Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Wed, 12 Aug 1992 13:57:09 -0400
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: Perot said he was Vietnamese assassination target
X-To:         FISHLM%SNYBUFVA@pucc.princeton.edu, scv@media.mit.edu,
              seasia-l@msu.BITNET, vietnam@cco.caltech.edu, vn-news@saigon.com

08/11

Perot said he was Vietnamese assassination target

	 WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Texas billionaire and former independent
presidential candidate Ross Perot told a Senate committee Tuesday that
North Vietnam plotted to kill him in the 1970s because of his work on
behalf of American prisoners of war in Indochina.
	``The Vietnamese sent people to Canada in the 1970s with instructions
to kill me and my family,'' Perot told the Select Committee on Prisoner
of War/Missing in Action Affairs.
	None of the 11 senators present questioned Perot about the assertion.
	``They invited me to Hanoi,'' Perot said of a visit which he made to
the Vietnamese capital in 1987. ``That was a surprise to me because they
had tried to kill me. They didn't get to my house, but they got to my
yard.''
	Perot had attempted unsuccessfully to go to Hanoi at Christmas 1969
with mail and medicine for the American prisoners. The effort brought
widespread publiclicity to the plight of American prisoners and, they
said on their released, resulted in better treatment by their captors.
	Perot repeated his conviction that U.S. servicemen were left behind
in Indochina after Hanoi officially released what it said were all of
its American prisoners of war in 1973. ``We left men in Laos,'' Perot
said, ``There's no question that we left men in Laos.''
	But Perot provided little fresh evidence to bolster his conviction.
He cited his 1969 conversation with a Laotian official who claimed that
the Communist Pathet Lao held ``10s of 10s'' of Americans, far more than
the nine Americans and one Canadian captured in Laos and officially
identified in early 1973.
	But that same Lao official later told the committee that his
statement had been ``propaganda.''
	Perot cited a March 1973 memorandum from Lawrence Eagleburger, then
acting assistant secretary of defense, to then Defense Secretary Elliot
Richardson, saying additional Americans were possibly held prisoner in
Laos. The Pentagon published the memo last month as part of a general
release of documents on Americans still missing in Indochina.
	Perot noted that only weeks after the Eagelburger memo was written,
Roger Shields, then head of the Pentagon's prisoner of war task force,
stated officially: ``We have no indication at this time that there are
any Americans missing in Indochina.''
	Shields earlier testified that he disapproved of that statement, but
had been ordered to make it by his superior, Deputy Defense Secretary
William Clements. Clements is to testify later.
	Perot said a reported satellite photograph taken as recently as 1988
shows a Laotian rice paddy in which the letters ``U.S.A.'' and ``K,'' an
Air Force code for ``pilot in distress,'' appeared to have been treaded
into the dirt. The committee is studying the photograph.
	Asked by Sen. Hank Brown, R.-Colo., whether he could suggest any
further ``sources the committee has not heard from,'' Perot answered
``signals intelligence,'' the official term for intercepted foreign
communications. ``Signals intelligence is a world class operation,''
Perot said, ``there's no reason why that should remain classified.''
	Perot spoke of a ``cover up'' of the fate of the missing Americans
and warned that ``history is being rewritten.'' He was critical of the
government's efforts to develop information on the missing Americans.
``If you want to get in trouble in a refugee camp,'' he said, ``just say
you've seen an American.''
	The Texan was challenged on that point by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,
a former prisoner in Vietnam, who noted that it was contrary to
expressed U.S. policy.
	McCain said that in the early days of the search for missing
Americans, refugees often fabricated reports about missing Americans in
order to gain preferental treatment.
	Perot said he had gotten his information from a Drug Enforcement
Administration agent formerly stationed in Thailand, but could not
recall the agent's name.
	Perot said Vietnam could be induced to release missing Americans
through negotiations that offered economic aid. ``The people over there
desperately need us,'' he said, ``they want desperately to be part of
the world community.
	``They feel that they won the war and we treat them as though they
lost the war. Send someone to Vietnam to negotiate. Give that person the
freedom to send a positive message.''
	Noting allegations that in 1981 Hanoi offered President Ronald Reagan
a chance to ransom missing Americans for $4 billion, Perot asked, ``Why
don't we take the $4 billion offer from the Vietnamese?''
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