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Symbols Erickson 10/15/92 Chairman Kerry: Now, with respect to the K up there, it has been referred to occasionally as a walking K. Without getting into great details about walking, does that appear to be a walking K?

Mr. Erickson: To me, it does. Symbols Godley 09/24/92 We had one very peculiar incident. Some random aerial photography happened to take a picture of a rice paddy or some cultivated area, and we thought we saw USAF spelled out in this field, even with an arrow. We got very excited about it, and we sent an intelligence team of local American irregulars -- these were Hmong. They went there and they said there was absolutely no evidence of any American or any other prisoners in that area. Symbols Grassley 10/15/92 On October 2 and 5, the Committee received a full court debunking from DoD on the pilot code numbers in two closed sessions. They said that numerous sets of numbers seen in a photo and which match code numbers of know MIAs were shadows and vegetation. They made the numbers disappear, presto, just like that, by some sort of high-technology equipment. Symbols Gray 12/04/92 Mr. Gray: Yes, sir, exactly. The owner was brought out. We talked to him about the symbol being seen in his field several years before. At first he didn't understand what we were talking about. As the conversation went on, he laughed when they showed him the line drawing of the USA. He said I know now what you're talking about. My sons did that 3 or 4 years ago and they did that based on letters that we got from our relatives in the United States.

We said we'd like to see those letters. They brought them out and written under the sender's address on these envelopes in big letters was USA. The owner of the rice field said my sons saw this. They went down, one of them wrote it in a hut. The other said I can do better than that, and he went out into the middle of the field, stacked up rice straw, and burned it in the shape of a USA.

We asked if we could speak to his sons and he said absolutely. They were brought out. They were 20 and 17-years-old. They admitted that they had made the symbol. The older son that he had done it by stacking up the rice straw. He was asked if he had written anything else and he said, yes, I made a stick airplane and he drew that for us. And he said he also did a dragon's head in the same area either days before or day after he burned the USA into the rice field.

We have pictures of the letters that came from the United States. It turns out most of the villages in Ban Hui Hindon have letters from the United States and all of them have on them in big letters USA. So he says -- the long man said that's where he got the idea for the USA. Symbols Gray 12/04/92 Vice Chairman Smith: Mr. Gray, I have no reason to doubt what the individual told you. On the other hand, I do not have any reason to believe him either. So let me just ask you a tough question. Was he [given a polygraph test]?

Gray: He was not [given a polygraph test]. Symbols Gray 12/04/92 Vice Chairman Smith: Now do you have proof that he made this?

Mr. Gray: Do we have proof that he went out and burned a symbol into the field? We have his word.

Vice Chairman Smith: Well see the point I am making -- I am not doubting what you say, I am really not. I am just trying to make a point here that we make these quantum leaps when it relates that is not live Americans. We draw the conclusion the man is telling the truth. He may be, I do not know.

But I guess what frustrates me in trying to get to the bottom of the issue...is that when we get live- sighting reports, which are [given polygraph tests] and pass some, we do not believe them. And we do not have any evidence to contradict it in some cases. In many cases we do, but in some cases we do not, and we do not believe those reports.

So I mean I guess I get concerned about -- DIA and intelligence people are supposed to be strict and tough on methodology. Symbols Santora 10/15/92 ...when you're not looking at the original imagery and you're trying to detect something on anything else, any other form or copy of that imagery, then all bets are off on what you might see or might not see. Symbols Sheetz 12/04/92 I share the Senator's concern about the need to be as careful as you can given the situation that you are in, to make sure you are collecting accurate information. And I would point out that I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about this and the first thing I asked Warren when he came back was there any indication at all that these kids had been coached or that someone had sort of prepared the war for Warren's entry and had pushed these people out.

Because I will admit, we have had experiences in the past in Southeast Asia in investigating cases where witnesses appear to have their story coached. But in this case we did not even know who we were looking for and it was only through happenstance that they were able to track these kids down. And basically they dug the kids out on the their own. They weren't pushed out there by a local Lao official saying ha, we found the person who made these symbols. Symbols Shields 06/25/92 Sen. Robb: Let me just go back to the question that I think has troubled the panel... it has to do with the whole question of compartmentalization of information during a critical period and what appeared to be the lack of sharing of information and/or critical questions being directed to those who might have been able to help in that reconciliation process.

General Tighe observed during his testimony yesterday that when policy makers in the early 1970's made statements about no Americans being left behind, that the intelligence analysts tended to believe them, despite contradictions with most current intelligence, simply because they felt that the policy makers had access to compartmentalized information not available to them.

