United States Senate Select Committee On POW/MIA Affairs - Hearings and Investigations

Hearings and Investigations

Hearings began on November 5, 1991, and were conducted in five blocks:

1. Hearings on the U.S. Government's Efforts to Learn the Fate of America's Missing Servicemen (November 1991)
2. Hearings on the U.S. Government's Efforts to Learn the Fate of America's Missing Servicemen (June 1992)
3. Hearings on U.S. Government's Post-War POW/MIA Efforts (August 1992)
4. Hearings on the Paris Peace Accords (September 1992)
5. Hearings on Cold War, Korea, World War II POWs (November 1992)

Going into the hearings, Smith was convinced that prisoners had been left behind after the war. Kerry suspected that some prisoners had been left behind by the Nixon and Ford administrations in their eagerness to disengage from the war; however, he doubted that there were secret camps in operation, as had been touted by POW/MIA activists and some media reports. McCain was skeptical that any prisoners had been left behind, partly because he and the other POWs had gone to great lengths at the time to keep track of everyone who was a prisoner in North Vietnam, and partly because he could see no motivation with evidence behind it for the Hanoi government to have kept any.

The first day of hearings featured the testimony of then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and retired General, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and current head of the American POW/MIA delegation in Hanoi, John Vessey. Both defended the administration's and the military's role in trying to get the Vietnamese to improve their efforts in ascertaining the fate of missing personnel. Vessey rejected the notion of a government conspiracy, saying that he had never seen evidence of one at any time in his military career, and adding that, "American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are not conspirators." Cheney said that Vietnamese cooperation was improved but still needed much more improvement. The second day featured Garnett "Bill" Bell, head of the U.S. Office for P.O.W.-M.I.A. Affairs in Hanoi, saying that he believed that up to ten American servicemen had been left behind after the war, but that there was no evidence they were still alive. Other Defense Department witnesses testifying that day expressed surprise at Bell's testimony, saying they were unaware of any evidence behind it; their statements were met with hisses from POW/MIA activists and family members in the hearing room. The third day saw the testimony of former Vietnam People's Army Colonel Bui Tin, who had likely observed McCain in prison once and, years later and dissatisfied with the course of post-war Vietnam, had left the country to live in exile in France in 1990. Tin stated that there were no American prisoners alive and that only a few Americans who had switched sides had remained after the war. After his testimony, he and McCain embraced, which produced a flurry of "Former Enemies Embrace"-style headlines.

Thus at times the hearings became heated and contentious. McCain was criticized by some of his fellow POWs for wanting to find a path to normalization. He was also being vilified by some POW/MIA activists as a traitor or a brainwashed "Manchurian Candidate", which the embrace with Tin only exacerbated. Occasionally his famous temper flared during hearings and Kerry had to calm him down, for which McCain later said he was grateful. McCain had an emotionally-charged exchange with Dolores Alfond, Chair of the National Alliance Of Families For the Return of America's Missing Servicemen. McCain said he was tired of Alfond denigrating the efforts of himself, Vessey, and others involved in investigating the POW/MIA issue, while a tearful Alfond pleaded for the committee to not shut down its work.

The committee was responsible for getting the Department of Defense to declassify over one million pages of documents. Kerry and McCain and others were able to get the Vietnamese government to give full access to their records. The committee had full-time investigators or delegations stationed in Moscow and other parts of Russia, North Korea, and Southeast Asia. In all, the committee would conduct over 1000 interviews, take over 200 sworn depositions, and hold over 200 hours of public hearings. Some of the hearings were telecast on C-SPAN.

The senators' work was often hands-on. Smith would get leads about possible whereabouts of a POW, and then Kerry would follow up on them. Because of Kerry's activities with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the North Vietnamese deemed him honorable and opened their facilities to him. There had been persistent reports of U.S. prisoners held under the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi or in nearby tunnels; Smith had stated in hearings that the Vietnamese Defense Ministry had an underground prison in its compound near the mausoleum, which a Vietnamese official called "a myth and an affront to the people of Vietnam." Kerry and Smith were personally led through a patchwork of tunnels and catacombs under Hanoi, until Smith was satisfied that no Americans were being held there. The number of live-sighting searches, include those on short notice, sometimes led to Vietnamese officials accusing the whole process of being a cloak for espionage.

