by John Kerry
For years, slivers of information had been collected by all of America’s intelligence agencies, particularly the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, alleging sightings of an American still in captivity. On flagpoles all across America, the black POW/MIA flag still flew right under or beside Old Glory as a reminder to all Americans of a duty not to forget.
The right wing of American politics was deeply suspicious of our intelligence gathering on this subject. Many of the strongest advocates believed that at least the CIA and DIA had been engaged in a cover-up ever since the agreement of 1973 in order to protect the decisions made by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in their haste to be done with Vietnam. Secretary of State Kissinger never negotiated for those who were last known alive or missing in and over Laos and Cambodia.
The reason my staff was so concerned about my taking this on was the difficulty of disproving a negative. Twenty to twenty-five years later, it would be a near impossible task to satisfactorily disprove a “last seen alive” report of as many years ago. But John and I believed that with an exhaustive inquiry, one that delved into the traditional oral history maintained in provincial “history houses” in Vietnam, interviewed old soldiers, followed through on the last reports, dug up supposed burial sites—if we did all that was humanly possible, we could persuade the majority of people of our conclusion and provide the basis for proving to the families the good faith efforts of their government. Clearly that was the only way to bring some measure of closure to individual families and to America.
We began a series of hearings, some very straightforward, some controversial. All the bases needed to be covered. To convince those who believed in a conspiracy to cover up the knowing, willful abandonment of live captives, it was critical that we bring in players who had made key decisions during that period of time. Just getting agreement on witnesses was difficult. Every decision was second-guessed by the outside advocacy groups who were perfectly prepared to label the committee a continuation of the cover-up. Many of these groups were led by sincere families of the missing, families whose lives had been frozen in amber since the war. But other groups were schemers and charlatans profiting from the perception that Americans might still be alive. They were glorified direct-mail fund-raising operations filling their pockets at the POW/MIA families’ expense. Ted Sampley was a self-appointed POW activist who sold T-shirts, flags and newsletters on the Mall, a stone’s throw from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He profited grossly from the myth that prisoners were still being held in tiger cages in Vietnam. As McCain and I worked painstakingly to bring the facts and the truth to families who had waited twenty years for any word, Sampley was at work ignoring the evidence and purposely promoting lies. After all, the truth would cut into his business. He launched a campaign to label John McCain the “Manchurian candidate.” He publicly accused John of having been brainwashed into betraying his fellow POWs. I’d watch the veins in John’s neck bulge every time Sampley would interrupt one of our hearings. I’d reach over and tap his forearm before I banged my gavel and asked for order in the hearing room. Once, John’s chief of staff, Mark Salter, got into a fistfight with Sampley and clipped him pretty good. Sampley went to jail for assault. I liked Mark before that but even more afterward.
John McCain and I bent over backward to be exhaustive in the witnesses as well as in the evaluation of the paper trail going back to the war. Thousands of documents from the DIA and the CIA were declassified. In one single day we released the largest dump of classified documents at one time ever. We felt we needed to overwhelm people with transparency and we did. It was difficult for anyone to assert we were hiding something, which was exactly what we wanted.
My committee assignment was cause for my first-ever trip to Moscow. It was the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Things had not yet sorted out. I arrived in the dead of winter to the bitter cold of a Moscow in disarray. My mission was to pursue the evidence regarding rumors of American pilots having been transferred from Vietnam to Moscow for interrogation during the Vietnam War. Fortunately for us, perestroika worked in our favor, breaking some of the barriers to the exchange of information. I was following up on specific reports we had of these interrogations.
I visited Russia’s equivalent of the State Department. I was brought to a large, currently vacant office to wait for my meeting. Seven phones sat on one desk. I thought, whoever works here must be someone very important. I asked our ambassador why there were so many phones. The answer stunned me: Soviet technology couldn’t link all the lines into one phone. And these were the guys who were going to march across Europe?
Along with a minder and a bureaucrat from the office, I made my way down into the bowels of KGB headquarters underneath Lubyanka Square, the former site of the famous statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. In August 1991, when the citizens of Moscow fought back against the counterrevolution and won, perhaps twenty thousand people gathered to celebrate their freedom by removing Dzerzhinsky’s statue. One of their labor leaders said, “We are cleaning away the waste from our lives.” It was fascinating to visit this site where people had courageously stood up against a vastly superior force to reassert their thirst for freedom.
I may have been the first American ever to walk down into the deep recesses of the KGB records. There were endless long corridors with wire mesh screening protecting reams of files sitting on shelves and desks, collecting dust. I wondered about each individual file and the person or persons it represented. How many moments of horror—sheer terror—were collected in those files? I wished I had a hundred researchers and permission to go through them all. I was also surprised by how haphazard and antiquated it all appeared—no visible order or system, just piles of “stuff” representing some of the worst of human behavior stuck away in a dustbin of history.
The next day I was informed I would be met by a car that would take me to meet with Yevgeny Primakov. He had previously been an advisor on Mikhail Gorbachev’s Presidential Council and was tapped to transform the KGB into the new intelligence service called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, which it remains today. In truth, he preserved most of the existing KGB apparatus. That drive was harrowing. The early Moscow night had descended on us. We were careening along the narrow roads outside Moscow, going to some compound in the country. It was snowing like crazy. I had visions of us barreling off the road, crashing into trees or sliding into a river.
