Associate
- Joined
- 20 Dec 2008
- Posts
- 1,380
This 600 page book is the encyclopedia on the Vietnam POW issue. I bought it used on Amazon for about £7 and it is full of information that I would have had to spent weeks myself researching and most likely meant travelling to America, so, worth a read then.
It starts off discussing Communist tactics during the Bay of Pigs invasion and how the Communists were successful in trading prisoners for materials. It makes the point that the Vietnamese government were watching very carefully at this situation. At the time, American advisers were being sent to aid the South. When it became evident that American forces were building up, the Communist regime handed out leaflets informing citizens to take any American prisoners alive and that any harm brought to an unprocessed American prisoner would be met with punishment, any killing of an American who could be captured would be met with execution. Prisoners were to be handed to authorities straight away. It would be later said by witnesses that prison guards would say one American is worth 5 factories. This was the mindset of the Norths regime.
The book then provides reports from spies within Hanoi reporting sightings of U.S POWs being placed in strategic positions around the City in plain sight, being used as Human shields to prevent infrastructure being bombed. All throughout the war the CIA knew exactly where POWs were being held in and around Hanoi, what factories, power plants, bridges. This was all documented and backed up by multiple eye witnesses and spies working for the U.S. In 1973 after Operation Homecoming which supposedly freed all POWs being held, a total number of 597, all prisoners were debriefed. The former POWs wrote personal histories during their debrief and this is where the inconsistencies come in. Not one of the released POWs was at the locations the CIA knew POWs were being used as Human shields. Previously before Operation Homecoming various agencies that dealt with the issue were shocked at the POW list received from the Hanoi government which was dramatically smaller than those of the U.S governments POW list.. but this was the icing on the cake.
Throughout the war all the way up into the 1990's, reports came in from refugees of live sightings. The witnesses range from poor working people to military and government officials who escaped from Vietnam to even foreign businessmen. All witness testimony was dismissed by U.S government officials as fabrication. The witnesses were either confused, drug addicts, crazy, Communist disinformation, spies or rapists according to the U.S agencies that interrogated the refugees. Every single one. A lot of the refugees had 2-3 polygraph tests and passed 100% each time but this was dismissed. " There was a mindset to debunk " it says in the book. A number of refugees offered to go back and take pictures or record footage of the POW camps they saw but the U.S government did not allow them to do that. So here we have people who have been in Communist re-education camps for 10 years offering to go back and risk being put back into jail... and the U.S government says no and says they're confused about what they saw. Yeah right.
Operation Pocket Change
A refugee report came in and like many of the others it talked about witnessing American POWs in captivity. This particular report was very detailed, it had sketches of the camp, how the find it and the source even said the area is perfect for launching a raid as it had lots of open ground to land helicopters. U.S satellites found the camp in the exact location where the source told them. President Reagan personally approved the mission titled Operation Pocket Change. The next step was to launch reconnaissance. Delta Force were called up but the CIA REFUSED to go along with the operation unless they were the ones doing the recon. The CIA wanted to use newly trained Asian men to do the recon instead of Delta Force. Lt. Col. Lewis H. Burruss was chosen to lead the assault force. Burruss was ****ed that he could not use Rangers to recon backed up by a heavy reaction unit to extract the Delta recon team in case it got into trouble. Burruss has no option but to agree with the CIAs terms. Mean while Delta Force built an exact replica of the camp on Tinian Island in the Pacific to train on.
The CIA's thirteen-man team made up of indigenous personnel was being trained and equipped in Thailand. The all-Asian reconnaissance team crossed the Mekong in late March and headed on foot to the POW camp. It immediately ran into trouble in crossing the 40-mile distance to Nammarath. While the Team was en route through central Laos during April a radio transmission was picked up from the location of the camp. Guards were complaining to each other about bad conditions at the camp. Complaining of lack of female companionship and it's quoted " even the Americans in the long building receive better food than we do ". The team reached the camp in early May. After establishing a base and scouting the area, the two team leaders left the camp and approached within several hundred metres of the camp and began taking pictures. In the crucial inner compound , the site of the two long windowless buildings, they observed and photographed several guards, several Asian prisoners, and one tall dark-haired prisoner whom they believed could have been Caucasian. They also observed food and water being brought into the long buildings and waste buckets being taken out. After observing the compound for 2 hours the two team leaders headed back to base camp and proceeded to head back to Thailand.
