SECRETS OF THE MUSEUM

By DOUGLAS WALLER

On a Saturday morning in April 1992, Theodore G. Schweitzer powered up his optical scanning machine in a corner room of Hanoi's Central Military Museum. Vietnamese officials had approved his use of the scanner to copy documents for a book he was writing on the museum's war archives. Schweitzer had convinced them that he was a private American researcher, which was part of the truth. The part he left out was that he was also working for U.S. intelligence.

A museum curator handed Schweitzer a faded red ledger. Its 208 pages contained a surprise: the index for a vast archive of documents, photos and military artifacts concerning every American taken, dead or alive, during the Vietnam War. The ``Red Book,'' as it was called by the Vietnamese, turned out to be the key to discovering the fate of some of the 2,211 service members the U.S. listed as missing in action in Indochina. Schweitzer worked quickly to scan the pages, storing the images on a thin magnetic tape in his machine. Back at his hotel, he telexed a U.S. intelligence officer in Bangkok that he had found a ``very beautiful bird with many beautiful feathers,'' code words signaling he had the index. Schweitzer made two copies of the original tape. He wound one into a tight spool the size of a coin and inserted it into a slit cut into his sneakers; he transferred the other onto an audio cassette and slipped it into his Walkman. Inspectors at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport did not discover either tape before Schweitzer boarded a flight to Bangkok. The operation, code named ``Swamp Ranger,'' was a success.

Vietnam and the U.S. are about to open liaison offices in each other's capitals, another step toward healing the wounds of a war fought more than two decades ago. In a new book, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, author Malcolm McConnell recounts how Schweitzer helped speed that process--and how the former librarian for an international school in Bangkok became a covert U.S. operative who helped break the diplomatic logjam over the missing service members. The U.S. Defense Department had assumed all along that Hanoi was keeping detailed records on captured U.S. soldiers, though Vietnamese officials insisted that most of the archives had been destroyed by termites. The Red Book information Schweitzer sneaked out provided proof that Hanoi had been lying. ``He opened the door for us,'' Colonel Joseph Schlatter of the Pentagon's office for prisoners of war told Time. ``He gave us the material to go to the Vietnamese and lay out the facts they had been denying for some time.''

Schweitzer, who collaborated with McConnell on the book, stumbled into being an intelligence operative. From his librarian's job he moved to the U.N., serving as a relief official in Indochina until 1983, when he organized a nonprofit charity to aid Vietnamese boat people. Six years later, during a trip to Hanoi to arrange a hospital visit, he asked his Vietnamese hosts on a whim if he could tour the Central Military Museum, which housed the Defense Ministry's war artifacts. The Vietnamese agreed, permitting him to browse through displays of uniforms and equipment taken from members of the U.S. Air Force and even to photograph documents. During a return visit by Schweitzer six months later, the museum's director, Senior Colonel Pham Duc Dai, made a startling revelation: the museum was the repository for records on all the Americans, living or dead, who had fallen into North Vietnamese hands. ``All the records, Colonel?'' Schweitzer asked, flabbergasted. ``We have everything,'' the colonel replied and handed Schweitzer the Red Book. Later, Colonel Dai offered something just as astonishing: permission to photograph and copy any material in the museum that would help Schweitzer write a book on its collection.

But Schweitzer could find no American publisher willing to finance the research project. The Pentagon, weary of con artists peddling phony stories of U.S. prisoners still said to be alive in Southeast Asia, at first brushed him off. Schweitzer finally reached Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Carl Ford, who recognized that the Vietnamese were prepared to hand over something of a treasure trove.

Pentagon officials believe the Vietnamese wanted to break the impasse with Washington over the missing service members in order to get the U.S. to lift its trade embargo but had backed themselves into a corner with their earlier declarations that no prisoner records existed. McConnell suggests that Hanoi needed an unofficial way to turn over the material and saw Schweitzer as a ``face-saving conduit.''

At Ford's urging, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency provided Schweitzer with the optical scanner. One of its case officers gave him a hurry-up course in spy craft: Schweitzer learned emergency codes and signals and roamed northern Virginia shopping malls, practicing how to shake off a tail and how to retrieve messages from dead drops. Cover stories were rehearsed in case he was compromised.

Upon his return to Hanoi, operation ``Swamp Ranger'' was almost blown before it started. A Pentagon official, in the capital as part of an official POW task force, had just presented the Foreign Ministry with photographs of documents in the Central Military Museum and ``demanded that we provide everything,'' a furious Colonel Dai told Schweitzer. The photos had been taken by Schweitzer and turned over to the Pentagon. The task-force members were unaware of Schweitzer's secret mission, McConnell writes. ``How did American intelligence get copies of your pictures?'' Colonel Dai demanded, suspecting that Schweitzer was a spy. After four days of grilling by the Vietnamese, Schweitzer evidently convinced his interrogators that his publisher must have been careless in handling the photographs. Defense Department officials say the Vietnamese government still suspected that Schweitzer worked for the Pentagon but allowed him to begin scanning the records anyway.

U.S. officials later used Schweitzer's documents and photos to force Hanoi to allow a Defense Department team to search the entire prisoner archive. Last February President Clinton lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam; since then more than 70 U.S. companies have opened offices there. ``Relations were in the Ice Age only five years ago, and now the two sides are normalizing,'' Schweitzer told Time.

Pentagon officials suspect that Hanoi is still holding back what one Vietnamese officer described to Schweitzer as its ``darkest secrets''--records on some Americans who were killed or tortured to death while in captivity. Yet, in the 212 years since Schweitzer was first granted access, Vietnam has turned over more documents than in the previous 19 years.

Those records confirm what U.S. officials suspected: no prisoners are still alive. Some defense aides complained that Schweitzer was an amateur trying to play spy, whose find did not add much to what the Pentagon already knew about the missing. Of the 2,211 men listed as MIA, the U.S. has now firmly concluded that 2,156 are dead. Schlatter says the remaining 55 will likely be ruled dead as investigators collect more evidence. Even if that happens, a few Americans will remain unsatisfied. ``For some POW families, this issue will never be laid to rest,'' says Frances Zwenig, vice president of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council. Even access to all of Hanoi's archives is not likely to change that.

With reporting by FRANK GIBNEY JR./HANOI