The Mia Industry Bad Dream Factory

By Richard Lacayo

War has always been good business for defense contractors and arms dealers. But the Vietnam War gave rise to a dismal new enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended. Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about the extremely remote possibility that there might be any POWs still alive in Vietnam or anywhere else.

In recent weeks the MIA industry has been given a new lift by retired Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, who was forced to resign in 1990 after he became one of the agency's most truculent public critics. Kalugin has told several U.S. news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, that the KGB questioned "at least" three American POWs in Vietnam in 1978, five years after Hanoi said it had returned all living prisoners.

Among those questioned, according to Kalugin, were an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. Navy officer and a U.S. Air Force officer. He also told the Daily News that two of the POWs later returned to the U.S. -- an astounding claim, if true, because the only former POW known to have been repatriated after 1973 was Marine PFC Robert Garwood, who disappeared near Danang in 1965 and resurfaced 14 years later, claiming he had been a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Garwood was court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy.

There are many reasons to be skeptical about Kalugin's story. For one thing, he has given conflicting versions of the year in which the questioning took place. Investigators for the Senate's Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs are nonetheless eager to question Kalugin, who may appear before the committee this week. In addition, the committee's chairman, Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts, and its ranking Republican, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, said they may travel to Moscow to ask Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, to open the KGB files on POWs.

Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish because of the virtual impossibility of determining what happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam. After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and the Korean War. Yet perhaps because of the humiliating defeat the U.S. suffered in Vietnam, Americans have been unwilling to close the books on the MIAs. In a recent TIME-CNN poll conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 60% of those questioned said they believe there are still live Americans in Vietnam.

Some U.S. officials, including Garnett Bell, head of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs in Hanoi, have speculated that as many as 10 Americans could have been left behind in 1973, though he added that he believed they died at the hands of their captors. That possibility, unsettling in its own right, is a far cry from the outlandish claims by some members of the MIA industry. Millions of dollars are raked in every year through mailings from organizations that plead for contributions by raising the specter of large numbers of Americans being held in secret prison camps, waiting for rescuers who are being held back only by a lack of funds. Not one of these efforts has succeeded in bringing forward credible evidence of surviving POWs, much less a flesh-and-blood American prisoner. What they have produced in abundance is wild conspiracy theories backed by so-called proof that is generally feeble and often false.

Photographs that supposedly depict Americans in captivity have a special role in the MIA industry because they make the most direct appeal to both reason and the emotions. But many of the most widely circulated pictures have been retouched or misrepresented. Over the past few years, for example, several pictures purporting to show imprisoned Americans have emerged from Kampuchea. They turned out to be altered images of Soviet citizens clipped from old magazines.

Sometimes the actions of grieving relatives can inadvertently assist scam artists in Indochina. Over the years, a number of MIA families have arranged for printed flyers to be distributed across Southeast Asia seeking information about their missing loved ones. Those provide pictures and personal information that unscrupulous operators use in the manufacture of phony dog tags and doctored photographs.

The exodus of Vietnamese boat people that began in 1975 brought a surge in tales of POW sightings, some of them apparently inspired by the mistaken belief that anyone offering such stories to immigration officials would be put on a quick path to the U.S. For similar reasons, a macabre trade in bones said to be the skeletons of American servicemen became a growth industry in Vietnam: the going price for a box of purported remains ranges from $1,000 to $5,000. Most of them turn out to be animal bones or the skeletons of Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, a number of MIA organizations in the U.S. keep the issue alive by spreading unsupported allegations about supposedly missing Americans. While they may not manufacture false leads themselves, some have been known to make outrageous claims. Among them:

John LeBoutillier III, a former Republican Congressman, heads Skyhook II. The group sends anguished fund-raising letters detailing the conditions it claims are being endured by scores of POWs in Asian slave-labor camps.

Billy Hendon, also a former Republican Congressman, currently heads the POW Policy Center. For several years, the group has offered -- over U.S. government objections -- a $2.5 million reward to anyone in the region who can deliver a live American POW to safety. This effort has so far produced no results.

