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ACCOUNTING FOR MISSING SERVICEMEN

Overview

The responsibility for accounting for American military personnel and civilians missing or held captive as a result of the war in Southeast Asia resides with the Departments of Defense and State, respectively. Over the years their efforts have been supplemented by Congressional inquiries and Presidentially appointed emissaries.

Nevertheless, the fullest possible accounting has yet to be obtained. The inability of the U.S. Government to achieve this goal over the last 20 years has spawned criticisms of the process and suspicions about the integrity of the effort.

The magnitude of work required to achieve the fullest possible accounting further underscores the need for cooperation from Southeast Asia governments. For instance, as of 1992, there were nearly 500 crash sites associated with unaccounted for U.S. personnel, according to the Department of Defense. Less than 100 of these sites have been visited by U.S. investigators. In Laos, there are approximately 250 crash sites associated with unaccounted for U.S. personnel, of which less than 40 have been visited by U.S. investigators. As of the publication date of this report, U.S. investigators have not had the opportunity to visit any detention sites or prison camps in Laos for the purpose of fully evaluating various live-sighting reports.

In view of this situation, the Committee deemed it essential to undertake a comprehensive review of the policies and procedures used by the U.S. government to account for American prisoners and missing from the beginning of the war until the present. The purposes of this investigation were:

. to determine accurately the number of Americans who served in Southeast Asia during the war who did not return, either alive or dead;

. to evaluate the accuracy of the U.S. Government's own past and current process for determining the likely status and fate of missing Americans;

. to learn what the casualty data and intelligence information have to tell us about the number of Americans whose fates are truly "unaccounted for" from the war in Vietnam; and

. to consider whether efforts to obtain the fullest possible accounting of our POW/MIAs was treated, as claimed, as a matter of "highest national priority" by the Executive branch;

. to assess the extent to which Defense Department and DIA accounting policies and practices contributed to the confusion, suspicion and distrust that has characterized the POW/MIA issue for the past 20 years; and

. to determine what changes need to be made to policies and procedures in order to instill public confidence in the government's POW/MIA accounting process with respect to the war in Southeast Asia and in the event of future conflicts.

In analyzing the accounting process, the Committee did not simply accept "the official view." Instead, Committee members asked Executive branch officials to break the process down, step by step, going back more than 25 years. The Committee asked them literally to reconstruct their database, and to reply to questions, under oath, about how and why individuals were categorized as prisoners of war (POW), as missing in action (MIA), and as killed in action, body not recovered (KIA/BNR). They were asked to explain who made these decisions, who kept the lists, and on what basis individuals were moved from one category to another.

The Committee's goal was to build a factual foundation upon which the remainder of its investigation could rely, so that it could proceed with an accurate understanding about what is possible and what is probable with respect to the three bottom-line questions: Were Americans left behind in captivity following Operation Homecoming? If so, how many? And, what is the likelihood that some of those prisoners might still be alive today?

The need for a solid grounding in fact is essential in any investigation, but it is particularly crucial in understanding the universe of what is possible with respect to the question of whether there are surviving POWs from the war in Indochina. Ever since the war ended, there has been a swirl of claims and counter-claims, suspicions and theories, about this question. By focusing on the details of the accounting process, the Committee sought to gain a realistic understanding of the spectrum of of possibilities within which the truth must certainly fall.

Records Search

The Committee began its investigation by seeking all data relevant to the accounting process including the lists of all prisoners and missing from each Defense Department (DoD) agency that maintained casualty and intelligence lists prior to, during, or after Operation Homecoming; casualty files from the individual services; analyses of individual cases; and policy documents. The Committee's search of the archival records held by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)'s POW/MIA Office also yielded lists of American POW/MIAs that had been provided to private Americans by the North Vietnamese. Early in its investigation, the Committee received the "Post Ceasefire Casualty Book", from the former office of the Comptroller at the Defense Department. This book chronicles the Comptroller's number of unaccounted for servicemen from the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, through September 30, 1977. This document reflected the casualty status of servicemen who had not returned based on information which had been provided by the three main military services since the end of the war.

As such, the Comptroller's records provided an important baseline from which to examine the actual status of POW/MIAs. For instance, the records showed that there were 1,929 servicemen captured or missing before the start of Operation Homecoming and more than 1300 captured or missing by the end of Operation Homecoming. The records also showed that there were an additional 1100 servicemen who had been declared dead during the war, but whose remains had not been recovered. The Committee's task was to examine the accuracy of these numbers and to compare them with lists maintained by the services and the DIA.

Accordingly, the Committee requested and received from each service either microfiche or paper copies of all casualty files. The Committee was also provided access to both the casualty and intelligence files of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) and DIA's POW/MIA Office, respectively.

In January 1992, the Committee located the files of a U.S. Army unit responsible for maintaining files on American and foreign POWs from 1968 until 1971. The records of this unit describe the broad history of the DoD's POW/MIA accounting effort from the earliest days of the Vietnam conflict. At the request of the Committee, all key documents in this collection were declassified by the National Archives.

DIA's records document an important part of the national intelligence picture before, during, and after Operation Homecoming. They indicate that DIA had not always recorded the same casualty status for an individual as had the individual's military service, but the Committee found no evidence describing DIA's methodology. Analysis was also complicated by the near total unavailability of service intelligence staff documents.

