Berger did not ask for the document, obviously aware of my reluctance to hand it over, although in fact I had come prepared to show it and my English translation of the key sections to him. Instead he asked for key pieces of information from it so that it could be checked out by the relevant government experts. I provided him with a prepared two page memorandum which provided this, and which also explained where the document came from, why it was credible, and how the matter could be pursued further in Moscow.

I requested that my memorandum be kept out of the hands of the bureaucracy. Although I had never met nor even heard of the Department of Defense's MIA bureaucracy before that week, I instinctively feared that their concern with this issue would amount to nothing more elevated than defending personal reputation and political damage control. Although Berger said he would contact me again in a week, that was the last I saw or heard of him for five weeks, despite several follow-up calls on my part.

Meanwhile Zbigniew Brzezinski, to whom I had shown the document on February 10, informed Tony Lake of the document's contents and political credibility over lunch on February 18. According to Brzezinski, Lake was interested and shocked by his account. But this intervention produced no discernible effect.

NSC chief of staff Soderberg sent the detailed memorandum which she had received from the congressional staffer, not the briefer memorandum I had given to Berger, to the Department of Defense for evaluation. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who had been informed by Pipes of the seriousness of the document and my willingness to publish it, instructed his subordinates to try to get a copy of the document from me. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/MIA Affairs Ed Ross and Colonel Stuart Herrington of Task Force Russia (the Pentagon's support group for the U.S./Russia Commission on POW/MIAs) acted on that instruction, but were unsuccessful. At some point somebody decided that the U.S. government would try to acquire its own copy through the Commission.

But in the interim the analytical division of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Ed Ross had already made up their minds about the value of the document. When Sandy Berger finally called me back on March 17th, he asked me whether the document referred only to Americans. He told me that he had been advised that if the 1205 figure referred to other nationalities as well as Americans, then there was no problem for the DOD data base, but that if the document referred only to Americans then it was inconsistent with the information that the government had. I expressed to Berger my absolute certainty that the document was discussing only Americans.

In subsequent weeks I had conversations with the belatedly appointed NSC specialist on Asia, Kent Weiderman. The career foreign service officer seemed genuinely concerned about the document and indicated that he took its contents seriously. Weiderman said he would try to arrange a meeting for me with Lake and Berger. He asked whether I would be willing to bring a copy of the document and I agreed to so do. But he was never able to organize a meeting.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that either resolving the MIA question was a low priority for the newly-installed National Security Council, or else the NSC did not believe that the Soviet document was an accurate or valuable source--or both. I certainly believe the second to have been the case. For the NSC had done what I had naively expected them not to do: called upon and accepted the expertise of the permanent bureaucracy--which had a record to protect--before making any other effort to pursue the matter in other ways.

On April 8 the head of the American side of the U.S./Russia Commission on POW/MIAs, Ambassador Malcolm Toon received his copy of the Soviet GRU document from the Soviet joint head, General Volkogonov. I arrived in Moscow to continue my academic research on April 9th. On April 10 the Russian daily newspaper Izvestiya published a report of the handover of documents, with extracts of key facts from the GRU document on American POWs. On the evening of April 11th, realizing that the leaking of the document in the U.S. could only be days away, I took a taxi to the New York Times bureau in Moscow, and gave a copy of the document to the journalist Celestine Bohlen. The next morning I flew back from Moscow to the United States, to do what I could to explain the document and its background to the American people.

The Bureaucracy and General Vessey

The official defense department view of the Soviet GRU document (labeled by the DOD as the "1205 Document") was presented in the DOD POW/MIA Newsletter of July 1993. It is worth quoting the key passage summarizing their evaluation:

The "1205 document" appears most credible in its first section, about political operations planned for South Vietnam. The report, however, also contains numerous errors and inconsistencies, particularly on the section on POWs. While portions of the document are plausible, evidence in support of its claims to be an accurate summary of the POW situation in 1972 are far outweighed by errors, omissions, and propaganda that detract from its credibility. As additional information becomes available, the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies will continue to assess the document. At this point our bottom line judgment is that the document and the information contained in it suggesting the Vietnamese held more than 600 POWs is not accurate.

What are the "errors, omissions and propaganda that detract from" the credibility of the Soviet GRU document? The DOD did not feel it worthwhile to cite any of them. Presumably the American people, including MIA family members, were expected to take the DOD's evaluation on trust. Somewhat bizarrely, the DOD evaluation is still officially "ongoing," in spite of conclusions being already reached. But let us examine what available written and verbal statements by DOD members, the public statements by General Vessey (apparently based upon briefings by DOD and State Department officials), and the State Department intelligence unit's report show us about how they evaluated the evidence.

On April 12, after publication of key extracts of the document in the New York Times, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) special office on prisoners of war and missing in action, Robert Sheetz, wrote a memorandum to the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW/MIA affairs, Ed Ross. The memorandum stated: "DIA believes that this document is referring to both U.S. POWs and to allied POWs, particularly ARVN commandos. The confusion probably lies in an inaccurate translation from Vietnamese to Russian."

Sheetz's analysis is preposterous. Anybody remotely familiar with published and secret Vietnamese Communist documents knows that Hanoi always distinguished allied from American troops, with the former described as "puppets." The use of such distinctive terms as "American" (My in Vietnamese, amerikanyets in Russian) and "puppet" (nguy in Vietnamese, marionyetka in Russian) is so frequent in communist writings as to make their confusion by any competent translator inconceivable. In an earlier report to the Vietnamese politburo dated June 26, 1972, Quang drew the distinction frequently. Clearly, his use of the term "1205 amerikantsi" in September could refer only to 1205 Americans.

For the month before the Russian document became public, and before the DIA had actually seen the document, this had been the DIA's and the DOD's unofficial interpretation. It continued to be such, through the medium of off-the-record press briefings, for another week, until my article in the Washington Post (April 18, 1993) noting Quang's earlier speech and its terminology.

On April 18, General John Vessey led a mission to Hanoi on behalf of President Clinton, to pursue the POW/MIA issue. The materials received by the Vessey mission--documents suddenly "discovered" by Hanoi officials after the revelation from Moscow--did not address the charges in the Russian document, because they do not discuss the fate of servicemen still unaccounted for. And because they are accounting records of the known prison system, the Vessey documents neither confirm nor falsify the Russian document's assertion of a separate prison system. Yet Vessey misled President Clinton by telling him that they challenged the Russian document.

More disturbing were Vessey's public statements. In Hanoi he said, "I have no reason to disbelieve" General Quang's denial that he had ever made the report contained in the Russian document. But what did Vessey expect Quang to say? After all, if the Russian document is accurate, General Quang is complicit in a huge crime. Even if General Vessey had possessed no means of judging General Quang's credibility, common sense should have suggested that any criminal suspect's mere denial of guilt is not sufficient ground for suggesting innocence. But Quang and his alleged accomplices do have a record by which we can evaluate his denial. He has been a senior figure in a regime which has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens in peacetime as well as war. He has served a regime which for twenty years denied that it was controlling, supplying, and eventually directly participating in the war in South Vietnam. He has served a regime which for over ten years denied that it had military forces stationed in the independent nations of Laos and Cambodia. A candid listener might have accurately commented "I have no reason to believe" General Quang's denial--or, if prudence required it, remained silent.

Essay Types: Essay