Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW MIA Myth in America. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by John Corry

SOMEDAY, in the year 2015, say, the State Department will issue a report very much like the one it issued two years ago, officially recognizing that a number of American war prisoners had once remained captive in a foreign land after the shooting had stopped, even though the enemy refused to admit it. The report two years ago was about the Korean War; the new one, of course, will be about Vietnam. We will close a chapter of history, although by then it is unlikely many people will still care.

That American POWs and MIAs remained in Southeast Asia after they supposedly had all been repatriated in Operation Homecoming in 1973 is no longer open to debate. North Vietnam lied in 1973, just as North Korea and the Soviet Union had lied twenty years earlier. The unresolved question is whether any of the Vietnam MIAs are still alive. Susan Katz Keating insists they are all dead. She once believed there were live MIAs, but too many people deceived her.

Mrs. Keating says that charlatans and frauds perpetuate the MIA issue, mostly to line their own pockets. MIA family members are easy prey. Desperate to learn the fates of sons, husbands, and fathers, they succumb to tricksters who peddle bogus intelligence reports, fake photographs, and imaginative rumors. Prisoners of Hope begins with the sad story of Marian Shelton, who committed suicide after years of searching for her husband, a pilot shot down over Laos.

Mrs. Keating confesses that she once succumbed, too. As a young reporter at the Washington Times in the 1980s, she was obsessed by the idea that MIAs were still being held in Vietnam. As she forthrightly admits, she thought she might win a Pulitzer Prize if she could prove the existence of live MIAs. Disillusionment set in when she became aware of the tricksters.

Perhaps the best known was James "Bo" Gritz, a former Special Forces officer, who organized four missions to Southeast Asia to rescue American prisoners. He found none. Jack Bailey, a retired Air Force officer, acquired a rusted old ship, and then sent out fundraising letters saying he wanted to save boat people from China Sea pirates. In 1991, he turned up a photograph of an American serviceman supposedly held captive in Laos. The photograph was widely publicized, but it turned out to show not an American serviceman but a German smuggler.

Gritz, Bailey, and those like them are independent entrepreneurs, running their one-man shows with guile and flamboyance. Mrs. Keating is right to expose them. Others in the MIA scam, she says, are equally reprehensible, although outwardly more respectable. She calls them the "grey flannel Rambos": Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire; Eugene "Red" McDaniel, a retired Naval officer, who was a POW for six years himself; and John LeBoutillier and Billy Hendon, two former Republican congressmen.

Smith, an amiable boob, according to Mrs. Keating, has "built his career on fanning the hopes of MIA families by telling them their loved ones might still be alive." Meanwhile, McDaniel, who runs the American Defense Institute, "has made greater gains in fundraising than in learning the truth about MIAs." LeBoutillier has found his "niche in POW activism," although he is now no more than a mere "telephone solicitor." Undeterred by his narrow escape from prosecution for a misguided attempt to arm Laotian mercenaries, he has raised funds for new MIA ventures.

And Hendon, Mrs. Keating claims, is the "greatest troublemaker" of all, whose "imagination and stamina far outshine that of his fellows."

When Mrs. Keating first talked to Hendon, in 1985, she says, he promised to let her in on "the next Watergate." This turned out to be a report that three MIAs were on their way out of Laos. But they never appeared, and in the days to come, Mrs. Keating writes, Hendon forgot all about them. He did go on, though, courting reporters (including Mrs. Keating), badgering government officials, and apparently promising more than he could ever deliver.

Prisoners of Hope pays the grey flannel Rambos back. They are depicted as either fools or knaves, motivated only by self-interest. The possibility that they might actually believe in their cause simply never arises. Mrs. Keating gives not an inch, and it is obvious she is on a mission: to prove the MIAs are all dead.

Mrs. Keating, however, is extraordinarily selective in her reporting. She notes, for example, that the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs concluded in 1992 that no Americans had been willfully abandoned in Southeast Asia, but she declines to mention the finding of the committee's intelligence investigators. The investigators, who, for technical reasons, worked with intelligence reports that extended only through 1989, found "that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989."

What Mrs. Keating cannot explain she ignores. Prisoners of Hope is porous. The grey flannel Rambos have always insisted that we left hundreds of men in Vietnam and not merely the handful of men we now unofficially acknowledge we left in Laos. Their case rests on the not implausible assumption that at least some may still be alive. But Mrs. Keating declines to discuss numbers. If she did, it would weaken her argument.