The question of testimony by businessman and POW/MIA advocate Ross Perot before the committee in June 1992 also led to conflict, with Perot fearing a "circus"-like atmosphere due to his candidacy in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. Perot believed that hundreds of American servicemen were left behind in Southeast Asia at the end of the U.S. involvement in the war, and that government officials were covering up POW/MIA investigations in order to not reveal a drug smuggling operation used to finance a secret war in Laos. But much of any testimony was expected to concern Perot's own actions: committee members wanted to question Perot about his unauthorized back-channel discussions with Vietnamese officials in the late 1980s, which led to fractured relations between Perot and the Reagan and Bush administrations, about Perot's 1990 agreement with Vietnam's Foreign Ministry to become its business agent after relations were normalized, and about Perot's private investigations of and attacks upon Department of Defense official Richard Armitage. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, one of the leading POW/MIA groups, objected to Perot's decision not to testify. McCain urged Perot to testify, saying, "I have heard he is very convinced that there are still numbers of Americans being held against their will in Southeast Asia, and I am very interested in knowing what leads him to hold that view." Perot did finally testify in August 1992, after (temporarily) dropping out of the presidential race. He did not present new evidence of live prisoners, but did denounce U.S. behavior towards Vietnam after the war: "What we have done for 20 years is treat them rudely and punch them around." He also criticized the Central Intelligence Agency for running a secret war in Laos. There were several exchanges between McCain and Perot, who had a complex relationship going back to when Perot had paid for McCain's wife Carol's medical care after she was severely injured in an automobile accident while he was a POW. Perot denied McCain's suggestion that he was a conspiracy theorist, while McCain disputed Perot's notion that the U.S. had "ransomed our prisoners out of Hanoi" at the close of the war.

Some of the most publicized testimony before the committee came in September 1992, when former Nixon Defense Secretaries Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger said that the U.S. government had believed in 1973 that some American servicemen had not been returned from Laos, despite Nixon's public statements to the contrary. Schlesinger said, "As of now, I can come to no other conclusion. that does not mean there are any alive today." Laird said in retrospect of Nixon's assurances that all POWs were coming home, "I think it was unfortunate to be that positive. You can't be that positive when we had the kind of intelligence we had." In reaction to the testimony, Kerry said, "I think it's quite extraordinary when two former secretaries of defense both give evidence documenting that they had information, or they believed personally, that people were alive and not accounted for in Operation Homecoming."

Another conflict occurred over whether Henry Kissinger's testimony was complete regarding what top levels of the Nixon administration knew about POWs at the end of the war. Kerry suggested calling Richard Nixon himself to testify, but after Nixon showed that he was unwilling to do so, Kerry decided not to call Nixon. Kissinger had bristled at the notion of a conspiracy: "There is no excuse, two decades after the fact, for anyone to imply that the last five presidents from both parties, their White House staffs, secretaries of state and defense, and career diplomatic and military services either knowingly or negligently failed to do everything they could to recover and identify all of our prisoners and MIAs." Admiral James Stockdale, a former POW, also rejected the conspiracy claims: "To go into it as a venture, you'd be a fool because there are so many possibilities of leaks and so forth." Former Defense Intelligence Agency director Leonard Peroots testified that a conspiracy would have involved hundreds to thousands of participants from the outset, rapidly growing into the millions with frequent personnel shifts and administration changes over the next twenty years.

Yet another source of conflict were the different factions within the POW/MIA community. The older National League of Families was more established, less radical, and more connected to the government. The newer National Alliance of Families had been created in a schism with the National League during the 1980s, created by members who were dissatisfied with the League's leadership and ties to the government. Compared to the older group, the National Alliance took a more activist, radical stance, especially towards belief in the existence of live prisoners in Southeast Asia.