WHO ARE THOSE MEN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100360002-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 3, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Si Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100360002-3
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
3 March 1986
Who are those men
By JIM ANDERSON
WASHINGTON
Two men dressed in combat fatigues hunkered down in a Laotian jungle in 1981
and aimed their sophisticated cameras and listening devices at ''two white,
older, skinny men' walking inside a camp.
One of those watchers said later the older men are under armed guard and the
sophisticated microphones picked them up speaking American English.
Are they POWs, as the men in combat fatigues believe?
Or are they, as another theory goes, U.S. intelligence agents, possibly even
involved with drug smugglers who captured them or turned them over to the
Laotian army?
Scott Barnes, 32, now living in northern California, swears that he was one
of the men who saw the prisoners, and he presented his written testimony to the
Senate subcommittee on veterans affairs.
In a telephone interview, he repeated the story but also said he has been
threatened by " U.S. government agencies'' " and has decided that if asked to
testify, he will either refuse or plead the Fifth Amendment.
He said his film and tapes of the two older men were destroyed on order of
the CIA and he quit the mission when told the POWs were to be ''liquidated''
along with any evidence that they existed.
Pentagon officials reject that as absurd and insulting.
Assistant secretary of state Paul Wolfowitz, in Senate testimony, did not
directly refute or support Barnes' story, but merely noted, ''Barnes had
misrepresented himself as a congressional staff member in Southeast Asia,'' a
charge that Barnes admits.
"That was our cover,'' Barnes told United Press International. ''We all had
ID cards that said we were members of the House POW-MIA Task Force.'
The Barnes case and its connection with some other allegations by former
members of military Special Forces teams illustrate a fact about the MIA issue
that has anguished and angered everybody who has gotten involved in it: It is a
hall of mirrors where every government involved has been guilty of some
deception or dereliction.
It is a subject that attracts psychopaths and heroes.
One old Asian hand, who has extensively checked Barnes' story -- and even was
with him when Barnes passed a truth serum test -- says, ''Some of these people
are rogues, liars, adventurers and may be more interested in the possibility of
scoring some drugs. But some of them also care passionately about getting the
MIAs out.''
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100360002-3
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100360002-3
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Other people are attracted by greed and there are cases where Indochinese
smugglers have tried to sell POW families monkey bones as human remains; where
GI dog tags have been fabricated, and in one case where a human cranium was
sawed in half on the theory that two sets of bones would fetch a higher reward
than one complete set.
The events around Laos, in addition to attracting all kinds of cross-border
adventurers such as Barnes and his employer ''Boll Gritz, are especially
susceptible to speculation and wishful thinking.
Some Americans were prisoners of war in Laos, but none were ever returned --
although nine Americans held in Laos were returned through Vietnam in 1973.
The government strongly opposes the private missions, if only because they
make Laos and Vietnam less willing to deal with legitmate MIA search operations.
Richard Hebert, president of POW-MIA Acccountability Inc. said in January
that people involved in the free-lance forays "suffer from the Walter Mitty
syndrome in pursuit of their own self-serving interests."
' Most often it is for personal financial benefit at the expense of (MIA)
family members and a naive public, '' he said.
But those motives do not apparently explain the stories of former Special
Farces Maj. Mark Smith and Lt. Col. Robert Howard. They have testified that they
were assigned to such a cross-border operation by their Army superiors, and there
were ordered off the assignment when Smith said he came up with evidence of
Americans held in Laos.
Lt. Gen Leonard Perroots, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has
denied under oath that there was such an operation or a coveru^.
But the allegations are not easily dismissed. Smith, now retired after he was
passed over twice for promotion, is a former POW himself. Howard, still on
active duty, holds the Medal of Honor, a decoration that he won on an attempted
POW rescue mission.
The Senate subcommittee, which has been trying to chop its way through the
jungle of conflicting testimony, is troubled about the direct contradiction
between highly decorated combat veterans, such as Howard, and high-ranking
professionals such as Perroots.
To find their way, panel members decided to have a face-to-face confrontation
-- with Howard, Smith and other Special Forces men as well as the high-ranking
officers -- in the next two weeks.
Now that the administration has put its weight behind the MIA issue, the
Rambo raids across the borders are an embarrassment, a distraction, an
obstruction to government cooperation and -- worse -- they put to risk any
prisoners who might be there.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100360002-3