Last January, I was sitting in the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, reading top-secret Soviet files about the Vietnam war. While turning the pages of a file, I unexpectedly came upon a startling document by a Vietnamese Communist general. It was a Russian translation of a report dated September 15, 1972 by Lieutenant General Tran Van Quang to the Vietnamese Worker's (Communist) Party politburo, detailing the number of American prisoners of war held by the North Vietnamese on that date. The document was the product of the former Soviet Armed Forces Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedivatelnoye Upravleniye--GRU). Though I was unfamiliar with the details of the controversy surrounding missing American servicemen, I knew enough to realize immediately that the number of prisoners cited by the Vietnamese general--1205--exceeded the number of American POWs who were actually released six months later in early 1973, under the terms of the Paris Peace Agreement, by more than seven hundred. If the information in the document was accurate, its implications were likely to be explosive.
In the document General Quang described the American prisoners as being divided into three political categories--"progressives," "neutral," and "reactionary." The "progressives" would be released first. More important, Quang stated that Hanoi had created a separate secret camp system unknown to other prisoners. He acknowledged that in public Hanoi had deliberately understated the number of prisoners it was holding. Quang explained that Vietnamese communist policy was eventually to use the secret prisoners to achieve all its political, military, and economic objectives.
