An Ugly Secret Unearthed by John McCain’s Primary Opponent

Senator John McCain’s primary opponent, J.D. Hayworth, is talking the 2008 Republican nominees’ many efforts to cover up the fact that the United States left hundreds of POWs behind in North Vietnamese hands. Tea Baggers are wrong about many things, but Hayworth is right on target about the abandonment of those American soldiers and McCain’s sordid role in the cover-up.

The United States signed a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese in Paris on January 27, 1973. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger promised the North Vietnamese $3.25 billion in reconstruction funds if they returned all of our POWs. At one point, the North Vietnamese said they had 368 captives, but they refused to provide a list. Kissinger signed anyhow. Then the North Vietnamese released 591 Americans, including John McCain. The Vietnamese retained the rest as bargaining chips to make sure they got their reparations money. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they held on to French captives until France paid reparations.

On February 2, 1973, President Richard Nixon wrote to Premier Pham Van Dong that we knew for certain that they held at least 317 Americans in Laos, and he complained that they had only released 10. Yet, Nixon told the public that all of the POWs had been released.

Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew that almost all of the known captives in Laos had not been returned and he said in 1992 that he wanted to resume bombing the north but that Nixon would not go along. He then sent a “back-channel” message about this to ranking officers, saying “Nixon and Kissinger are at it again.”

Ignored Evidence

There were sightings of prisoners and some electronic messages were received. The National Security Administration had a listening post in Saigon until 1975, when it fell. Thereafter, we relied upon the Thai to intercept electronic messages. They passed on much evidence about the POWS, but the authorities in Washington rejected it all because it came from a “third party.” On December 27, 1980, the Thais intercepted a North Vietnamese message that said that American prisoners were being relocated via air from a camp at Attopeu, Laos. Four days later, the CIA Bangkok station reported to Langley about this relocation and about other camps in Laos.

In early, 1981, the Vietnamese told the Reagan administration that it would return the remaining prisoners for $4 billion dollars. Robert Syphrit, a Treasury Secret Service Agent, eventually said he heard the offer being discussed in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. At the time, the Secret Service officer was wiring some equipment and was stunned by what he heard. Present were President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, William Casey, Richard Allen, and some cabinet officers. Allen, then national security advisor, testified about the meeting behind closed doors on June 23, 1992. He later retracted his sworn testimony. Somehow journalist Robert Caldwell learned about the meeting and published an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune. He later recanted.


Two Secretaries of Defense, James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, admitted under oath and on television that the United States left men behind in Vietnam. There have been 1,600 first hand sightings, and many of these people passed lie detector tests. There 14, 000 second hand reports. Satellite photographs show symbols US aviators had been taught to use to identify themselves. An outside consultant was paid to look at all of the photographs, and he said they were just grass and rice formations. But Bob Taylor, a highly regarded Senate staff investigator said,” If grass can spell out people’s names and secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass.”

In 1981 and 1982, there were two planned rescue missions that were to be led by Delta Force Sgt. Major Eric Hanley. Both were aborted.

As time passed, both the United States government and Vietnam came to share a common policy of denying that there were any remaining U.S. prisoners in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese wanted to gain a place in the community of nations. Some speculated that by 1990 the hostages were probably executed.

McCain’s War with the POW/MIA People

Senator John McCain played the role of the Pentagon’s point man in denying that prisoners had been left behind. Having been a prisoner for five and a half years, he was the perfect figure to lead the effort to keep the lid on this story. Time and again, he was successful in blocking efforts to bring the surface vital pieces of the missing POW story. But who could believe that this hero was not interested in helping these prisoners and their grieving families?

McCain took to attacking POW/MIA advocates, saying they were perpetrators of fraud and profiteers. In the 1970s, Air Force Lt. General Eugene Tighe, once head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was the main uniformed soldier who defended the efforts of the POW-MIA families to learn what happened to the missing soldiers. McCain became Tighe’s bitter enemy, and the general eventually went into retirement. Later, he attacked former Navy Captain Eugene “Red” McDaniel for drafting a letter against lifting the trade embargo on Vietnam. It was signed by fifty former POWs. Red McDaniel has been described as “one of the most tortured Americans in the history of war.” There seems to be no clear reason why McCain is so hostile to the POW/MIA advocates and opponents of Vietnam.

In 1990, at the urging of the families of the missing prisoners, Congress considered “The Truth Bill,” which McCain managed to kill. It was replaced in 1991 by the “McCain Bill, which did nothing to unseal records.