The Defense Department, with layers of command and a certain overlap in responsibilities, produced volumes of material at each level in the military hierarchy. For example, each separate military service had separate casualty and intelligence files and separate staffs who developed them. The Committee sought to bring this material together and to locate material from the key military commands in Washington, from the Pacific Command in Hawaii, and from unified and specified commands in the Pacific theater. Little, if any, of these records had been sought in prior investigations of the POW/MIA issue.

Today, after more than a year of diligent searching, certain key groups or documents cannot yet be located. The Committee also learned that many of the individual service files have either been lost or destroyed.

For example, the U.S. Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (DCSINT) has been unable to locate any of his agency's archival POW/MIA intelligence staff records from the Vietnam war era. This includes internal intelligence reports, memoranda, planning documents and similar records documenting what the Army knew or suspected about personnel captured or missing in Southeast Asia. It remains unknown whether the records were destroyed or simply misplaced.

In another example, the U.S. Marine Corps initially reported to the Committee that it had transferred all of its documents to the Defense Intelligence Agency 11 years ago. When this turned out to be incorrect, the Corps reported that it had shipped the documents to the National Archives in 1990 for secure storage. The documents were turned over to DIA's Central Documentation Office in October 1992 for declassification.

The U.S. Navy provided a small collection of assorted documents in response to the Committee's request, but advised that nothing further could be located. After repeated prodding from the Committee, the Navy reported that all remaining POW/MIA records had been destroyed in about 1975. Committee investigators then uncovered extensive Navy records at the Naval Historical Center which had been transferred there in 1973, including most of the major files of the Chief of Naval Operations' Special Assistant for POW/MIA Affairs. There are indications that certain sensitive Naval intelligence files were shipped to DIA in 1981, while others appear to have been destroyed in 1975 or 1981.

The U.S. Air Force provided no response to the Committee's original request for records. Finally, in September 1992, the Committee was provided a printout of a small portion of the archives at the Joint Services SERE (Search, Evasion, Rescue, Escape) Agency (JSSA) in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. A Committee staff survey of a small portion of the JSSA files uncovered wartime Air Force Intelligence staff files. It appears that the wartime air intelligence files were transferred to JSSA in 1974, put on microfiche (where they have become largely illegible when printed out) and the original documents destroyed. Documents recovered from partially readable JSSA archives have filled in important gaps in understanding joint service activities, particularly after Operation Homecoming.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) located in permanent storage its collection of POW/MIA related memoranda. These documents have been made available to the Committee through the Central Documentation Office (CDO). The Committee also located a monumental study on the history of covert operations in Southeast Asia, the MACVSOG Document Study, together with other appropriate special operations annual histories. At publication time, these documents had been declassified, or soon were to be.

Sources indicate that there were some intelligence reports on POW/MIAs collected through MACVSOG during the war, especially in Laos. Unfortunately, the Committee was not able to locate these reports.

The Joint Task Force Full Accounting (JTF-FA) has yet to provide the wartime permanent records of the principal organization responsible for monitoring the POW/MIA problem on the ground in Southeast Asia, the special operations related Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). JPRC was transformed into the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in January 1973; the Committee has requested, but at publication time had yet to receive, an index of its archival files. The Pacific Command has reported it has no documents, even though it was one of the most major command players throughout the Vietnam war.

Finally, the Committee was hindered in judging the accuracy of servicemen accounted for and not accounted for during the war by the fact that Search and Rescue (SAR) reports had been destroyed following the war. We note that Gen. Vessey confirmed to the Committee that these records had been destroyed by 1979.

In May 1992, the Committee located and began an exhaustive review of DIA's 1966-1981 archival POW/MIA files. The review was later expanded to include files at JSSA in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. The archival files of both agencies brought to light a broad range of wartime and post-wartime policy and accounting documents, automated data base printouts, and weekly data input sheets covering the war and post-war period.

The Committee's investigation disclosed the possible existence of other collections of POW/MIA related files which have been requested for review and declassification, but which at publication time had not been received. These include, but are not limited to, the POW/MIA staff and operational files of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), J-2 staff element responsible for management of POW intelligence in Vietnam, and the Pacific Command's (CINCPAC) POW/MIA staff.

The archival POW/MIA intelligence files from the Department of State are also undergoing declassification. However, the Committee has been advised informally by the Department that these files are poorly organized and never have been indexed.

The Committee located and examined many POW/MIA lists compiled by official agencies involved in the accounting process over the last 20 years. Together these lists document the evolution of the U.S. Government's knowledge about the fate of American prisoners and missing. On its own, each list is an imperfect snapshot of knowledge at one point in time during the past 31 years. Many of the lists were provided to the Committee by family members and concerned individuals who had obtained the lists from the U.S. Government over the years. Because of automation procedures, the Committee found that many of these lists had not been archived by the government at the time they were printed, but rather were continuously updated in an automated database. Nonetheless, the Committee was able to make determinations on the comprehensiveness of the lists, especially those produced by the DIA.

Many of the lists enabled the Committee to understand better intelligence and casualty information pertaining to missing servicemen. For instance, one important list, generated by DIA in 1979, included analytical comments indicating the possible survival or death of many unaccounted for U.S. personnel. Taken together, the DIA and State Department lists also showed that unacounted for USAF personnel covered by the CIA at LIMA SITE 85 in Laos during the war did not show up on official lists until at least 1982, nine years after the war ended.

