VICTIMS OF VIETNAM LIES

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

It was late afternoon on Jan. 26, 1967, when the Air Force CH-53 helicopter dropped off Pham Ninh Ngoc and 10 other South Vietnamese at a clearing in North Vietnam, just across the Laotian border. The team, code named Hadley, was supposed to gather intelligence on supply convoys traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but within a day North Vietnamese soldiers began rounding up the commandos. An iron shackle was secured to Pham with a stake driven through the flesh of his leg, and he was taken north. Once in prison, he spent hours hanging upside down in the sun with his jaw held shut by a muzzle. Rats and cockroaches nibbled at the torn flesh on his leg as he spent his nights in a bare brick cell, unheated even when the temperature fell to 20 [degrees] F.

After all this torture, Pham suffered something almost as terrible: betrayal. The U.S. Army officers who recruited him had promised that if he were captured, his mother and father would receive a stipend while he was in prison. But the U.S. reneged on the deal. Officers visited his parents and told them Pham was dead, and his family received nothing during the 16 years he was held by the North Vietnamese. When he returned home in 1982, his parents thought they were seeing a ghost.

Pham, who is 49 and now lives in Garden Grove, California, was one of about 450 South Vietnamese commandos who were part of an operation called Oplan-34A, which the CIA and Pentagon ran between 1961 and 1968. Two hundred of the commandos who are now living in the U.S. have filed a suit asking that all commandos still alive be paid $2,000 for every year they served in prison--an estimated total of $11 million. Two weeks ago, the case broke open when a federal claims court forced the CIA and the Pentagon to declassify secret payroll rosters and memos. The documents show that the U.S. government had declared the commandos dead even though it knew many were still alive. The money saved by withholding the benefits was used for other operations.

The documents confirm that most of the commandos should never have been sent on the missions in the first place. North Vietnam's Hanoi agents "had penetrated the operation from the beginning," says Sedgwick Tourison, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who has written a book on the operation (Secret Army, Secret War; Naval Institute Press). For three years, the agency's Saigon station continued to send teams into North Vietnam even as evidence mounted that the North Vietnamese seemed always to know where and when they were coming. Some captured radio operators, ordered by the North Vietnamese to ask for more agents, managed to signal to their CIA handlers with code words that they were being held. Still, when SOG, the Pentagon's Studies and Observations Group, took over Oplan-34A in 1964, it sent hundreds more commandos into North Vietnam during the next four years, even though the officers in charge of the program in Saigon knew it was riddled with enemy informants.

Beginning in 1962, CIA officers began crossing the names of captured commandos off the pay rosters and telling their families they were dead; SOG officers continued the practice. "I think it's terrible, I really do," says George Gaspard, who as a Green Beret major in Vietnam ran a related SOG program code named Oplan-34B. "As an agent handler, that would be appalling to me to write somebody off the books that way."

CIA and Pentagon lawyers have battled the commandos' allegations for two years. The CIA cited an 1875 Supreme Court case that it has used successfully to fend off past suits by agents who claimed to have been cheated. In that case, a Civil War spy was denied back pay because the court ruled it had no jurisdiction to enforce secret contracts for espionage. Retired Major General John Singlaub, who ran the SOG program from 1966 to 1968, gives another defense. He insists that the South Vietnamese government, not the U.S., decided which commandos should be taken off the lists. "I don't think there is a legal or moral justification for saying we should accept responsibility for them," Singlaub says. "They were not Americans."

Last week CIA Director John Deutch finally did take responsibility, realizing that the revelations could endanger operations being run today. Foreign spies might now be far less willing to take risks for the CIA if the agency got a reputation for not paying its bills. "The CIA feels very deeply that it must take care of the people who work for it," CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith told Time. White House aides quickly cobbled together an amendment that calls for the commandos to be paid; it will be attached to the defense appropriations bill now before Congress. For about the cost of a new Comanche helicopter, the betrayal of Pham Ninh Ngoc and his comrades may finally be repented.

--Reported by Dan Cray/Garden Grove and Frank Gibney Jr./Hanoi

With reporting by DAN CRAY/GARDEN GROVE AND FRANK GIBNEY JR./HANOI