Eventually, we arrived at the imposing gate of a secluded compound. I had no idea which direction we had driven or where we had wound up. The gates opened. We drove in, passed some random dachas and arrived finally at one where the car stopped in front of a door. I got out, walked up to the door as it opened, and Primakov stood there to welcome me. I said hello, walked in and quickly asked him, “Have any Americans ever been out here before?” Without missing a beat, he said, “Not voluntarily!”
That was precisely what I had come to talk about, but his answer was merely humorous. We talked at length about the Soviet Union’s support for the Vietnamese and their intelligence gathering at the time. Clearly this was a conversation that was inconceivable only months earlier. I had no reason to expect revelations or confessions, but I did want to see if we could establish a process where some of the files I had viewed cursorily at the headquarters could actually be examined. Our committee also possessed documents from that period that we wanted to discuss with them to help resolve some issues. He agreed, and we worked together quite constructively going forward. For a Cold War kid, what a long, strange trip that was.
We also began a series of visits to Vietnam that were essential to achieving our goal. A lot of the higher-ups in Vietnam thought we were either crazy or trumping up the POW/MIA issue in order to delay lifting the embargo and avoid the thorny issue of normalization. The Vietnamese themselves had well over a million men and women unaccounted for or missing. Our perceived obsession with allegedly alive or unaccounted for American captive
s seemed contrived to them, particularly when measured against their losses. My job was to build trust, to persuade them of the authenticity of this issue. Over more than twenty trips to Vietnam, through several foreign ministers, party chairmen, presidents and prime ministers of Vietnam, I built up a reputation as an honest broker. I believe I managed to convince Vietnamese officials of the sincerity of our inquiry and the importance of this inquiry to the task of changing the perception of Vietnam, which of course was essential to changing the policy.
Nguyen Co Thach, the first foreign minister I dealt with, and the father of Vietnam’s current foreign minister, believed in this initiative. He made a huge difference in helping us build credibility. He understood America. More than that, he was sensitive himself to the deeply held concern of American families. His early intervention was a key step forward in this endeavor, as was the commitment of the president, prime minister and chairman of the Communist Party. These leaders all put their reputations on the line to push reluctant soldiers, jailers, government officials, historians and citizens to embrace the task. On one occasion, when I was talking with Party chairman Doi Moi, himself a veteran of the war, trying to emphasize the importance of putting this issue to rest, as if to convince me of the sincerity of his commitment, he stood up, pulled up his shirt and showed me several massive scars he bore from wounds in the war. He said to me, “We both have great losses and have suffered greatly. We will get this done and we are committed to help make it happen.” I was impressed and taken aback at the same time. I never expected to be standing in the reception hall of the Presidential Palace with the powerful chairman of the party and have him bare his stomach and back to show me the price he paid in the war. It was a dramatic, moving, spontaneous moment.
As chairman of the select committee, I traveled alone to Vietnam many times to advance the inquiry. On a number of occasions, many of my colleagues joined me. Always these trips were complicated but fascinating. In many ways it’s hard to describe the range of emotions I went through. On the first visits it was naturally bizarre for me to be reliving the smells, the sounds of motorbikes, the bustle of the markets, the joy and enthusiasm of the children, the sight of sampans plying the muddy brown rivers, the earthen scars on battlefields, the still-damaged buildings and the bomb craters that had grown over with new green but unmistakably reflected the shapes of the bombs themselves. It is hard to convey how weird it was to be in Hanoi, sitting in the presidential reception hall under a giant bust of Ho Chi Minh, with the president of Vietnam or chairman of the Communist Party, trying to persuade him that we needed to talk with his top generals, enter his history houses, fly helicopters into hamlets and possibly, without prior notice, drop from the sky to determine if Americans were secretly being held in one village or another. But that’s exactly what we did.
The Vietnamese deserve enormous credit for letting us do all that we did. Helicopters make an unmistakable sound with the whirr of the rotors. It defined air cover, medevac, mail, lift into battle, lift home. It was the sound of the war, but not just for us. For the Vietnamese, that sound was reminiscent of the war not so many years in the past. It had so often been the sound of impending death and destruction. It had so often signaled the arrival of a search and destroy mission, the imminent deployment of troops who would descend into a village to seek out the enemy. Sometimes, with luck, it brought help or safety, but it was the unmistakable and distinctive sound of the Vietnam War. Now we were asking the government of Vietnam to allow us again to descend in helicopters, without notice, into hamlets where the memories of these machines were fresh and raw with emotion. It was a lot to ask, but it was the only way to convince doubters that the search was real, that we were following up on a live sighting report without letting the Vietnamese know ahead of time where we were going so they could “move the prisoner.”