In another instance, a JTF-FA list of priority cases in Laos provided in March, 1992 indicated that several missing individuals in Laos were believed to have ejected from their aircraft before it crashed and to have reached the ground alive.

Civilian Accounting: State Department

Although DIA included civilians in its accounting process, the official responsibility for collecting information and determining the fate of American civilians missing in Southeast Asia was held by the Department of State. This was a natural outgrowth of the Department's general responsibility to aid American citizens abroad.

Information was maintained on missing civilians, including private citizens, journalists, missionaries, employees of U.S. government agencies including DoD and the services, and employees of firms under contract to the U.S. Government. Sources used to obtain information included U.S. intelligence agencies, private citizens, press reports, and foreign governments.

During the war, the Special Assistant for POW/MIA Affairs (attached to the office of the Deputy Secretary of State), the East Asia Bureau, and the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs had responsiblity for POW/MIA accounting within State. The Special Assistant's office and the Consular Affairs bureau maintained files on missing civilians. This organizational structure for POW/MIA accounting remained essentially the same in the years after the war. However, in 1976 the Special Assistant's responsibility for POW/MIA affairs was transferred to the newly created Bureau for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for POW/MIA Affairs was created within that bureau. The Office of Workers Compensation in the Department of Labor, which was responsible for financial support to the families of persons covered by the workers' compensation program, also maintained records on many of the missing.

Unlike DoD, State did not categorize individuals as "prisoner", "missing" or "killed." While there was firm information in some cases as to the fate of the individual, the Department avoided categorization in the absence of official documentation. In testimony before the Committee in June, Frank Sieverts, who served as both the Special Assistant and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for POW/MIA Affairs from 1966 to 1978, explained the rationale behind this policy:

...in the absence of official documentation, we did not label these individuals in this way. We simply kept files that were as complete as we could make them.

In view of this policy, State did not compile or disseminate the types of POW/MIA lists created by DIA or DoD. Rather, State officials communicated regularly with families in an effort to provide as much information as possible.

Civilian Accounting: Central Intelligence Agency

During its investigation, the Committee also found that the Central Intelligence Agency maintained information on missing civilians who had been employed by the Agency in Laos. During the "secret war" in Laos, the CIA had operated three proprietary organizations known as Air America, Continental Air Services, and Byrd and Sons. The Committee received information from CIA that 40 personnel were lost by CIA during the war in Laos; as of publication time, the CIA has informed the Committee that the fate of these individuals is known, except for six who are carried on lists maintained by DIA. Deserters

None of the lists obtained by the Committee includes deserters because as a matter of policy, DoD did not consider deserters to be military casualties. Although the Committee's principal concern was POW/MIAs, there was interest in determining whether any deserters in Southeast Asia might have been the subject of reports of alleged POWs surviving after 1973. A preliminary inquiry by the Committee found that the issue of deserters and its relation to POW/MIA accountability had never been studied thoroughly by the Executive branch.

Committee investigators identified a master list of 1,284 possible deserters from nine separate lists provided by various services and agencies. On March 19, 1992, the Committee provided this information to the Administrator of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Committee asked each agency to review all appropriate files and identify all known deserters locatable outside Southeast Asia.

In June 1992, the two agencies responded. The SSA Administration was able to confirm more than 300 of the deserters located in the United States after the end of the Vietnam War. The FBI correlated the 1,284 names on the master list to 1,198 individuals. Of these, there were no FBI records on 391 of the reported deserters; 60 names were duplicates or represented an alias. There were investigative files on all remaining individuals and copies of sensitive files were provided to the Committee for further review.

In July 1992, the Committee forwarded the information to CDO with a request that the FBI's information be compared to that in the databases of each individual service. To date, it appears that approximately 50 deserters remain unlocated in subsequent records.

The Committee notes that DIA and CILHI's assessment that fewer than 100 (15 in one list; 65 in another) are known to have deserted while assigned to units in Vietnam. Only two of these individuals, McKinley Nolan and Earl Clyde Weatherman, are believed to have been in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

The Committee also received information from officials in the former Soviet Union, and from a KGB defector in the United States, that a group of American servicemen had deserted a U.S. carrier in Japan with KGB assistance during the Vietnam War. These Americans had then traveled to Moscow and from there to other countries outside the United States.

Wartime Accounting

The Process

In September 1963, the Defense Department began to compile weekly statistical reports of American casualties in Southeast Asia. These reports, retroactive to 1961, were based on information provided by each of the military services in accordance with a memorandum from the Director, Statistical Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). The Comptroller was responsible for compiling and publishing the reports during and after the war until 1982, when the duty was transferred to the Directorate for Information Reports of the Washington Headquarters Services (DIOR). Changes in the statistical information were made only upon notification from the services because the services had, and continue to have, the legal responsibility for making status determinations.

This casualty reporting system was driven primarily by the needs to re-staff missing personnel and to determine entitlements. Those who were incapacitated and unable to perform their assigned task had to be accounted for and identified before replacement troops could be requisitioned, whether the individuals were believed to be missing or captured. Since the system was driven largely by personnel needs, the casualty categories were very specific, designed to provide precise information as to whether someone was dead, wounded or missing as a result of hostile or non-hostile action; whether someone was captured; and if dead, whether the body had or had not been recovered. Both the services and DIOR maintained this information, although DIOR's reports consisted of the aggregate numbers of all service personnel in each of these categories. DIOR did not begin to keep information on service personnel by name until the end of Operation Homecoming in March 1973.

