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That Perot has a penchant for getting involved in secret activities seems undeniable. He put up the money for some of Oliver North's efforts to buy the freedom of American hostages in the Middle East (and lost at least $300,000 that was taken by middlemen who disappeared). In 1981 Perot agreed to a suggestion by agents of the U.S. Customs Service that he finance a drug sting in the Caribbean. The idea was to set up a landing strip on a foreign-owned island where agents would gather information on drug-carrying flights that would be induced to put down there. Customs could not operate an undercover enterprise in a foreign country, however, without clearing it through the U.S. ambassador and the government involved, and it did not want to do that. So a Customs agent proposed that Perot build the landing strip and have his employees serve as unofficial agents. "Nobody would know who they were," says Frank Chadwick, a retired Customs official who was then special agent in charge of the Houston Customs office. "We would not be beholden to report to the U.S. State Department in the foreign country." Perot, he says, seemed ready to invest $1 million to $2 million and even assign an employee (another former Green Beret -- Perot keeps a number of them around) to scout potential sites. But Customs headquarters in Washington turned down the idea.
Perot's best-known and most extensive unofficial operations, of course, have been those involving U.S. prisoners of war, real or imagined, in Vietnam. The operations began with his shipment of a planeload of food and clothes to them at Christmas in 1969, an unexceptionable venture that made him a hero (even though the shipment did not get through). For a while after the peace accords of 1973, he became convinced that there were no more Americans being held prisoner in Vietnam, but later he became equally positive that there were and are -- why he has never made clear. He speaks darkly of secret informants who would talk publicly only under subpoena, but has refused to give their names to a congressional subcommittee that pledged to subpoena them. In 1985 he contravened U.S. policy by proposing to pay $10 million for each American that the Vietnamese released, and in 1987 he made a trip to Hanoi, where, government officials grumble, he came close to violating the Logan Act, which forbids a private citizen to conduct foreign policy. Among other things, they say, he prematurely informed the Vietnamese about a forthcoming visit by an official emissary, General John Vessey, and talked about potential U.S. aid -- "major development projects," says one official -- beyond anything Vessey was authorized to discuss. Richard Childress, a former National Security Council official who dealt with both Perot and the Vietnamese, accuses Perot of "confusing the Vietnamese and the American people" by blundering into delicate negotiations that "he tried to take over."