Vietnam War/Prisoner

 Vietnam War/Prisoner (Prisoner of war)

Date	1975 - 2026
Exposed by	Sydney Schanberg
Interest of	John Kerry, John McCain
Description	Missing American soldiers from the Vietnam War

American soldiers were taken prisoner during the Vietnam War and never returned after the conclusion of the hostilities.

"[...] North Vietnam - after the peace treaty had been signed on Jan. 27, 1973 in Paris - held back hundreds of American prisoners, keeping them as bargaining chips to ensure getting Washington’s promised $3.25 billion in war reparations. The funds were never delivered, and the prisoners were never released. Both sides insisted to their people and the world that all POWs had been returned, challenging the voluminous body of facts to the contrary."

Official narrative

As per Wikipedia:

Considerable speculation and investigation have been devoted to a hypothesis that a significant number of missing U.S. service members from the Vietnam War were captured as prisoners of war by communist forces and kept as live prisoners after U.S. involvement in the war concluded in 1973. A vocal group of POW/MIA activists has maintained that there has been a concerted conspiracy by the Vietnamese and U.S. governments since then to hide the existence of these prisoners. The U.S. government has steadfastly denied that prisoners were left behind or that any effort has been made to cover up their existence. [...] Several congressional investigations have looked into the issue, culminating with the largest and most thorough, the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs of 1991–93, which found "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."

Concerns

The story was covered by Sydney Schanberg for decades:

• when Hanoi produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, US intelligence agencies expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on February 2, 1973, about the discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in Laos, only nine of whom were being returned.
• two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned.
• the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports.
• in the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another
• distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government's satellite system in the late 1980s and early '90s, show[ing] markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses—such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots.
• PAVE SPIKE sensor system has been used to enterauthenticator numbers of 20 US POWs who were lost in Laos
• in a Moscow archive, a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973. In the transcript, General Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 US prisoners were being held.
• in his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, Retired Command Sgt. Major Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government's vows to leave no men behind.
• in his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, Retired Command Sgt. Major Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government's vows to leave no men behind.
• in 1990, Colonel Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA's Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer, which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners—a "black hole," these officials called it.

Reports of soldiers seen alive in Laos were reaching Schanberg up to 2008.

Cover-up

John Kerry and John McCain were heavily involved in the cover-up. Image data, live sightings and signal intelligence all pointed to the fact that US soldiers were being held in Laos, Vietnam and possibly other places.

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
John McCain	“I don't think people understand how much prisoners go through. They don't come out the same person that they went in, especially if they were tortured. So I think that he has what some students of psychiatry say are snakes in his head and I think this is his possible motive for doing all this [...] If you go to the families and talk to them, you won't find anybody praising John McCain, he's become their enemy and he has had confrontations with them [...] physical confrontations.”	John McCain Sydney Schanberg	29 September 2008

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