The information collected by DIOR from the services established a database which was used not only for personnel reasons but also to compile information on those who were "unaccounted for" during and after the war. DIOR's "unaccounted for" statistics were the "official" DoD statistics which were disseminated to Congress, other agencies, the public and the families.

Testimony presented to the Committee by Service representatives in June 1992 suggested that the reporting policies and procedures have varied little from the early days of the war to the present or from service to service. In general, the reporting procedure consisted of collecting as much information as possible immediately or as soon as possible, after the loss incident, including eyewitness accounts; and forwarding that information in the form of a casualty report from the unit commander through one or more levels of command to the service headquarters in Washington. In each service, the commanding officer of the unit held the initial responsibility for determining the casualty status of an individual lost under his command. By law this status could be changed only by the Service Secretary or his designee. None of the services provided casualty reports on individuals absent without leave (AWOL), unless information demonstrated that the absence was involuntary, or on deserters. Deserters were dropped from the military roles by all services unless they came back under military control.

Early Losses

The United States sustained casualties in Laos in 1961, not all of which were accounted for through the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos.

The accounting for Americans captured or missing in Vietnam during the early 1960's was complicated by the nature of the conflict. Much of the Defense Department's doctrine at the time was an outgrowth of lessons learned during World War II and the Korean War. These lessons provided little guidance for categorizing those who became unaccounted for while participating in an ill-defined, counter-insurgent war. This dilemma was illustrated by the Executive branch's policy of referring to prisoners during this period as "detainees," thereby avoiding a characterization associated with formal involvement in war.

Even by 1965, after the U.S. advisory effort in South Vietnam had given way to the deployment of units of division size, there was still no clearcut definition of the conflict. Without a declaration of war or large-scale military mobilization, it was questionable whether the 1949 Geneva Convention governing the treatment of prisoners of war was applicable. There was no effort, during these early years, to spur international efforts under the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) or similar organizations either to define the war as being an "armed conflict" in the legal sense or to designate those captured as bona fide prisoners of war.

The increasing number of casualties, coupled with reports of prisoner executions and North Vietnamese threats to try U.S. prisoners as criminals, prompted a review of the issue during the first part of 1966. On July 21, 1966, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense issued a directive providing that "U.S. military personnel captured in Vietnam will be categorized as captured or interned rather than detainees." Thereafter, the United States argued (albeit in vain) that its prisoners should be accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention, including a public accounting, access by humanitarian groups and the right to send and receive mail.

DIA's Involvement

U.S. units arriving in Vietnam before and during the major build-up in 1965 collected and reported POW intelligence in accordance with procedures established by the DIA. Selected units in Vietnam also initiated agent operations in an effort to locate and recover American prisoners. In addition, the Military Assistance Command Studies and Observation Group (MACSOG) directed covert in-country and cross-border agent operations against targets approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, particularly inside North Vietnam. These operations were carried out by the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). JPRC's activation was intended to meet a growing need for POW intelligence and to respond, if possible, to the intelligence developed.

The loss of servicemen at an ever increasing rate by 1966 increased the urgency of the accounting process and demonstrated the need for more and better intelligence. The effort to establish a focal point for POW/MIA accountability led to the involvement of the DIA in the accounting process.

Beginning in late 1966, DIA was assigned specific responsibilities with regard to U.S. POWs by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Services retained the responsibilityfor accounting for their own personnel and for producing their own intelligence about the fate of casualties. DIA's role was to ensure that a high priority was given to the collecting of POW intelligence. Beginning at that time, detailed weekly casualty data was provided by the military services to DIA. The result was the development of a second system of POW/MIA accounting maintained by DIA and based on casualty information produced by DIOR and intelligence information.

DIA's role in the accounting process grew after 1966, as DIA assumed the chairmanship of the Interagency POW Intelligence Ad Hoc Committee and participated in the POW/MIA Intelligence Task Force formed in 1971. The intelligence branches of each of the military services, the CIA, and the State Department were represented on each of these entities.

In October 1969, DIA approved the Pacific Command's request for a Human Resources Collection Directive (HRCD), which envisioned conducting agent operations in Laos and North Vietnam for the purpose of obtaining POW intelligence. The Pacific Command pointed out the need for clandestine agent operations because the North Vietnamese had not divulged the identity and location of U.S. prisoners. Two primary targets were established in Laos, Khang Khai and Sam Neua; and four in North Vietnam: Hoa Lo Prison, Xom Ap Lo Prison, Cu Loc Prison and the Citadel Prison. This effort was the start of a high-level clandestine agent operation, aspects of which remain classified.

DIA's wartime accounting efforts were focused almost exclusively on determining who were prisoners and where they were held. Unlike the Services, DIA collected information on American civilians as well as military personnel. However, DIA did not collect information on any individual until the services or the State Department indicated that that person was missing. As information on prisoners and missing was received, DIA's POW/MIA Office attempted to correlate that information to an individual POW or MIA. DIA had no written criteria or procedures, either during the war or after, to determine who was a prisoner of war. DIA's categorization of an individual as a POW was an "analytical judgment."