In August, 1991, the Senate Established a Select Committee to look into the problem. Senator John Kerry, who was deeply committed to normalizing relations with Vietnam, was chairman. Senator Bob Smith was vice-chairman, and Senator McCain – who had asked to be appointed chairman--was its driving force. The families demanded that records be unsealed, particularly those regarding a program called Pave Spike.

It involved dropping electronic motion sensors along the Ho Che Minh Trail. They had spikes on them and were supposed to stick in the ground. Their primary purpose was to alert Americans to enemy troop movements. However, they had another use. Americans on the ground could manually enter data, such as authentication numbers. Planes passing overhead would pickup the information from the devices. By 1974, twenty individual authentication numbers had been entered. There is no record that the committee looked into this.

McCain got into an argument with Dolores Alfond, the sister of a missing airman, woman who wanted the files de-classified. The senator, whose conduct was ugly and shocking, reduced her to tears. His approach was that anyone who disagreed with him impugned his honor and patriotism. Biu Tin, a former North Vietnamese colonel and interrogator of prisoners, appeared at the hearings to say that all the POWs had been sent home in 1973. Mc Cain hugged him. Bin Tin had also told an interviewer that McCain had never been tortured.

Ronald Reagan refused to talk to the Select Committee, and the panel never asked Presidents Nixon and Bush to appear. Vice Chairman Smith spoke to Henry Kissinger by telephone, and a footnote on page 91 of the report indicates that Kissinger said there was a time when Nixon considered bombing Vietnam to retrieve prisoners. Senator Mc Cain fought mightily to remove the note, but it remained. Buried in the report is the estimate that between 150 and 600 might retained by the Vietnamese. The official conclusion was that “a small number” could have been left behind. The Kerry committee essentially accept with little complaint the failure of the Pentagon and Langley to provide critical files. At the time, Richard Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Robert Gates was Director of the CIA.

Congress passed the Missing Personnel Act in 1996, but Mc Cain added an amendment that rendered it unenforceable. A group of about 15 POW/MIA supporters awaited McCain in the Russell Senate Office Building on June 20, 1996 to ask him to drop the amendment. When he realized who they were, his face reddened aqnd he exploded in anger, brushing aside a woman in a wheelchair. These folks thought he had assaulted the lady and filed charges with Capitol Police.

Bell Bell, former head of the Office of POW/MIA Affairs, relates how he was in Hanoi in 1993 with McCain and Ambassador Bill Peterson. Bell said that both Mc Cain and Peterson were very interested in reaching an agreement that POW records from the war never be made public.

Also in 1993, Stephen Morris, a Harvard researcher, found the transcript of a Hanoi politburo briefing in May, 1973. General Tran Van Quang reported that the army held 1,205 prisoners, and noted that they had only admitted to having 368. He said that more than that would be returned, but that a large number would be retained until the United States paid reparations. Since the Vietnamese returned 591, this would mean that they retained 614. The government of Vietnam said the document was a forgery, but it did not explain who produced it and was able to place it in the Soviet archives.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has a Special Office fir Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. Critics have long said that its function was to bury leads about what happened to our missing men. In 1990, Colonel Millard Peck asked to be made head of the office. He intended to what went on there and to see that all leads were thoroughly investigated. He resigned and retired on February 12, 1991, calling the office a “black hole” that was involved in “ a cover-up.” He said he was never really in control of the office and noted that officers who “rocked the boat quickly come to grief.”

What Can Be Learned from this Sad Story?

For decades, the mainstream press has ignored this story. Sydney Schanberg, the Pulitizer Prize winning journalist, has consistently followed it in his Newsday and in The Nation and American Conservative. The present piece is grounded in his hard work. He has written about his failures to interest other many other publications in this cause. He concludes that mainstream journalists are simply lazy. But more is involved. There is a clear pattern of ignoring stories and evidence that would anger the powers that be and the Right. The reader might look into what happened to the journalists who exposed the Iran/Contra Scandal to find examples.

This tale also underscores how people like John McCain own to the press for favorable treatment. His days as an irresponsible young pilot wrecking planes and possibly causing a massive carrier fire have not been carefully explored. Though he was the key player in the Keating Five Scandal, an adoring press helped transform his image to that of a fighter for integrity in the Senate. When he ran for president, there was no exploration with ties with criminal elements or the possibility that his intense interest in gambling made him the wrong person to regulate Indian casinos.