Shields: Senator, to my knowledge, all of the intelligence agencies, including the NSA, were part of our process. That information was fed in... into the DIA. Symbols Smith 10/15/92 ...it would be my position... that if information like this was provided to me, I would want to take the position that these symbols should be treated as valid until proven as otherwise. But that is not the position that has been taken here. The position that has been taken here is that these symbols are not valid. Symbols Smith 10/15/92 ...what do we need this agency for? If we have signals and we are training people to do is, and then when we get the signals but we do not have the capability to determine whether it is a signal, it does not make any sense to me. Symbols Smith 10/15/92 [to Andrews] ...But basically, what you are saying here is that the analysis on 52, by your early analysis, is incorrect, or may have been incorrect. Therefore your analysis today very well may also be incorrect. And yet you are taking the emphatic position that you are correct. Symbols Smith 09/24/92 if we are talking about negotiating an end to a war and accounting fully for all of our prisoners of war, and we have photographs like that -- if somebody has presented you an analysis of those photographs and they say they are not true, they are not accurate, they are not Caucasian, they are something else or somebody else, fine. But your testimony is not that you got that testimony. Your testimony is that you never saw the photographs, and that very well may be the case. But the point is, it shows there is a communication breakdown somewhere, in terms of information that we had on POWs. Symbols Smith 10/15/92 Second, if a pilot were to attempt to communicate by ground signal, letter or whatever means, by using his authenticator number, the U.S. government will be unable to identify the individual if his number happened to be among those numbers DIA can't account for. This could be potentially tragic. Vessey Cases Ford 11/15/91 The way we define a discrepancy case is, a case about which the United States Government has convincing evidence that the Governments of Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia should have specific knowledge. The term 'discrepancy case' includes not only individuals who were last known alive, but also individuals who we are not certain of their fate, or who were known dead but for whom the Indochinese Government should be able to provide information or remains. Vessey Cases Trowbridge 06/24/92 ...the 97 who were listed as prisoner that have not subsequently been accounted for. They have made their way into the General Vessey list as priority cases. And those are the cases that are the core of the search efforts that are ongoing right now. Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92 It was not to mean that we weren't going to investigate the other cases. We were going to investigate all the cases, but these were the priority cases because they appeared to be the cases of those people had the best chance of being alive. Vessey Cases Vessey 11/05/91 . . . my approach with the Vietnamese is that we are not trying to reconstruct the past or come up with war crimes trials or any such thing as that. We want to know what happened to our people. First, we want to know, are there any live Americans there? We are not going to ask the question about what you said in the past, that you said there were not any, and now there are. Fine, if there are some, let us have them and we are just going to ignore the past statements. If people have been killed under circumstances that are embarrassing, we are not going to make an issue out of that. What we want to know is where are our people, what happened to them? Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92 So in early 1989 I asked DIA and JCRC to work together to refine the list and include all cases where the evidence showed that the person involved was alive when he last knew of him and we had evidence that he likely came under Vietnamese control or was captured and for whom we had not yet had an accounting.

I also asked that the border areas be searched for the same sort of cases. And as a result of that effort we added 39 people lost in Vietnam and came up with 49 so-called discrepancy cases in the border area. Vessey Cases Vessey 06/25/92 I wanted to be able to confront that assertion that they had held no live prisoners with the sort of glaring examples that led Americans to believe that there may well have live American prisoners held. So at that time, the Defense Intelligence Agency officials gave me a list of about 70 cases... they were the cases for those individuals for whom the Vietnamese should have been able to account readily, some of them were not cases of people we thought had been reported to have died in captivity, but the remains had not been returned and we believed that the Vietnamese government should be able to account for them.

Most of them were in fact people who the U.S. believed we had the evidence to show that they were alive when we last saw them, they were captured or about to become captured. Vessey Cases Vessey 11/05/91 The people who are missing are my comrades, as they were comrades of many of the people on this committee. Watergate Kerrey 09/22/92 The question today for this committee is how could this have happened? Several witnesses who were appointed policymakers in 1973 have identified Watergate as the culprit. They believe the United States would have forced North Vietnam to abide by the terms of the peace treaty had President Nixon not been weakened and distracted by the scandal of Watergate. Perhaps this is true.

It also seems likely to me their attitude towards informing the public, coupled with their obsessive desire and need for secrecy, led to information about our missing being withheld from the American people. While they were trying to keep information about Watergate secret, they were also trying to keep information about our missing in action secret. The faulty judgment which resulted in one tragedy also produced a second. Watergate Kerry 09/22/92 It is clear also that paramount among the pressures of that time, when the agreement was signed and implementation began, was the energy and attention- sapping saga of Watergate. Watergate Kissinger 09/22/92 Now on the impact of Watergate, I think it is only fair to point out that the opposition to using any kind of military force strongly antedated Watergate. If you read the media of February and March when the Administration was repeatedly saying that it preserved the right to enforce the agreement, we were constantly told that we had no right to enforce a cease-fire. And it was something we always objected to on the ground that under those conditions any time America ends a war and makes a cease-fire, it has, in effect, surrendered because it cannot enforce what it has fought for. Watergate Kissinger 09/22/92 ...it is quite possible that President Nixon did not have the same strength to resist that pressure as he might have had without Watergate. He never said that to me. I think the position he took, which was that he wanted one more negotiation before considering military operations, was a perfectly reasonable position. I had a somewhat different view, but I had always a somewhat more professorial view and he had a somewhat more understanding of the political situation; that's why he was President. Watergate Rodman 09/21/92 I think knowing all the risks that we were heading into as 1973 began, none of us anticipated Watergate and how it would explode and totally wipe out Nixon's political leverage, and I think our analysis was that some of the crucial votes in the Congress that we used to defeat were lost this time and it was probably because of the demoralization of the President's supporters, so this was an unanticipated factor. But I agree with what Winston said earlier, and it's very important. We signed this agreement believing that if we did the right thing we had a good chance to maintain it, and that there was a chance that the South Vietnamese -- that the struggle within Vietnam would turn into some kind of political competition. There was a chance for this agreement to survive, and a lot depended on what we did.

Chairman Kerry: Well, I accept that, and I said earlier, and I'm convinced from all the reading that I have been doing, that Watergate looms far larger in this than I had ever imagined... Watergate Secord 09/24/92 What I think happened was we evolved through the Watergate era on this issue, and it just dragged on and on, and it was just kind of pushed off to one side, and it became less important in people's minds. And to our discredit, I think, it kind of left the consciousness of nearly everyone. But I think those of us who knew the truth, or what we thought to be truth, were always bothered by this. I don't know what else I can say.