(2 of 3)
Schweitzer, who collaborated with McConnell on the book, stumbled into being an intelligence operative. From his librarian's job he moved to the U.N., serving as a relief official in Indochina until 1983, when he organized a nonprofit charity to aid Vietnamese boat people. Six years later, during a trip to Hanoi to arrange a hospital visit, he asked his Vietnamese hosts on a whim if he could tour the Central Military Museum, which housed the Defense Ministry's war artifacts. The Vietnamese agreed, permitting him to browse through displays of uniforms and equipment taken from members of the U.S. Air Force and even to photograph documents. During a return visit by Schweitzer six months later, the museum's director, Senior Colonel Pham Duc Dai, made a startling revelation: the museum was the repository for records on all the Americans, living or dead, who had fallen into North Vietnamese hands. ``All the records, Colonel?'' Schweitzer asked, flabbergasted. ``We have everything,'' the colonel replied and handed Schweitzer the Red Book. Later, Colonel Dai offered something just as astonishing: permission to photograph and copy any material in the museum that would help Schweitzer write a book on its collection.
But Schweitzer could find no American publisher willing to finance the research project. The Pentagon, weary of con artists peddling phony stories of U.S. prisoners still said to be alive in Southeast Asia, at first brushed him off. Schweitzer finally reached Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Carl Ford, who recognized that the Vietnamese were prepared to hand over something of a treasure trove.
Pentagon officials believe the Vietnamese wanted to break the impasse with Washington over the missing service members in order to get the U.S. to lift its trade embargo but had backed themselves into a corner with their earlier declarations that no prisoner records existed. McConnell suggests that Hanoi needed an unofficial way to turn over the material and saw Schweitzer as a ``face-saving conduit.''
At Ford's urging, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency provided Schweitzer with the optical scanner. One of its case officers gave him a hurry-up course in spy craft: Schweitzer learned emergency codes and signals and roamed northern Virginia shopping malls, practicing how to shake off a tail and how to retrieve messages from dead drops. Cover stories were rehearsed in case he was compromised.
Upon his return to Hanoi, operation ``Swamp Ranger'' was almost blown before it started. A Pentagon official, in the capital as part of an official POW task force, had just presented the Foreign Ministry with photographs of documents in the Central Military Museum and ``demanded that we provide everything,'' a furious Colonel Dai told Schweitzer. The photos had been taken by Schweitzer and turned over to the Pentagon. The task-force members were unaware of Schweitzer's secret mission, McConnell writes. ``How did American intelligence get copies of your pictures?'' Colonel Dai demanded, suspecting that Schweitzer was a spy. After four days of grilling by the Vietnamese, Schweitzer evidently convinced his interrogators that his publisher must have been careless in handling the photographs. Defense Department officials say the Vietnamese government still suspected that Schweitzer worked for the Pentagon but allowed him to begin scanning the records anyway.