Daring Mission, Dashed Hopes

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

CIA finds no P.O.W.s in Laos, but M.I.A. families keep hoping

The Viet Nam War is long over, and for most Americans, best forgotten. But there remains a nagging concern--and for many families a daily grief--that, when the U.S. got out of Southeast Asia, it may have left dozens, even hundreds of P.O.W.s behind. Past Administrations have tacitly assumed that there may be some survivors among the 2,528 men missing, including 560 lost in Laos. The anguished families believe that as many as 300 of them are still alive. Neither Viet Nam nor Laos admits holding any prisoners, and no one has ever found solid proof.

But the U.S. Government has tried. According to a front-page story in the Washington Post last week, Defense Intelligence Agency analysts studying satellite photographs had spotted seemingly persuasive evidence of an American prisoner-of-war camp in Laos. The Central Intelligence Agency then trained and organized a group of Laotian mercenaries--many of them Hmong hill tribesmen--who crossed the border from Thailand and got close enough to take more definitive photos on the ground. The sad conclusion, according to Defense Department Spokesman Henry Catto: "There is no evidence that would lead us to believe there are Americans being held in Laos."

The Hmong tribesmen were apparently the first secret reconnaissance force to enter Laos on behalf of the soldiers missing in action but not the first ones to try. Angered by the refusal of the Carter Administration to accept and act on the uncertain proof that Americans are being held in Southeast Asia, families of the missing raised a dozen-man commando squad of their own--an underfinanced and overaged group of veterans from the Green Berets. Their improbable training center for an operation code-named "Velvet Hammer" was an academy for cheerleaders in Leesburg, Fla., near Orlando. Their leader was retired Lieut. Colonel James ("Bo") Gritz, 42, a former Army public affairs officer who served in Viet Nam and who now works for Hughes Helicopter in Culver City, Calif. Gritz (rhymes with beets) may not have been the ideal choice to run the secret operation: he showed up at the training camp with a psychic, a hypnotherapist, an ABC News crew and a Washington Post reporter to serve as "historical record keeper." After spending about $40,000 of the P.O.W. families' rescue money, Gritz's squad disbanded--according to Gritz, at the request of the Government.

Enter the CIA, which decided to organize its own mission on the basis of reconnaissance photographs that suggested the presence of a P.O.W. camp in Laos, near the former Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The photographs appeared to show people taller than native Laotians, using tools too big for natives, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the ground, instead of squatting Oriental-style. Surrounding them, it appeared, was a stockade with towers. Perhaps most persuasive, an aerial photograph showed the numerals 52 outlined on the ground. No one is sure what that number might signify: 52 prisoners in the camp, perhaps, or that the captives were the crew of one of the B-52s that had been shot down over the region. Because the numerals were first observed after Jan. 20, one theory was that they represented the 52 American hostages released from Iran.

The satellite photos, taken from an altitude of 80,000 ft. at 2,000 m.p.h., were enhanced through use of a computer. They seemed sharp enough to show prisoners posed in a secret body-language code taught to selected airmen facing a risk of capture. The code had worked before; it alerted photo interpreters that there were Americans at Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi, although by the time that daring rescue attempt was carried out in 1970, the prisoners had been moved.

Alas, the esoteric decoding of the intelligence agencies' elaborate technology was wrong. The Hmong brought back "ground check" photographs, which satisfied the agency that there were no Caucasians in the camp--neither Americans nor Soviet advisers, whom the CIA had half-jokingly feared "rescuing" against their will.

The families insist there is plenty of other evidence that American P.O.W.s are being held, particularly in Laos, and that their physical condition is deteriorating. George Brooks of Newburgh, N.Y., whose son was shot down over Laos in 1970, has compiled some 450 reports. Among the most important is a 1980 debriefing in Paris of a Laotian who spent 18 years in prison. He said that he had shared cells with Americans and that seven had died in the four months before he left. Other refugees have reported seeing foreigners in Laos held under guard or kept in caves rather than prison camps. There have been similar but sketchier sightings in Viet Nam. Most of these reports were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. But after the Paris debriefing, Brooks claims, the Carter Administration reclassified most reports of P.O.W. sightings as "top secret" and thus denied the families access.

The number of potential survivors of the war is hard to calculate. Of the 2,528 missing, the Pentagon has listed 1,178 as killed in action (although no bodies were found), 1,237 as missing in action and 113 as presumed prisoners of war. Of the 560 missing in Laos, only three had been declared prisoners of war. The families claim a "hard count" of 27 Americans in Laos and a possible total of 50. They believe there are about 250 more in Viet Nam. They agree with the Government that any Americans missing in Cambodia are presumed to have been killed at the outset of the Pol Pot government's "reeducation" holocaust in 1975.

If Viet Nam and Laos are holding prisoners, say the families, those countries may be seeking ransom in the form of foreign aid. Instead, the U.S. has withheld permission for grain sales and other food aid because of Viet Nam's invasion of Cambodia. "Our main struggle," says a former military officer now involved in the families' cause, "has been to force the Government to admit they are still there and then to either buy them back or bring them back." --By William A. Henry III. Reported by William McWhirter/Miami and Eileen Shields/Washington

With reporting by William McWhirter, Eileen Shields

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