Eugene ("Red") McDaniel, a retired Navy captain who heads the American Defense Foundation and its educational arm, the American Defense Institute, came to the POW issue the hard way -- he was once one himself. After his release in 1973, he resumed his military career, ending up at the Pentagon, where he concluded that "the U.S. government would never do the job" of tracking down the POWs who he became convinced were left behind. McDaniel's group has been the conduit for a number of photographs of alleged POWs that ^ have been made public recently, including the now famous picture that purports to show three U.S. servicemen standing before a background of The Pentagon says the picture shows signs of having been altered.

Ted Sampley, head of Homecoming II, is a Vietnam Special Forces veteran from Fayetteville, N.C. Among other things, Sampley three years ago offered anticommunist insurgents $5,000 to destroy a government building in Laos, arguing that the only way to liberate American POWs from that country was to topple the communist regime.

Jack Bailey, a retired Air Force colonel, heads Operation Rescue (no connection with the antiabortion organization of the same name). For much of the 1980s, Bailey's chief project was raising funds to support the Akuna, a freighter that he said patrolled the South China Sea rescuing Vietnamese refugees. By most accounts, the ship was unseaworthy and spent 90% of its time in port.

In 1989 the National League of Families, the largest group representing close relatives of MIAs, accused 14 of the self-styled MIA rescue groups, including Operation Rescue, Homecoming II and Skyhook II, of distributing "false or distorted information" or supporting "counterproductive" activities. "It's a mystery how these guys have survived," says League of Families official Louise Van Hoozer, the sister of an Air Force pilot shot down in Vietnam. "All the leads offered by these guys evaporated."

One of the main reasons for the MIA industry's persistence was the government's initially sluggish effort to get to the bottom of the mystery. For years, the Pentagon turned over the question of missing Americans to defense-intelligence agencies more accustomed to concealing secret information than to guiding bereaved relatives through a thicket of classified and often conflicting reports. This heavy-handed approach not only angered relatives of missing servicemen but also fueled the suspicion and frustration that the MIA industry exploits.

Sensitive to criticism that they once acted too slowly to resolve the MIA riddle, Pentagon investigators beginning with the Reagan Administration have taken a more aggressive stance, seeking quickly and publicly to investigate all reports of MIAs, even from the most dubious sources.

Last summer Operation Rescue's Bailey brought to light what he claimed was a photograph taken in Laos last year of U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Donald G. Carr, who was shot down over Laos in 1971. The resemblance between pictures , of the young Carr at his 1961 wedding and the weathered face in Bailey's picture was sufficiently unnerving to move the Defense Department, after being prodded by some members of Congress, to fly Bailey to Bangkok. There he promised to supply more information and introduce Pentagon investigators to the source for his pictures.

But according to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who described the incident in November testimony before Congress, after several fruitless days Bailey came up empty-handed. Then, Cheney testified, Bailey had second thoughts. Perhaps, he suggested, the picture had been taken in Burma. Bailey now claims he was set up by Cheney. The Pentagon, he insists, drove a wedge between him and his mysterious source by getting to the man first and convincing him that Bailey was attempting to cheat him out of a sizable reward for his information.

The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs has begun its own effort to close the books -- or open them more fully -- on the MIA issue. During a 14- month inquiry that is expected to cost $1.9 million, the committee hopes to establish whether any American servicemen are alive in Southeast Asia, as well as make recommendations for ways in which the government can improve its process for resolving unsettled cases.

Unlike earlier bodies that have looked into the question, the Senate committee has subpoena power, and witnesses who appear before it must testify under oath. For those reasons, its probe stands a better chance than previous investigations of unearthing enough evidence to determine whether the search for missing Americans should be continued. Moreover, the replacement of the Soviet Union by a new Commonwealth of Independent States seeking good relations with the U.S. could permit American investigators to learn at last what Moscow knows about the MIAs.

Even so, it is likely that the Senate investigation, like 10 prior official inquiries, will leave unanswered questions that the MIA industry can prey on. Illinois Republican Congressman Henry Hyde has suggested that given the cost of disproving counterfeit assertions about MIAs, anyone who makes one should be charged with defrauding the government. Perhaps. But the real victim is not the government. It is the MIA families, whose grief and uncertainty have been exploited.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington