Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Senators find little in Hanoi's Citadel Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 16:10:35 EST Message-ID: \SE A \SS (WS) \HD Senators find little in Hanoi's Citadel \SH No evidence of MIAs at headquarters \BY Grant Peck \CR ASSOCIATED PRESS \DT HANOI 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 the 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 cooperates on the MIA issue. He did not say if that meant Mr. Bush would renew 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 until 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 taken 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 United States 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 several 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 States 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 diary to the Americans to copy. He gave them three large albums of photos of dead and captured U.S. servicemen and some original identification 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 material 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." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM