World Notes Prisoners

The black-and-white snapshot, its images shadowy and washed out, shows three men holding a cryptic, hand-lettered sign. Family members of three U.S. officers missing in action in the Vietnam War -- Colonel John Robertson, Major Albro Lundy Jr. and Lieut. Larry Stevens -- say they are "positive" those are the men in the photograph.

Pentagon analysts have been studying the picture since receiving it from "an intelligence source" 10 months ago but say they are still unable to authenticate it because the print is so poor. The FBI is trying to determine whether the picture was faked.

Most senior officials in Washington believe that none of the nearly 2,300 American MIAs still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia are alive. Officials are reluctant to say that publicly because it might make them seem unresponsive to the anguish of families still uncertain about the fate of their loved ones -- and because they just might be wrong. An unreleased 1986 report by Lieut. General Eugene Tighe, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), concluded that some MIAs could be alive.

Hopes in this country are fed by reports of sightings of Americans in Asian jungles, often from refugees or anti-communist guerrilla bands seeking money and publicity from the U.S. The production of faked pictures, forged letters, dog tags, even bones has become a cottage industry in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Veterans' groups and families of missing servicemen have offered large rewards for information, but none of the thousands of reported sightings and pictures has ever turned up a surviving American prisoner.

This photo of the three men, one of several copies in circulation, was released last week by the American Defense Institute, based in Alexandria, Va. In 1987 the DIA listed the institute among several organizations that "concocted" sightings of Americans in Southeast Asia as part of their fund-raising efforts.

MIA families often take reported sightings seriously not only out of their desperate desire to believe but also because they do not accept the government's word as final. The Pentagon's bureaucratic bumbling, secretiveness and mixed signals have led some families to feel there is a conspiracy to conceal the truth. To try to dispel that fog, a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee will soon investigate whether there is truth in any of the sightings reports and why the Pentagon seems so unresponsive.