From 1966 onward, DIA kept an automated database reflecting who was a prisoner and who was missing. It did not keep records on Americans believed to have been killed, but whose bodies were not recovered, so DIA did not maintain wartime files on approximately half of the 2,264 Americans currently listed as unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia. The only exceptions were those initially declared dead and later determined to have been captured.

DIA relied on numerous sources of information including enemy news releases, captured documents, enemy prisoner interrogations, and intercepted enemy radio communications. Other information concerning the fate of missing or captured individuals was received from escapees and early releases. During the war, 84 individuals either escaped or were returned alive from captivity. Based on their reports, DIA listed 21 individuals to have died without the recovery of remains.

In addition, the DIA relied on the "official" lists provided by North Vietnam to private individuals and to Senator Kennedy in order to update and judge the accuracy of its own lists. One of the most important lists the DIA received was from an early releasee in 1969, Captain Wesley Rumble. While in captivity, Captain Rumble memorized a list of more than 300 servicemen whose names he had heard in conversations with his fellow prisoners.

Another important source of information, especially later in the war, was the receipt of mail from American prisoners in North Vietnam. Unfortunately, no mail came from either Cambodia or Laos and little was received from POWs held by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.

DIA's correlation efforts resulted in the establishment of what DIA officials call "working lists" of Americans believed by DIA to be missing or held captive. Since DIA has no legal responsibility for making casualty status determinations, these lists were not "official". At various times during and after the war, DIA's lists differed from those maintained by the individual services. The apparent reason for this is that DIA was in a better position to respond quickly to new intelligence information than were the boards set up by the services to review casualty status determinations.

The DIA and the military services were not the only agencies involved in the POW/MIA issue. The U.S. Air Force had overall responsibility for survival, escape and evasion. Within Vietnam, the JPRC was responsible for planning efforts to rescue U.S. POWs.

Cross-Border Operations

Beginning in the mid 1960s the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) decided to classify and/or falsify the loss locations of many military personnel killed, captured or missing in action from covert, cross-border operations in Laos and Cambodia and exempt them from normal casualty reporting requirements. As a result, the casualty and intelligence files for many individuals lost on these "black" operations contained incorrect countries and locations of loss. The purpose of this policy was to maintain the secrecy surrounding U.S. operations in Laos and Cambodia. The consequence of this policy was that service casualty officers unwittingly provided families with inaccurate casualty data. For example, in one instance, a woman was told that her husband was missing after a combat action in South Vietnam when, in fact, he had fallen from a helicopter while being extracted from an intelligence mission in Cambodia.

Corrections in loss locations for these individuals were made beginning in May 1970 for Laos and in May 1971 for Cambodia. Formal, public disclosure of these operations and the admission of the falsification of loss locations and coordinates did not occur until July 1973. Due to the loss and destruction of wartime special operations records, the process of correcting inaccurate loss locations continued at least through 1977.

The confusion caused by the falsification of the records was one of many sources of concern expressed by Brig. Gen. Robert Kingston, first commander of the JCRC, when he assumed the job of accounting for missing U.S. personnel in the post-war period. The JCRC began work with the wartime records it inherited from the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). In a message to the Pacific Command at the time, Gen. Kingston wrote:

Since its inception the JCRC has been confronted with the task of attempting to develop a complete and accurate database of information on missing and KIA personnel for whom search/investigation operations are required. At the time of its activation, the JCRC acquired the records of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). Since that time, continuous and extensive efforts have been made to correct deficiencies in the records. The premise that JPRC records were reasonably complete and accurate was erroneous... Recently, the JCRC initiated search/investigative operations and inadequacies in the records became apparent... Review of our records reveals numerous... cases where there is reference to previous search/rescue operations but reports of the operations are not available. Additionally, there are instances of omitted or conflicting coordinates on crash locations. Due to previous security restrictions, some personnel are carried in one country when in fact they were lost in another...We have had cases of KIA/BNR where research on the part of JCRC has revealed that remains were previously recovered. We expect there are more such cases. In few cases do JCRC records contain reports of eye-witnesses to the incident. In many cases, information contained in the records was obtained by informal liaison and word of mouth...

Documents related to the falsification of records concerning the cross border operations have been declassified at the Committee's request.

Databases and Accounting Terms

As indicated above there were two databases which were used within the DoD to determine the number of individuals unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. The first database, which DIOR maintained, was built upon basic casualty information provided by the services. The second, created by DIA, consisted of casualty information from DIOR and intelligence information. During and after the war both DIOR and DIA used their respective databases to generate lists of those unaccounted for.

During the war the term "unaccounted for" was used by DIOR, and thus officially by the DoD, to refer to prisoners of war and missing. Until 1973, DIOR included both those "missing in action" (MIAs) and those "missing in nonhostile circumstances" (MNH) under the term "missing." The MNH are individuals who disappeared under non-combat situations. Beginning in 1973, DIOR began treating MIAs and MNHs as separate categories and reported them as such.

During the war and throughout most of the 1970s, DIA used two categories to refer to those who were unaccounted for: prisoner of war and missing in action. The latter included those lost under both hostile and non-hostile circumstances.

During the war, field units established casualty boards to review and make recommendations on the casualty status of each individual unaccounted for. Casualty boards were expected to meet while incidents were still fresh in people's minds, witnesses were readily locatable, and pertinent documents could be made available.