J.D. Hayworth probably will not take the Republican nomination away from McCain. To the extent that he focuses on McCain and the POWs, he is making a great contribution to the public discourse and showing why it is sometimes necessary to distrust government. The trouble is that to date, Tea Baggers have very rarely questioned militarism and imperialism.

McCain’s Democratic opponent in the general election should talk about this case. So long as the nation’s chief priority is serving its military machine, there will be too few resources to rebuild here at home. So long as Democrats fail to demand an end to our wars, their domestic agenda is imperiled.


This is the story of a militarist who cares little about what war does to soldiers or to this nation. Voters need to take off their rose-colored glasses and begin to see that reality is quite different from what is presented in the mainstream media and in the so-called conventional wisdom. John Mc Cain has been one of the chief spear carriers for the military industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about. The economy is remains in serious peril now because of the de-regulatory policies that McCain pushed at the behest of corporate America.

McCain’s conduct in this matter is as old as history, going back to that of the Roman aristocrats who cared little for what happened the ordinary men in the legions. In this case, a man born to privilege suffered in a prisoner of war camp but, once liberated, he commanded the effort to discredit those who sought answers about the Missing in Action and the POWs who were never repatriated. As one might expect, his record on veterans concerns is indifferent to so-so. He was not there when they most needed him. He refused to co-sponsor the Agent Orange Bill in 1984 or the Gulf Veterans Health Care Act of 1998. Today, he is the chief spokesman for continuing the Afghan War indefinitely.
Mc Cain says he does not like war, but American promotes it more. But as the prototypical militarist, John Mc Cain shows too little interest in the cost of war and what it does to its victims.

Some say McCain’s recent postures show he no longere has integrity. Maybe he lacked it all along.

Veterans Against John McCain Make Some Important Points

John Mc Cain has been cashing in on his 5 ½ years as a POW with such regularity that some think it unseemly. His September 4 acceptance speech centered on those dreadful years. He even used it to answer a question about how many houses he owns. Now he points to his experience of running a naval squadron as proof of his executive experience. Having opened the subject of his military experience, it might be appropriate to at least look at some of the questions that have been raised about this.
Ted Sampley, who was a leader of that anti-Kerry Swift Boater movement, is now raising questions about McCain through Vietnam Veterans Against John M Cain. However the corporate media, which spent weeks circulating his claims against Kerry will not given him the time of day. Of course, progressives have not forgotten that the corporate media refused to thoroughly examine George W. Bush’s problems with the SEC or his very dubious service in the Texas Air Guard.
Sampley and his colleagues detests both Kerry and McCain shutting down the search for missing prisoners of war and says it was because the senators were anxious to open trade with Vietnam. This cannot be proven, one way or the other.
Former GOP Congressmen John LeBoutillier and Bill Hendon insist that McCain abandoned the American POWs. Perhaps McCain did not think he was abandoning anyone, but it is hard to dodge the fact that he has devoted his senate career to preventing anyone from effectively reopening the question and unsealing what could be important evidence. Here, again, we do not know what his motives are. Perhaps the man is too convinced of his own infallibility. His angry and somewhat illogical attacks on Barack Obama suggest as much.
Critics also accuse him of often collaborating with the North Vietnamese, calling him the Hanoi Hilton’s “songbird,” a charge that cannot be proven and which overlooks evidence of his determination to resist his jailers when possible. Applying the corporate press’s usual standard of “balanced” reporting, the MSM (mainstream media) should at least approach the Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain claims with a “he said—she said” approach.

John LeBoutillier is on solid ground when he notes that McCain’s story about the guard making the sign of the cross in the dirt was probably borrowed from Admiral Jeremian Denton, another POW/Senator.

The allegations of Sampley and others about McCain’s conduct while a POW are impossible to definitively prove and overlook the basic fact that all human beings have breaking points. McCain’s detractors suggest he could have been brainwashed and programmed in Hanoi, becoming some sort of “Manchurian Candidate.” Unfortunately, this is within the realm of possibility, but it cannot be proven. Since the early 1950s, US intelligence (through MKULTRA) and other countries have experimented with mind control and have had limited success in brainwashing and programming people to carry out certain actions when triggered.

There is ample evidence that Soviet ( KGB &GRU) and Cuban psychiatrists interrogated POWs in Hanoi, yet McCain insists that it never happened. Some former prisoners spoke about interrogators from North Korea, whose programs for turning prisoners were very successful. It is documented that McCain was interviewed by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral in 1970. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin told a Senate committee in 1992 that Soviet officers interrogated prisoners on a daily basis. Why would McCain deny the presence of non-Vietnamese interrogators and also hug the Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin as though he were a long lost brother. Bui Tin, who had been a North Vietnamese interrogator. One cannot help wondering about the Stockholm Syndrome.

