Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 10:23:06 -0500
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      LAOS: grants new access for US MIA search teams

11/19

LAOS GRANTS NEW ACCESS FOR U.S. MIA SEARCH TEAMS

    By Kathleen Callo
    HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, Nov 19, Reuter - Laos for the first time on
Thursday granted U.S. investigators permission to inspect a remote spot where a
satellite picked up the mysterious letters "USA" stamped out in the earth.
    U.S. Senator John Kerry, chairman of a Senate committee investigating the
issue of American soldiers missing from the Vietnam War, told reporters about
the agreement reached during a trip earlier in the day to the Laotian capital,
Vientiane.
    He said the obviously man-made letters that were recorded in satellite
imagery in January 1988 no longer existed, but U.S. investigators trying to
resolve the fate of American pilots who crashed in Laos and disappeared wanted
to check the spot.
    Kerry, who flew from Hanoi on Thursday morning with Senator Tom Daschle,
another committee member, said U.S. experts had also just found 350 bone
fragments and an identification card while excavating a site in Laos where a
U.S. aircraft with nine crewmen crashed.
    Forensic experts will now try to identify the pieces of bone, eight teeth,
pieces of dentistry and thousands of pieces of wreckage found at the remote
mountain site, where the excavation team worked for 23 days.
    Kerry said Laotian Foreign Minister Phoun Sipraseuth assured him and
Daschle that no Americans missing from the war were still in Laos. Some private
groups and individuals in the United States have circulated rumours that some
American pilots who crashed are still secretly being held prisoner.
    "The minister said very clearly to us there are no live Americans," Kerry
said after arriving in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam.
    He and Daschle, who also met Laotian Prime Minister Khamtay Siphandone,
reached agreement with Laotian officials for U.S. experts to have new access to
film archives and to former pro-communist Pathet Lao fighters to try to resolve
the fate of missing Americans.
    Many of the roughly 600 U.S. pilots shot down over Laos are described by
Washington as "presumed dead but unaccounted for."
    Kerry said the jagged mountains and dense jungles in Laos made it a
"gruesome terrain" in which to search for remains or clues of men who crashed
there.
    Some Americans have said that below the mysterious "USA" letters picked up
by satellite in Sam Neua province in 1988 was a letter "K," a signal once used
by U.S. forces in distress. Kerry said U.S. intelligence had not concluded it
was a "K."
    "(But) it is man-made. We know it's man-made... How did it get there?" he
said.
    Kerry, Daschle and Senator Hank Brown arrived in Hanoi on Monday to check
on progress in resolving the fates of missing Americans in Vietnam.
    Kerry delivered a letter from U.S. President George Bush to Vietnamese
President Le Duc Anh on Wednesday promising a positive move towards Vietnam in
response to a recent big increase in Hanoi's cooperation on the
Missing-In-Action issue.
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