After hearing statements from both team leaders about one possible Caucasian sighting in the inner compound and the food and water being brought into the long buildings, the CIA determined another recon mission should be launched this time with at least one American. On May 19 CIA officials in Thailand cabled their superiors in Langley seeking approval for a second recon mission. Included in the request was the specific statement that the two team leaders claimed to have seen a tall dark-haired person who could have been Caucasian.
In a move that would later fuel charges of conspiracy and cover-up, the information on the sightings of the possible Caucasian prisoner was initially held back from the Pentagon. When asked later by the Senate investigators why this had occurred, William G. Graver, a veteran CIA officer who at the time was in his fifth year as chief of the agency's East Asia Division at CIA headquarters, said the information was withheld because CIA officials "did not want to put gasoline on the issue".
On May 21, two days after the CIA headquarters personnel had received the crucial information about the sighting of the possible Caucasian prisoner, a banner headline reading "Mercenaries Sent to Laos Seeking MIAs" appeared at the top of the front page of The Washington Post. First reporting that "the United States financed and helped train a secret force of mercenaries who went into Laos earlier this month to determine if Americans were imprisoned in a jungle camp there, as covert overflights by satellites and sly planes had suggested", the article then declared the secret force "returned a few days ago without any evidence that Americans were in the camp, chilling the hopes that the earlier photographic intelligence had raised in the minds of some Pentagon officials.". Continuing, the article told how members of the team had been issued cameras to take pictures of the camp's inhabitants, but now upon their return "photo interpreters had scrutinized all the photography and concluded that there were no Americans in the jungle camp.".
Any chance that a second team would return was gone. At a meeting held at the Pentagon on the morning the article appeared in the Post, the brass were angry "the Chairman wants to know who leaked this," one general declared. "Find the SOB," demanded another. By the time the meeting ended it was official: Operation Pocket Change, was history.
So they had plausible deniability, because they didn't use American troops for recon they could say it was a group of Mercenaries and make it look less serious. The fact the recon team spent only 2 hours at the camp is ridiculous.
There's so much information in the book I can't write it all down here but another incident that caught my attention was the fact over 20 U.S congressmen pledged $100,000 each to combine a reward sum of $2.4 million as a reward for anyone who could get a U.S prisoner out ALIVE. A Thai businessmen heard about the reward and came forward with a name of a POW, by law as someone had reported the POW alive it has to be announced to the family and it was. However, U.S government officials told the Thai businessmen there was no reward and to stop looking for POWs. This was announced by a bureaucrat at a POW family convention in front of family members including those of the soldier named by the Thai citizen. This was met with furious anger from the families and eventually he was shouted and booed off the platform but not before saying " I'm just doing my job ". His boss came onto the stage and said the same thing.
That's the problem, everyone's just doing their job. People say stuff like ' how could thousands of people be implemented in such big conspiracies ' well most people don't even know what the top brass are doing and just follow orders. They were told by their superiors no POWs exist and they parroted that for 35 years without question. In the book you'll see familiar names like John McCain, John Kerry, BUSH, Powell, all these rogues that have betrayed the citizens of their country many times over who are now in positions of wealth and power.
Even to this day the Vietnamese keep asking for their repatriation money, their schools, factories, hospitals that were promised in the Paris Peace Accords in return for POWs and the money Nixon promised in a personal letter he wrote. The Vietnamese, Laos and Cambodian governments refuse to admit they have prisoners but say if they receive their repatriation demands the POW question will be 'solved'. They repeat this throughout negotiations that they don't have prisoners but some may be alive in the wilderness of their country and that they would be found once the demands are met.
I couldn't help but get so frustrated while reading this book. Bureaucrats using technicalities to avoid looking into witness claims, dismissing people as crazy or confused to avoid having to validate their claims. Over 1200 live sightings have been received and all dismissed as fabrication and lies without any proof to back it up. On top of that you have the usual suspects running the show. In my mind there's no doubt it was a cover-up, seeing the administration squirm time after time at the thought of finding live POWs, the more they lied the less chance a POW was going to come out alive. If they did then I believe complete faith in government would be lost as the lie has lasted through so many administrations for both political parties.
I highly recommend this book