On one occasion, I was going to a prison that was the subject of supposed sightings. A crew from ABC television and a reporter from the New York Times were with us to observe the spontaneity of the spot check. This occurred toward the end of the committee’s work. A lot hung on the ability to conduct a spontaneous spot check on a number of prisons. This was one of the most notorious. We arrived at the gate only to be refused entrance. I was shocked because we had been told we would be cleared at whatever prison we went to when we notified the headquarters we were there. Apparently, the district commander had not yet given the instructions to let us in. I could envision the headlines in the Times and the story on TV—“Vietnamese Refuse POW/MIA Committee Entrance at Suspect Prison.” It would confirm the worst suspicions. It could undo months of painstaking work. I stepped away from the group to call the foreign minister. In no uncertain terms, I told him that unless we got immediate access to this prison he and the government risked blowing up months of work. Five minutes later the commander of the prison politely let us in and apologized that he hadn’t been instructed earlier to do so. Despite a moment when I had feared that our mission would be frustrated, that day could not have worked out better, because this incident proved that the visits were unannounced and spontaneous. The fact that the commander did not know we were coming was positive evidence of no collusion on anyone’s part. We walked through the whole prison, inspecting walls for scratched messages as well as interviewing prisoners. We found nothing indicating foreigners had been held there at all.
This kind of drama played out several times, but none more surreal than at the very end of the committee’s work, when Senator Bob Smith insisted that we had to chase down allegations that there were tunnels in which Americans were being held under the tomb of Ho Chi Minh. Imagine—we, the United States of America, were going to tell the Vietnamese leaders we had to inspect Ho Chi Minh’s tomb because we had information there might be prisoners held there. Only the “we” in this case was me. I was going to have to tell them this. As fanciful as it sounds, this rumor persisted in the United States. It had been circulated among the most passionate of the believers, so it had to be dealt with in order to secure the sign-off of all senators on our report.
To make this happen I knew would take every ounce of credibility and persuasion I could summon. I arranged to meet with the president of Vietnam and the chairman of the party. They were the only two people who could possibly make an inspection of the underground beneath Ho’s final resting place available to the prying eyes of Americans. I departed the Senate on a Thursday night, flew commercially to Bangkok, picked up a military flight to Hanoi, where I met with the president and chairman separately. I explained how this was really the last hurdle in a long journey. All of us had invested so much in trying to resolve the POW/MIA issue so we could move on and change the relationship between our countries. I told them we would not say anything about the visit publicly until perhaps years in the future, but certainly in no way would they be embarrassed by an early public disclosure. I also told them that, as difficult as this decision was for them, without it they would inadvertently give credence to the allegation that they were hiding something. I was personally squirming at having to ask for this but I knew it was critical to completing our task.
I was on the ground in Hanoi for less than twelve hours before I headed back to Washington. At the end of the weekend I was back in the Senate, where I related to Bob that he and I would be going under Ho’s tomb together to complete the mission. We returned to Vietnam for the inspection. At four in the morning or so, with minimal possibility of exposure, well out of sight of the prying eyes of onlookers, we met a couple of uniformed guards who took us down a set of stairs on the edge of the square dedicated to the tomb. We walked through a long corridor, then came to the spaces below the square where Ho Chi Minh’s remains lay in state encased in a glass viewing casket. There we were, two U.S. senators, walking around amid a mass of tubes, compressors and pumps, with weird, pulsating, gurgling sounds reverberating through the lower bowels of the tomb. Bob was opening various doors to look behind them and make sure there were no hidden passageways or cham
bers. I was pinching myself to make sure this was really happening. True to our word, Bob and I have never said much about this underground journey in Hanoi. It put an exclamation point on the lengths the Vietnamese went to, to help us dispel rumors and conspiracy theories. It was also, I think, an immense credit to our committee for seeing the job through and to Bob Smith for being true to his beliefs and loyal to those who counted on him. In the end, our committee did what so many predicted was impossible: we arrived at a unanimous conclusion, supported by all twelve senators, bringing much-needed closure to so many families who had gone decades living with nothing but question marks.
Over the next years, many who had served on our committee, Republican and Democratic administrations, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, forensic experts, on-the-ground American military personnel and the Vietnamese, all coordinated and worked, sometimes at risk of life, to get answers to any lingering questions. No country in history, in all of warfare, has ever done as much to implement an exhaustive accounting of all the missing and captured in a war. The American people can be proud of what our teams accomplished and continue to accomplish in this endeavor. Most Americans are simply unaware that even today, we have American military personnel who continue the search in Vietnam. We still dig up the crash sites of a C-130 or Phantom jet. We still climb to remote mountaintops and excavate the earth in a rice paddy or village. On one visit to Vietnam, I was taken out to a lush green field near a small farm. There, a complex scaffold of wood had been built leading down a ramp into the excavated area of a downed C-130 that had crashed and never been recovered. I walked into the area and had an eerie feeling that I was literally walking into the crew’s resting place, their grave. God had buried them in the very place they had died, but we were going to finally bring them home. I wondered about the circumstances of their loss, whether they were killed before impact or whether there was time for terror or panic as they plummeted to earth. Had anyone survived for a while? Did the plane hit with such impact that it drove itself twenty feet below the surface we were walking on? Inside the excavation, the troops working painstakingly to sift the earth and scrape away time, explaining to me how they managed their own emotions and performed the difficult task of recovering the fragments of what was once a vibrant, determined team of young Americans at war.