War has always been good business for defense contractors and arms dealers. But the Vietnam War gave rise to a dismal new enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended. Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about the extremely remote possibility that there might be any POWs still alive in Vietnam or anywhere else.
In recent weeks the MIA industry has been given a new lift by retired Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, who was forced to resign in 1990 after he became one of the agency's most truculent public critics. Kalugin has told several U.S. news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, that the KGB questioned "at least" three American POWs in Vietnam in 1978, five years after Hanoi said it had returned all living prisoners.
Among those questioned, according to Kalugin, were an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. Navy officer and a U.S. Air Force officer. He also told the Daily News that two of the POWs later returned to the U.S. -- an astounding claim, if true, because the only former POW known to have been repatriated after 1973 was Marine PFC Robert Garwood, who disappeared near Danang in 1965 and resurfaced 14 years later, claiming he had been a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Garwood was court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy.
There are many reasons to be skeptical about Kalugin's story. For one thing, he has given conflicting versions of the year in which the questioning took place. Investigators for the Senate's Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs are nonetheless eager to question Kalugin, who may appear before the committee this week. In addition, the committee's chairman, Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts, and its ranking Republican, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, said they may travel to Moscow to ask Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, to open the KGB files on POWs.
Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish because of the virtual impossibility of determining what happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam. After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and the Korean War. Yet perhaps because of the humiliating defeat the U.S. suffered in Vietnam, Americans have been unwilling to close the books on the MIAs. In a recent TIME-CNN poll conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 60% of those questioned said they believe there are still live Americans in Vietnam.