CLOUDS OVER THE AIRLIFT

For all the good intentions that fueled it, the airlift of orphans from Indochina continued to cause problems. Last week, after 28 Cambodian children arrived at Washington, D.C.'s Dulles International Airport without the proper papers indicating their suitability for adoption, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered the rescue operation stopped temporarily. The government had decided earlier to admit 2,000 children in all, and wished to double-check how many had already reached the U.S. and to be certain that future arrivals qualified for adoption. At week's end, the airlift was given a new green light; authorities expected about 300 more orphans to be brought over.

Living Parent. The Cambodian planeload was the latest in a series of irregularities that has troubled the humanitarian effort. At San Francisco's Presidio, where 932 of the children made a temporary stop, several Vietnamese-speaking interviewers discovered that some of the orphans said they were not orphans at all. Jane Barton, a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee who spent three years in Viet Nam, found two dozen children who claimed they had at least one living parent. Interviewer Nhu Miller talked to a twelve-year-old boy and his two sisters who said their parents had been persuaded by nuns to turn them over to an orphanage. The children, who survived the C-5A crash near Saigon that killed 200 persons early this month, arrived in San Francisco and were destined to be separated and sent to three different European countries. Susan Shaffer, a volunteer in the Presidio's immigration room, found that most children being processed were accompanied by only the spottiest documentation.

Barton also came upon a well-dressed girl of about eleven named Vu

Thi Loc, who cheerfully displayed a photograph of her uncle, an ARVN colonel. The girl said that her uncle had shipped her and about 20 other nieces and nephews to the U.S. to join relatives; her mother is living in the U.S. and is now married to an American. About five days before the flight, the girl said, the colonel's brood was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Saigon. Good connections and an ample store of cash served other Vietnamese well too. At least two well-to-do Saigon families managed to put their children upon U.S.-bound planes as "orphans"--and to accompany them on the trip as "escorts."

The adoption agencies that participated insisted that they had acted properly. Said Bob Chamness, director of Holt Children's Services in Saigon: "I know for a fact that no VIP children were on any of our flights." In the U.S., Pat Dempsey of Friends of All Children, which brought over a large proportion of the young refugees, said that all tots handled by her agency were either truly orphaned or had been deliberately --and irrevocably--handed over for adoption by their parents. Dempsey acknowledged that some children might have arrived in the U.S. minus their requisite papers, since many documents were lost when the C-5A went down.

Tiny Packages. TIME has learned that U.S. Government investigators are finding it extremely difficult to determine the cause of that crash. Looting South Vietnamese soldiers who were first on the scene picked through the wreckage, stripping the dead--and injured--of anything of conceivable value. Along with aircraft instruments and fuselage parts that are needed for the investigation, the scavengers ripped out and stole tiny packages of U.S. one-dollar bills that had been sewed into the underclothes of some of the orphans.

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