Officials Dispute Perot’s Claims About POWs

WASHINGTON — Defending their handling of the Pentagon’s efforts to account for servicemen missing from the Vietnam War, several former Reagan Administration officials took issue Wednesday with claims made by Texas billionaire Ross Perot that they suppressed information about POWs who might still be alive in Indochina.

Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs a day after an appearance by Perot, the officials also disputed Perot’s account of his involvement in the POW issue during the Reagan Administration. They portrayed his efforts as “counterproductive” to attempts under way at the time to open negotiations with the Vietnamese.

Perot, who asserts that Washington has “covered up” evidence of POWs being in held in Vietnam and Laos, evidently anticipated the criticism when he testified Tuesday. Without identifying them by name, he complained that Bush and Reagan administration officials were trying to “rewrite history” by mischaracterizing his efforts in order to discredit his presidential candidacy, which ended last month before he had officially entered the race.

He also described a visit he paid to Vietnam in 1987 and the key role he believes he played, at Washington’s behest, in persuading the Vietnamese to open negotiations with Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., who earlier that year had been chosen by President Reagan to lead a delegation to Hanoi to seek its cooperation in the effort to account for missing servicemen.

But two former officials, National Security Council staffer Richard Childress and White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker, disputed Perot’s recollection of those events, suggesting that they were self-serving and even harmful to the delicate diplomacy being conducted with the Vietnamese to seek a better accounting of the 2,266 servicemen still listed as missing from the war.

Baker indicated that the Reagan Administration sought to discourage Perot from making the trip to Vietnam in the spring of 1987 and told him that, if he did go, he would be doing so “as a private citizen.”

Childress said that, despite these admonitions, Perot confused the Vietnamese by engaging them in “broad-ranging discussions” about their “economic and political goals,” which misled them into believing that they could link cooperation on the POW/MIA issue to reconstruction aid from the United States.

Lt. Gen. Leonard H. Perroots, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is in charge of the effort to account for missing servicemen, sharply denied another of Perot’s assertions--that, by the late 1980s, refugees escaping from Vietnam were threatened with being sent back if they offered information to U.S. officials about American POWs still being held in Vietnam or Laos.

Perroots said just the opposite was the case--refugees arriving at Asian resettlement camps knew “they could go to the head of the line and get special treatment” if they came forward with information about missing Americans.

In response to questioning, Perroots and Childress agreed that some POWs were probably left behind when the United States withdrew, but they said they knew of no evidence that any were still being held in captivity.