Vietnamese officials Tuesday denounced as a "fabrication" a document that allegedly shows North Vietnam held hundreds more American prisoners of war in 1972 than it admitted at the time.
The formerly secret document found recently in Soviet Communist Party archives in Moscow, if authentic, indicates North Vietnam held 1,205 American POWs that year - 837 more than it acknowledged to the United States.The document was uncovered in January by Stephen J. Morris, a researcher at the Harvard Center for International Affairs. It purportedly was written by Gen. Tran Van Quang, deputy chief of staff of the North Vietnamese army, and trans-lated into Russian.
"This is a pure fabrication, and we completely reject it," said Tran Van Tu, deputy director of Vietnam's official agency in charge of seeking persons missing from the war. Tu's office works with U.S. representatives to resolve the fate of Americans still missing.
Nguyen Xuan Phong, acting director of the Americas Department at Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also called the document a fabrication. "Vietnam rejects it firmly," Phong said in a telephone interview.
A month after making his discovery, in February of this year, Morris told Samuel Berger, the deputy national security adviser at the White House, but he did not give Berger the text. That arrived only on April 8, after Malcolm Toon, a former ambassador who has been working with the Russians on the POW issue, obtained it in Moscow.
In a telephone interview Monday shortly after he arrived from Moscow, Morris said he had withheld the text because he feared it would be leaked if he gave it to the government and because he thought that would put an end to his research.
"This is the beginning of the story, not the end," he said. "I'm convinced the answers are there, in Moscow, but will we get them now?"
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Sergei Yastr-zhemb-sky said his government will "continue to do everything that Russia can do in the search for documents that might shed light on the truth on this issue."
Phong said he suspected the document was created by Americans who oppose the resumption of diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which is also under a U.S. economic embargo since 1975.
Families of the missing Americans generally oppose the lifting of the embargo, contending that to do so would eliminate any incentive Hanoi may have to cooperate on providing an accounting for missing Americans.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who headed a Senate committee that issued an inconclusive report on prisoners of war in January, said: "If this thing is really accurate, and really shows that the Vietnamese held that many American prisoners, it is a very powerful document. It is the smoking gun."
The January 1973 Paris peace accords ended direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. On April 1 of that year, North Vietnam freed the last of 591 American prisoners of war.
A few Americans whose status as POWs was murky - including civilians and at least one soldier who allegedly refused repatriation in 1973 - left Vietnam later. Vietnam has insisted ever since that there are no living Americans left.