Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.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: MIA panel won't call Secret Service agent Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 16:20:05 EST Message-ID: Lines: 88 \SE A;NATION \HD MIA panel won't call Secret Service agent \BY Carleton R. Bryant \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs has opted not to subpoena a former Secret Service agent who may have overheard Reagan administration officials discussing a Vietnamese cash-for-POWs offer in 1981. The decision forestalls a clash between the committee and the Treasury Department, which runs the Secret Service and has adamantly opposed the former agent's testifying because it could jeopardize the service's mission. In a 7-4 vote yesterday, the 12-member POW panel chose not to compel the testimony of John F. Syphrit, the former agent. Committee member Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican, abstained. Voting for the subpoena were committee Chairman John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat; Vice Chairman Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican; Sen. Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat; and Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican. Mr. Grassley, in a statement yesterday, blasted the committee's decision, saying it is "troubling in the extreme." "It is a highly extraordinary act when a committee of Congress . . . refuses to take legitimate, relevant testimony - hearsay or otherwise - from any witness," he said. As a Secret Service agent in January 1981, Mr. Syphrit was protecting President Reagan when he said he overheard him, Vice President George Bush, CIA Director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen consider and dismiss an offer to exchange 57 living American POWs for $4 billion. Mr. Syphrit told The Washington Times in August that the late Mr. Casey said the offer, which supposedly was delivered via China and Canada, was "blackmail." Mr. Allen thought "they should look into it some more," he said. "We've inquired about the authenticity of this rumor ever since it first surfaced in 1985," said Mary Backley, spokeswoman for the National League of Families of Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in Southeast Asia. Ms. Backley said the National Security Council in 1988 sent a letter to her organization saying that "such a meeting never took place." Yet in a June 23 deposition to the POW committee, Mr. Allen confirmed the story, adding that he had advised Mr. Reagan to act on the offer. But he retracted his account in a July 21 letter to the panel, saying he had first heard of such a deal in 1986 during a talk with POW activists. Mr. Allen concluded that Vietnam never proposed the offer. Mr. Syphrit, a Treasury employee in the department's forensic laboratory in Chicago, was unavailable for comment yesterday. His attorney - J. Thomas Burch Jr., chairman of the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition - declined comment. In a Nov. 18 letter to the select committee, Assistant Treasury Secretary Peter K. Nunez voiced his department's objection to Mr. Syphrit's proposed testimony by subpoena. "This arrangement sends precisely the wrong signal: Secret Service employees should not disclose information they have obtained as a result of their positions of trust," the Nunez letter said. Yesterday's vote, conducted by Senate mail, followed committee efforts to work out an agreement that went all the way to President Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. "As far as I am concerned, this is one more instance in which this committee . . . has caved in to the desires of the executive branch it was established to investigate," Mr. Grassley said of the vote. He did not elaborate. POW activist Dolores Alfond, president of the National Alliance of Families, said she is suspicious of the committee's decision not to use its subpoena power. "Is it a cover-up or is it for political ramifications?" she said. 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