In many cases, particularly with respect to the loss of Air Force and Navy pilots over North Vietnam, the casualty review boards concluded that an individual had been killed but that the remains were not recoverable at the time. These casualties were categorized by DIOR, the services, and DIA as "killed in action/body not recovered" (KIA/BNR). Individuals in this category were not considered to be "unaccounted for" during the war years. The Committee notes, however, that in some cases information later surfaced that provided an accounting for those listed as KIA/BNR.

Casualty Status Determinations

The Missing Persons Act gives Service Secretaries the sole statutory authority to make casualty determinations. The law was enacted to alleviate financial hardships endured by the dependents of members of the military services who were officially carried as "missing." It requires the Service Secretaries to review the determination of casualty status within 12 months of the individual's classification as "missing." A presumptive finding of death (PFOD) may be made if the service member can no longer reasonably be presumed to be living and if the passage of time, the absence of information, and the circumstances of disappearance warrant such a determination. The PFOD is a legal mechanism for permitting the settlement of estates. It cannot be made when there is evidence that an individual is alive; however, it can be made without certain evidence of death.

During the early years of the war, the Service Secretaries approved PFODs for 21 servicemen who were reported to have died in captivity without the recovery of remains. In some instances, the deaths were reported by POWs released in South Vietnam by the Viet Cong. In other cases, the Viet Cong announced that a prisoner had been executed.

In December 1970, North Vietnam released what its officials purported to be a comprehensive list of U.S. POWs detained inside North Vietnam. Included was a list of 20 servicemen reported by North Vietnam as having died in its custody. Dr. Roger E. Shields, Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ISA), recommended to the Secretary of Defense that the list be accepted "as an official notification by the NVN government of the status of the men listed thereon," and that the list be forwarded to the Service Secretaries for their evaluation.

In a subsequent memorandum, Dr. Shields recommended that the Secretary of Defense ensure that the Missing Persons Act was interpreted uniformly, that the authenticity of North Vietnam's list be verified, and that there be a coordinated notification to the next-of-kin. Dr. Shields wrote further:

I believe it is unlikely that we will receive the information required by the Geneva Convention... A finding of death in these cases will not foreclose a continuing demand for more details from NVN... We suspect most (next of kin) will accept a finding of death, but a few may protest very vocally... It is doubtful that legal action challenging a finding of death would be successful in overturning a Service Secretary's decision. Similar actions attempted in the past have failed.

Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird did not concur with Dr. Shields' recommendation on the ground that it might undercut U.S. efforts to press for implementation by North Vietnam of the Geneva Convention.

In December 1972, while preparing for the impending release of American POWs that would accompany the signing of the Peace Accords, Dr. Shields revisited the PFOD issue in a memorandum to Rear Admiral Donald B. Whitmire, Assistant Deputy Director for Intelligence, DIA. Dr. Shields wrote:

In the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict... one of the major problems which will face the Department of Defense and several hundred family members will be the resolution of the status of our men missing and unaccounted for throughout Indochina. Continuing uncertainty... has resulted in an increasing distress... among the next of kin... pressure will be intense... to adequately resolve the MIA cases within a reasonable time frame.

War-Time Lists

During the war, DoD kept two broad categories of lists of POW/MIAs.

The first was the basic casualty lists prepared by the services; the second was intelligence casualty lists prepared by DIA and the DoD for the purpose of tracking those who were "unaccounted for". Early computer models and automated data processing (ADP) began to be used in casualty accounting during the late 1960's. Accuracy depended on the reliability of information entered and the care taken by those entering it. At times, errors in one area or another caused the production of lists which were not totally accurate.

Although individual casualty reports were often unclassified, except in the case of covert cross-border losses, the overall lists of casualties were usually classified as "confidential." Intelligence lists were routinely classified as "secret." The reason for the different degree of classification was that the intelligence lists often contained more precise data about loss location and analysis of the likelihood of capture. The estimated location often reflected a range of intelligence estimates and may, or may not, have been based on firm information.

The refusal of the DRV to apply the 1949 Geneva Convention to the Vietnam War was an obstacle to U.S. efforts to confirm the casualty status and condition of American POWs. For example, very little mail was received from U.S. POWs prior to 1970, despite prisoners' right to send and receive mail under the Convention. DoD did receive some wartime lists and other forms of information about American POWs from private individuals who were involved with the peace movement.

In 1967, Mr. Joseph Elder, a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee, traveled to North Vietnam carrying with him a small quantity of mail to be delivered to POWs. Through 1969, he and other Friends staff carried mail from next-of-kin in the United States to POWs in Vietnam and often brought mail from POWs to their next-of-kin whn they returned. The quantity of mail on each trip varied from a half dozen letters to hundreds. The Friends' effort was complemented by anti-war activists who also traveled to Vietnam.

In October 1969, Mr. Elder met with U.S. officials in Hong Kong and was given a list of U.S. POWs about whom the U.S. hoped North Vietnam could provide information. The U.S. officials soon changed their minds, however, and asked Mr. Elder not to share the list with the North Vietnamese. As a consequence, Mr. Elder simply asked North Vietnam to provide its own list of American POWs. This request was denied.

