The '1205 Document': A Story of American Prisoners, Vietnamese Agents, Soviet Archives, Washington Bureaucrats, and the Media
Mini Teaser: 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.
Equally disturbing was General Vessey's attempts at textual analysis. Though this was not his assignment, he undertook the task anyway. His evident purpose was to show that the document was not accurate. Yet although he had had ten days to examine it before speaking publicly, he still managed to misrepresent its contents. On the day after his return from Hanoi, Vessey stated that the document claims that American prisoners were segregated according to their political views, which is inconsistent with what we know from returnees. Not so. The document suggests that Hanoi divided the prisoners up analytically, not physically.
Vessey stated that the document wrongly claims that prisoners were released according to their political views, when in fact release in 1973 was in accordance with date of capture. But Vessey is confused. Only the final process of release of those already selected was determined in accordance with date of capture, not the selection of who would be released. Moreover, since Vessey does not possess the Vietnamese list of who was in each category, how can he know whether or not the group of 591 finally released in 1973 did not include the 368 Hanoi deemed political "progressives"?
Vessey stated that the document claims that senior officers were segregated from others in the camps. But the document is highly ambiguous here. One passage might seem to be suggesting that. But the total number of senior officers Quang claims were held in four separate prisons is less than the total number of senior officers that he admits, elsewhere in the document, to be holding. Reading the whole document carefully, one could also conclude that 355 senior officers were segregated while others were mixed with lower ranks.
Next General Vessey points (correctly for once) to a claim by the document that after the Son Tay raid the prisoners were dispersed into several different camps. Not so, says Vessey; what happened after the Son Tay raid was that prisoners were concentrated in fewer camps, not dispersed. Yet the Pentagon's own evidence from returnees--contained in the DIA's report of the POW camp system, declassified by the Senate Select Committee last year--turns out to be neither of concentration nor of great dispersal.
Finally Vessey asserts that there could not have been 1,205 prisoners held because neither the returnees nor U.S.
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