-100, a powdered compound used in the manufacture of rubber sandals. Oddly, that one shipment was sufficient to make 7.5 million pairs, though last year's production in Viet Nam had been no more than 500,000. Du Pont had warned Government men before that the stuff was also a deadly explosive, and AID officials ordered a Naval Ordnance Laboratory test last month to determine its effectiveness. They were surprised to find that the compound is almost as powerful as TNT, and the big order for Unicel was canceled--along with any future shipments to Viet Nam. Administration officials admitted that they had no clear idea of how much Unicel had already landed there--or how much had gone into saboteurs' bombs instead of sandals.

One obvious reason for such snafus is that there is only a handful of AID men to monitor the vast commodity program in Saigon. In March, the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information, headed by California Democrat John E. Moss, dispatched a trio of staff investigators to Viet Nam. About the time that the probe began, Washington-based AID administrators were sending in more auditors, and made preparations to install data-processing machines to handle the huge load of paperwork in Saigon.

Last week John Moss and five subcommittee members visited Saigon and held three days of hearings on the sloppy handling of AID shipments. One subcommittee member, Michigan Republican Robert P. Griffin (now that state's junior Senator), said flatly that the Commodity Import Program "has been very inadequately handled, particularly in the number of people involved and the controls on it." He added pointedly: "There has been some improvement in the past six or eight weeks--since it was learned that our subcommittee was coming over here."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.