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Eugene ("Red") McDaniel, a retired Navy captain who heads the American Defense Foundation and its educational arm, the American Defense Institute, came to the POW issue the hard way -- he was once one himself. After his release in 1973, he resumed his military career, ending up at the Pentagon, where he concluded that "the U.S. government would never do the job" of tracking down the POWs who he became convinced were left behind. McDaniel's group has been the conduit for a number of photographs of alleged POWs that ^ have been made public recently, including the now famous picture that purports to show three U.S. servicemen standing before a background of The Pentagon says the picture shows signs of having been altered.
Ted Sampley, head of Homecoming II, is a Vietnam Special Forces veteran from Fayetteville, N.C. Among other things, Sampley three years ago offered anticommunist insurgents $5,000 to destroy a government building in Laos, arguing that the only way to liberate American POWs from that country was to topple the communist regime.
Jack Bailey, a retired Air Force colonel, heads Operation Rescue (no connection with the antiabortion organization of the same name). For much of the 1980s, Bailey's chief project was raising funds to support the Akuna, a freighter that he said patrolled the South China Sea rescuing Vietnamese refugees. By most accounts, the ship was unseaworthy and spent 90% of its time in port.
In 1989 the National League of Families, the largest group representing close relatives of MIAs, accused 14 of the self-styled MIA rescue groups, including Operation Rescue, Homecoming II and Skyhook II, of distributing "false or distorted information" or supporting "counterproductive" activities. "It's a mystery how these guys have survived," says League of Families official Louise Van Hoozer, the sister of an Air Force pilot shot down in Vietnam. "All the leads offered by these guys evaporated."
One of the main reasons for the MIA industry's persistence was the government's initially sluggish effort to get to the bottom of the mystery. For years, the Pentagon turned over the question of missing Americans to defense-intelligence agencies more accustomed to concealing secret information than to guiding bereaved relatives through a thicket of classified and often conflicting reports. This heavy-handed approach not only angered relatives of missing servicemen but also fueled the suspicion and frustration that the MIA industry exploits.
Sensitive to criticism that they once acted too slowly to resolve the MIA riddle, Pentagon investigators beginning with the Reagan Administration have taken a more aggressive stance, seeking quickly and publicly to investigate all reports of MIAs, even from the most dubious sources.
Last summer Operation Rescue's Bailey brought to light what he claimed was a photograph taken in Laos last year of U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Donald G. Carr, who was shot down over Laos in 1971. The resemblance between pictures , of the young Carr at his 1961 wedding and the weathered face in Bailey's picture was sufficiently unnerving to move the Defense Department, after being prodded by some members of Congress, to fly Bailey to Bangkok. There he promised to supply more information and introduce Pentagon investigators to the source for his pictures.