By his own 1973 US News and World Report account, he thought many of the prisoners had been drugged. Of course, the North Vietnamese could have done this, as drugging and interrogations have long gone hand and hand. McCain’s account includes the claim of being tortured daily, but his two senior officers have said they do not believe he was tortured. Some, including fellow prisoners, say his injuries were the result of the plane crash.

Oddly, he embraced the Vietnamese , Mai Van On, in 1997, who pulled him out of his plane and assisted him, but refused further contact after that meeting in Vietnam. By most accounts, he has become Vietnam’s best friend in the US Senate.

These angry vets damage their own case by embracing extreme charges that McCain often cooperated with the North Vietnamese and that he could be some sort of Manchurian candidate. They make a far better case when they discuss the way he has treated people in the movements concerned with POW/MIAs. There is much evidence that McCain does not want POW/MIA issues examined. They also make a very strong case that the man is simply not temperamentally equipped to be president.

. McCain’s track record in dealing with the POW/MIA people is very troubling and marked by wild outbursts and irrationality. During Senate hearings on POW/MIAs, he belittled and interrupted witnesses who disagreed with him. He erupted in anger, shouted, shook his fist, and reduced some to tears. Then he demanded that the Justice Department investigate some of the people who opposed him on this issue. St. John Mc Cain told reporters:

The people who have done these things are not zealots in a good cause. They are the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam.

The Justice Department did his bidding and probed two organizations, but did not find evidence of a scam. Mc Cain heaped scorn on H. Ross Perot, whose concern about the POW/MIAs was certainly sincere and well-informed. Navy Captain and fellow POW Eugene "Red" McDaniel was also attacked by the Arizonan as a fraud.

In 1995, Senator McCain gutted the Missing Personnel Act, which would have made it easier for families of missing soldiers and those would be missing in the future to gather information from the Pentagon. He has also consistently opposed releasing documents about POW/MIAs.

As late as 1996, he was still unbelievable uncontrolled in his conduct regarding these people, erupting in anger and accidentally turning over the wheelchair of a missing POW’s mother, Jane Duke Gaylor.

In the Senate his outbursts and verbal abuse of colleagues. Several Republican colleagues have said that John McCain was unfit to have his finger on the nuclear button.
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John McCain was known for his rebellious and impulsive,reckless behavior even at Annapolis, where he graduated 494th in a class of 499 in 1958. He entered Naval Aviation, whose policy was to select people from the top third of the class. He crashed 5 planes, and examiners wanted to attribute three of the crashes to “pilot error,” but did not do so. Some say he was responsible for the terrible accident on the USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin on July 29, 1967, when 132 lives were lost. The incident is called the “Forrestfire.”

It is said that he “wet started” his A-4E, which set off a chain reaction. Wet-starting was forbidden but considered sort of a joke prank among some pilots. It involved feeding fuel before starting the plane, resulting in more than 12 feet of flames coming out of his plane’s tail that day. The object was to alarm the pilot in the plane behind you. Lt. Commander Mc Cain was the only uninjured person to be helicopter off that great carrier that day.

The official story clears Mc Cain, son of a high rank admiral and grand son of a legendary admiral, but many shipmates took a different view. Some point out that few Naval aviators from his time have endorsed McCain’s quest for the presidency. He had been passed over for promotion twice before this incident. The main reason for withholding promotions is belief that the candidate lacks maturity. Of course, he was promoted as a matter of policy after he became a POW.

One is inclined to take a second look at what happened on the Forrestal when considering McCain’s cynicism and irresponsibility in selecting Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After months of complaining about Obama’s lack of experience and background in foreign affairs, he selected a politician with a very thin resume and no experience in foreign affairs and national security to serve one heartbeat away from the presidency.

It would appear that McCain had a badly flawed temperament before becoming a POW, and that terrible experience could have exacerbated his difficulties. Maybe the experience made him even angrier and more disposed toward irresponsible conduct. Was it a result of his suffering in Hanoi or just part of his personality? Whatever—it is not the temperament of a potential President of the United States. We need to know a great deal more about this man who is given to almost blind rage on occasion and sometimes rash and irresponsible conduct. The voters need to thoroughly vet this man with a view to learning if he is psychologically capable of handling the enormous power that resides in the hands of the President of the United States.