Soviet KGB agents interrogated American prisoners of war in Vietnam in 1978-five years after every living POW was supposed to have been repatriated- according to a retired KGB general.
Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who headed Soviet counter-intelligence at the time, said his agents questioned ”at least three Americans” for about a month in or near the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
Kalugin told the Daily News that the Vietnamese ”were likely lying” in their official denials that any American POWs under their control were held against their will beyond 1973.
Kalugin said he could not identify the men his agents interrogated, but he recalled that ”the Vietnamese gave us a chance to talk to these people because one of them was a CIA agent, one was a ranking Navy officer and one a ranking Air Force officer.”
U.S. officials are taking Kalugin`s assertions seriously. Senate investigators and State Department officials are to meet Thursday on the general`s assertions and ”the Soviet connection” overall, said a staff member of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
Kalugin is expected to travel to Washington soon to meet with Senate investigators, who have held initial discussions with him and other sources about possible Soviet contact and involvement with American POWs, the committee staffer added.
In committee hearings last November, Bui Tin, a high-ranking North Vietnamese defector, testified that Soviet agents had interrogated Americans at POW camps in North Vietnam-but only during the war. Bui Tin said that to his knowledge none of the Americans had ever been sent to the Soviet Union, and he did not believe that any American POWs remained behind after the mass POW repatriation in 1973.
However, Marine Pfc. Robert Garwood, branded a collaborator by other POWS and the Marine Corps, emerged from Vietnam in 1979 claiming he had seen Americans still held against their will while he lived and worked at menial jobs in the Hanoi area after 1973. Garwood, court-martialed by the Marines, is the only former American POW to have come out of Vietnam since the 1973 mass repatriation.
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More than 2,000 Americans still are listed as missing in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos almost 19 years after the last U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam.
Some news reports have asserted that the Soviets actively sought to interrogate captured fliers-specifically weapons and electronics experts-who could provide information about American weapons systems and high-tech defenses that the Soviets likely would encounter in a war with the U.S.
But Kalugin said his KGB agents did not seek precise military information, leaving open the possibility that separate interrogations-if they occurred-were done by Soviet military intelligence, not the KGB, which was the Soviet equivalent of the CIA.
Asked whether his agents had used force in their interrogations of the Americans, Kalugin recoiled in horror: ”No! No! We never do that. It was all very polite.”