On November 26, 1969, DIA received what it described internally as its "first list." While perhaps coincidental, the receipt from Hanoi of such a list may have been related to Mr. Elder's visit to Hanoi the previous month. This "first list", consisting of 59 names, was provided to anti-war activist Mr. David Dellinger.

Of the 59 names on the Dellinger list, 54 were carried by both DIA and the services as POWs. The other five were carried as POWs by DIA and as MIAs by their respective services.

In January 1970, the Committee of Liaison with the Families (COLIAFAM), released a list of 156 U.S. POWs detained in North Vietnam. The Co-Directors of the Committee were Cora Weiss and David Dellinger. The Committee also released a list of five servicemen "confirmed as being dead by the North Vietnamese." Of these five, three were listed by the DRV at the time of the Paris Peace Accords as having died in captivity, while the other two were never confirmed as having been held captive. The remains of all five have been repatriated.

Throughout 1970 and 1971, the list of confirmed POWs grew, as efforts to facilitate the exchange of mail and to obtain partial lists from North Vietnam slowly progressed. Mail and other information arrived through a variety of channels, including the Friends, COLIAFAM, other activists, Mr. H. Ross Perot, and even the Swedish Prime Minister, Olav Palme. By September 1970, the number of confirmed American prisoners had risen to 335. On December 22, 1970, North Vietnam provided Senator Edward Kennedy with a list of 368. As before, the North Vietnamese claimed that this was a comprehensive list of U.S. POWs detained inside North Vietnam.

In mid-1972, the Japanese "Nipon Dempa" News Agency released a list of 390 U.S. POWs. DIA analysis found that 339 of the names on this list had been acknowledged previously as POWs by the DRV, 9 were individuals already released, 20 were servicemen the DRV had reported earlier as dead, and 22 were new names, all airmen lost over North Vietnam between December 1970 and May 1972.

In June and August, 1972, Senator Kennedy announced the receipt of two new lists, of 24 and 10 respectively. All of the names on these lists were associated with recent combat activity. By the fall of 1972, the list of confirmed U.S. POWs held by North Vietnam had risen to more than 400.

The Sullivan Report

In June 1972, a high-level interagency report on the POW/MIA issue was completed under the direction of Assistant Secretary of State William H. Sullivan, Chairman of the Ad Hoc Group on Vietnam. The report examined lessons to be learned from the POW exchange at the end of the Korean war, the French experience in Indochina in 1954, and the U.S. experience in Laos in 1962.

The Sullivan report concluded that North Vietnam's overriding military and political objective was the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces and the eventual takeover of South Vietnam and the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. It presumed that North Vietnam was using U.S. POWs as leverage to achieve U.S. withdrawal and speculated on the possibility that U.S. POWs would be retained as bargaining chips. The report cited Laos as a particular area of concern because of the more than 300 Americans were listed as missing in that country. Despite indications that some U.S. POWs captured in Laos had been moved to North Vietnam, there was reason to believe that a number of Americans could still be held as prisoners in Laos. The Pathet Lao had stonewalled on any accounting for U.S. POWs until after a ceasefire and the cessation of all U.S. bombing in Laos.

As to how many U.S. POWs might actually be repatriated, the report concluded that an estimated 120 Americans were alive in captivity over and above the approximately 400, officially acknowledged at the time by North Vietnam. Returning POWs were expected to provide answers about the fate of many of the missing. With respect to a post-ceasefire accounting, the report stated that lessons learned from the Korean War suggested it might not be possible to account for Americans immediately, or to recover American war dead from areas of enemy control.

The report also noted that North Vietnam had raised the war reparations issue since 1967 and had linked it both to a ceasefire and to a prisoner exchange. In reviewing the Sullivan report, the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed opposition to any payment for the return of U.S. POWs.

Preparations for Repatriation

The military services had been charged with maintaining dossiers on each POW and MIA since August 1966. The dossiers were to include the most recent photograph, a summary of personnel and medical records with complete identification data, the circumstances of the casualty, all information about the individual received since becoming a casualty, and appropriate military orders.

As part of the preparations for Operation Homecoming, DIA adopted an ADP system, originally developed for the Air Force by a private contractor, in order to "...expedite the determination of the status of U.S. personnel not returned to U.S. control."

This ADP system was managed by DIA "...for the expeditious correlation and analysis of information derived from the initial debriefing of PWs" and to "provide intelligence support to the USG negotiations and other national bodies." On October 11, 1972, DIA agreed to give the Air Force executive agency authority over the ADP system under DIA management. Information entered into the database would be from both military and civilian sources. Civilian-associated information would be collected by the military, based on a 1972 agreement between DIA and the Department of State and would be reported to State.

The ADP agreement specified that the Air Force would determine the distribution of the initial debriefing reports but, in fact, the DIA played a key role. It excluded from the distribution list the JCRC, which was charged with seeking to resolve the status of MIAs and KIA/BNRs through the recovery of remains. DIA's argument, put forward by its POW/MIA Chief, Commander Charles Trowbridge, was that the Phase III debriefings were too voluminous, would require extensive photocopying, were not casualty-oriented and did not provide information of value to the mission of the JCRC. The CINCPAC was excluded from the list for similar reasons.

Operation Homecoming Accounting

The Paris Peace Accords were signed and POW lists exchanged on January 27, 1973. The U.S. delegation received what were represented to be complete lists from the DRV and PRG. The United States did not at any time during the negotiations, or after, present the Vietnamese with its list of Americans expected to be returned. American negotiators feared that prisoners would be withheld or used as bargaining chips if a U.S. list were handed over.

