Who Was Left Behind?

By STANLEY W. CLOUD WASHINGTON

Major wars, from the Peloponnesus to the Persian Gulf, are fought and refought in the minds of scholars and military buffs long after the bones of the soldiers who did the real fighting have turned to dust. So it is likely to be -- and then some -- with the Vietnam War. Last week, for instance, on the eve of a crucial U.S. mission to Vietnam, a Harvard researcher disclosed parts of a document indicating that Hanoi has lied repeatedly about the number of American prisoners captured during the war. If the document proves to be accurate, its contents could destroy any chance of normalization between the U.S. and Vietnam in the foreseeable future.

| The document purports to be a translation (from Vietnamese to Russian to English) of a report, dated September 1972, by North Vietnamese General Tran Van Quang. Unearthed last January by researcher Stephen J. Morris in the Communist Party archives in Moscow, the document asserts that Vietnam at that time was holding 1,205 American POWs. Quang said the Americans were in 11 prisons scattered around North Vietnam. The number of prisons had been increased from four to 11, he said, so that the POWs could be dispersed following a failed U.S. raid on the Son Tay prison in November 1970.

The most significant item in the Quang report is the assertion that there were 1,205 American POWs in captivity that September. Six months later, Hanoi released 591 POWs, insisting they were the only prisoners alive at that time. If that was true and if the Quang report is accurate, more than 600 POWs must have died or been killed between the fall of 1972 and April 1, 1973.

When news of the report's discovery broke last week, several old Vietnam hands, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, said they were impressed with its apparent authenticity. Brzezinski went even further, publicly speculating that the Vietnamese were guilty of a massacre similar to the infamous execution of 4,500 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Said Delores Apodaca Alfond, president of the National Alliance of Families, an organization that has long accused both Washington and Hanoi of duplicity on the POW-MIA issue: "Finally, we've found the smoking gun. It all seems to be falling into place now."

Morris, whose skepticism about Vietnamese intentions hardly makes him an enthusiastic supporter of normalization, has legitimate academic credentials. "I know it's an authentic document," insists Morris, who reads Russian and is a research associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs. "These files were not for anyone else to read except the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." Experts in the Pentagon and Congress remain skeptical. "We think it's an authentic document," says a Pentagon official involved in POW affairs, "but we have a lot of questions about the data in it." Defense Intelligence Agency analysts note a certain informality in the text, suggesting it might actually be a transcription of an oral briefing by General Quang.

That could explain some of the more obvious errors, including inaccurate descriptions of the North Vietnamese military-prison system and some badly garbled American names that do not correspond to the names of any U.S. MIAs. Indeed, a covering letter on the document indicates that Quang, who at the time was commander of the 4th Military Region in central South Vietnam, was reporting to his superiors on the success of his mission. He emphasized his plans for Operation Ba Bo, a program of "extermination" of South Vietnamese officials. In this context, Pentagon and congressional experts say, Quang may have engaged in the military briefer's time-honored tendency toward overstatement and, like other North Vietnamese officials, may have included non-American members of various CIA-run commando teams in his accounting of captured "Americans."

Unless non-Americans are included, the analysts say, it is not possible to come up with a total of 1,205 American candidates for POW status. Apart from MIAs who the Pentagon is all but certain died in combat, there are only 135 so-called discrepancy cases today. After analyzing the Quang report, Robert Sheetz, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's POW office, wrote in an internal Pentagon memo that the "DIA believes the number 1,205 could be an accurate accounting of total prisoners held" if foreigners working as U.S. agents are included. But, Sheetz added in his memo, "the numbers cannot be accurate if discussing only U.S. POWs."

Until last week, the Clinton Administration was moving with all deliberate speed toward normalizing relations with Vietnam and lifting the U.S. trade embargo. Retired General John Vessey, who has served the three successive Administrations in POW-MIA discussions with Hanoi, departed for Vietnam last week. His mission had been to assess whether the POW-MIA dispute had been sufficiently resolved to allow normalization to proceed. Now Vessey must also try to solve the mystery of the Quang report. And no matter what Vessey concludes, there is a good chance that many Americans, never keen about normalization in the first place, will decide that their old enemies can just stew a while longer.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston and Jay Peterzell/Washington