From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Subject: [NEWS] SENATORS FIND  LITTLE IN HANOI'S CITADEL
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Date: 20 Nov 92 16:59:47 GMT

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From Washington Times (11/18/92)
By Grant Peck
ASSOCIATED PRESS

No evidence of MIAs at headquarters

HANOI - Three U.S. senators made an unprecedented tour of Vietnam's military
headquarters yesterday but found nothing to substantiate reports of American
prisoners sighted there after the Vietnam War.
    Vietnamese officials gave the senators photographs, documents, recovered
flight suits and what was said to be flight helmet of Sen John McCain, Arizona
Republican, who was a Navy pilot when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
    The cooperation showed the communist leadership's eagerness to help resolve
the fates of more than 2,200 U.S. servicemen missing in action in the Vietnam
War - the major hurdle to diplomatic relations between the two countries.
    On the tour were members of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs:
John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat:  Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat; and
Hank Brown, Colorado Republican.
    The committee this year will write its report, which could significantly
affect the pace of normalization.  Mr. Kerry said he has been told that
President Bush wants to reciprocate if Vietnam cooperative on the MIA issue.
    He did not say if that meant Mr. Bush would recently diplomatic ties, but
he suggested that the United States might respond by easing its economic
embargo.
    Since 1973, U.S. policy has been to isolate Vietnam and punish it with the
embargo untill missing Americans are accounted for and peace has returned to
Cambodia, which Vietnam invaded in late 1978
     Vietnam's leaders, eager to mend ties and join the world community have
recently given U.S. officials thousands of photographs of Americans take during
the war and unprecedented access to archives, prisons and military bases.
     At the military headquarters, known as the Citadel, the senators checked
three "live sighting" reports that Americans were held there after all U.S.
prisoners were supposed to be repatriated in 1973, when the U.S. pulled out of
Vietnam.
     Mr. Kerry said the group took photographs and interviewed people,
including a woman who has lived there 40 years.  Checking on reports of a
prison that had held Americans under the complex, they found serveral bomb
shelters and planned to send staff to inspect one of the larger ones.
     But Mr. Kerry said that the description of the headquarters given in one
of the most credible "live sighting" reports was inaccurate and that he
therefore doubted the report.
     He expressed disappointment but said, "Anybody in their right mind is
going to continue to hold out hope."
     Mr. Kerry praised the Vietnamese for taking steps toward resolving the
issue of missing Americans and suggested that the United States respond by
easing its embargo.
     "My hope is that [Mr. Bush] will receive the information that we bring
back and that when we meet with him, he will listen carefully to the arguments
for why there ought to be a U.S. response of some kind at this point in time,"
Mr. Kerry said.  "You cannot make this a one-way street forever."
     The senators also visited the Central Military Museum, which released a
large cache of MIA photos to the United Staes last month.
     Museum director Col. Pham Duc Dai, who said he had two nephews missing in
action, described how his unit ambushed four Americans in 1967 and dumped their
bodies in a river.  He gave his dairy to the Americans to copy.
     He gave them three large album of photos of dead and captured U.S.
servicemen and some original idenntification cards.  One book had a snapshot
evidently of a serviceman's wife and children.
     Col. Dai also handed over what was identified as Mr. McCain's flight
helmet and several U.S. flight suits.
     Mr. Kerry, who served in 1968-69 as a Navy officer on a gunboat in the
Mekong Delta, said he could not help but feel uneasy holding materials from
comrades captured or killed more than 20 years ago.
     Earlier, Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam gave the senators lists of
pilots shot down or killed in provinces that were part of North Vietnam before
the country was united with U.S.-backed South Vietnam in 1975.
     "We think that relations will soon be normalized," Mr. Cam said.  "I
believe sooner or later this will come, but the sooner the better."


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