As of January 27, 1973, the Defense Department listed 1,929 Americans unaccounted for. These included 1,220 missing in hostile action (MIA), 118 others missing from non-combat related causes (MNH), and 591 servicemen officially listed as prisoners of war (POW). These statistics were based on the status determinations made by the service Secretaries. In addition, 1,118 servicemen had been declared dead by the service Secretaries without the recovery of remains.

The DIA list was not identical to the DoD list, in part because the DIA list included civilians. The DIA list of 1,986 unaccounted for included 54 civilians, of whom 41 were listed as POWs and 13 as missing. The remaining 1,932 unaccounted for were military personnel including 626 listed as POWs and 1,306 listed as missing.

Unfortunately, the Committee was unable to locate any archival compilation of names to support DIA's statistics or any evidence to suggest that DIA attempted to coordinate its overall statistics with those of the services or the DoD.

On January 28, 1973, the DIA completed its first analysis of the DRV/PRG lists and reported its findings to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. The DRV/PRG lists totaled 717 persons, including both U.S. and foreign nationals. The DRV list had 495 names; the PRG had 222. A total of 577 Americans were to be repatriated alive, of whom 22 were civilians. According to DIA, this left 1,325 Americans not accounted for, including 56 listed as POWs and 1,269 Missing.

On January 29, the DIA reported the following breakdown to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense:

566 Americans were to be returned alive; 64 were reported as having died in captivity; and 87 of those DIA had listed as POWs and 1,277 listed as MIAs were not accounted for. The breakdown was corrected on January 31 to include one additional unaccounted for MIA. In a later report, DIA indicated that of the 64 listed as having died in captivity, 18 had previously been so listed by the services and DIA, 9 had been listed as MIA, 3 were cases of misidentification, and 34 had been listed by DIA as POWs.

Also on January 29, DoD's POW/MIA Task Force provided its own analysis of DRV/PRG lists. It determined that the DRV list of 495 names included 12 persons previously released, 23 reported to have died, and 460 to be released (456 military, 1 civilian and 3 foreign nationals.) The PRG list of 222 included 50 previously released, 47 said to have died in captivity, and 125 to be released (99 military, 21 civilians and 5 foreign nationals.)

On February 1, 1973, the DRV provided U.S. officials with an additional list (DRV/Laos list) of 10 persons who had been captured in Laos. The DIA reported that, with the new list, a total of 586 Americans were to be returned alive, 63 had died in captivity, and 80 POWs and 1,276 MIAs remained unaccounted for.

On February 6, 1973, DIA provided its analysis of the names on the DRV/Laos list, in addition to expressing concern about the incompleteness of the list. Of the nine Americans and one Canadian on the list: three had been listed as POWs associated with Laos; four were listed by DIA as POWs associated with North Vietnam and by the services as POWs associated with Laos; and two were listed as MIAs. DIA also noted, with concern, that 215 of the 350 missing Americans in Laos were lost under circumstances where the enemy probably had knowledge of their fate.

The DIA report mentioned that the agency had listed a total of 13 Americans as POWs associated with Laos prior to the first exchange of lists on January 27. Four of these were accounted for on the DRV/PRG lists and three on the DRV/Laos list. This left six individuals -- five servicemen and one civilian -- listed by DIA as POWs associated with Laos. It should be noted that, at this point, the military services listed only two servicemen as having been confirmed captured in Laos. The reasons for the difference were (1) the inclusion of one civilian and (2) becuase three of those listed as POWs by DIA did not meet the services' criteria for classification due to insufficient evidence of captivity.

In hindsight, the DIA reports between January 29 and February 6, 1973, indirectly impinged on the services' authority to determine casualty status by reporting as accounted for all those listed on the DRV/PRG lists as having died in captivity (or returned alive). In fact, DOD took no action to adjust its official casualty records pending actual repatriation of live POWs and a formal casualty board review of the status of those not so repatriated. Since the evidence of death for those reported by the DRV and PRG to have died in captivity was not necessarily conclusive, these reports may have contributed to future misunderstandings about who had been accounted for and who had not.

At Operation Homecoming, ten Americans, including one civilian, were listed as unaccounted for over China. Of these, three had been reported alive in the Peking Municipal Prison as late as December 1971 and were released in March 1973. The others remain unaccounted-for.

POW Numbers As mentioned above, DIA listed 80 Americans as unaccounted for POWs after the exchange of the DRV/Laos list. This number was reduced by one with the return of Captain Robert White, who was not on the Paris lists, but was repatriated alive on April 1, 1973. This left 79 on the DIA list, 67 military and 12 civilians. At the same time, DoD listed only 53 servicemen as POWs; two of these were considered MIA by DIA. Both were later found to have been captured and to have died in captivity. Of DIA's 67 military, one was a deserter not carried by DoD as a casualty; the remaining 16 were servicemen last known alive on the ground, but not confirmed in captivity. With one exception, DIA changed its listing to conform to services' listings within six months of the end of Operation Homecoming. The exception was U.S. Navy Commander Harley H. Hall, whose plane had been shot down only hours before the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. The Navy's listing of Commander Hall was subsequently changed to POW.