Nexus - 0208 - New Times Magazine-pages

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DRUGS, Inc. Bo returned from Indo-China with extensive evidence that there were indeed American prisoners of war in captivity, including a solid report of 47 at one particular camp. Perot turned the pro- ject back over to General Tighe who wrote to Secretary of| Defence, Harold Brown asking that the source, a Nguyen Dok Jong (sp?) be brought to the United States for a polygraph test. Brown repeated the request to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. One month later, Vance finally responded that the commission- er of immigration would not permit Jong into the United States for further questioning. As Bo puts it, “Think about it. One man, not a thousand and the defence intelligence agency chief and secretary of state can’t get him into the country. That was a pretty clear signal that the military was politically handcuffed on the prisoner of war issue.” For eight years Gritz sought to find and free American POW’s. He crossed five times behind enemy lines into communist Laos and Vietnam. Three times he was within moments of embracing those American heroes our government had declared dead. Each time something unexplained caused Gritz and his Operation Lazarus team to fall short with freedom and victory in sight for the POWs. There has never been a shortage of criticism from any number of armchair generals such as Robert K. Brown of “Soldier of Fortune” magazine who devoted an entire issue to condemning Gritz’s efforts. Even to the extent of publishing documents stolen from Bo while he was on the mission in Laos. They have even belittled his prayer before crossing enemy lines. His critics said he should have looked more like the Rambo in the movies, who actually avoided the draft in an all-girls school in Switzerland. More debilitating than the hundreds of miles on foot within enemy territory has been’ the disinformation propagated by those within our government who have covered up the plight of our prisoners of war. Gritz has been accused of being a media hound. He insists he has never sought the spot- light, but when confronted has always been a positive voice for our prisoners of war and will continue to be until they are home to speak for themselves. Working as an agent for the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) in the CIA, it was fine for Gritz to travel at great peril using false documents, as Ollie North and Bud McFarland did when they travelled to Iran on phony Irish passports. On one occa- sion he was stopped by US customs at Seattle-Tacoma airport with four separate passports. He was quickly released when his intelligence contact in Washington confirmed his mission. It was quite acceptable with the US government for Bo Gritz to travel at such great peril until he returned from Burma’s infa- mous Golden Triangle on December of 1986 with information concerning with involvement of high-level US officials involved in large-scale drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. His tremendous courage in refusing to back down to their threats has lead to his current indictment for misuse of a pass- port in order to keep him from getting this information to the American public. Its about an organisation called the ISA. Congress never knew about and everybody gives me credit for exposing it, but that’s not true. When I was called before Congress in 1983, they said, “Bo, are you working as an official agent for the US government?” And I said, “Yes”. And they said, “For what organisation?” And I said, “I will not identify that organisation, other than to call it ‘the activi- - ty’.”. This is because even the initials I-S-A were top secret. Because it wasn’t an oversight. It was created by Carter. Can you imagine that? He did one good thing that I know of. (laughter) But it was parallel government. He created a secret organisation to do things that the CIA could not do and he didn’t dare let Congress know about it. Now ISA got Dosier back, the general that was captured by terrorists in Italy. And ISA did a lot of other things. You can read about them now because its in this book by some guy who writes for the Wall Street Jounal. The point is that Jerry King was the head of ISA. Jerry King called me on the telephone and said, “Bo, we have been ordered to put operation Grand Eagle...”, which was the governments name for the prisoner of war rescue mis- sion, it certainly wasn’t grand and it sure wasn’t an eagle ‘cause it never got off the ground. But he said, ”we’ve been ordered to put operation Grand Eagle on the shelf as if it never existed.” T= a book out now called Secret Warriors, I think. Hand before God he said, “there are still too many bureau- crats that don’t want to see American prisoners of war come back alive.” Now | didn’t know what Jerry King meant then. I thought he was angry because there was a bureaucratic tug-of-war going on between ISA, the CIA and Defence Intelligence and maybe he was losing. But remember Jerry King’s words, ‘cause they’ll tie in here. I’m wondering why that the Vietnamese intercept Colonel Richard Walsh (a POW..Ed) moments before the turnover and capture not only him, but the General also. And I knew that we still had him, because in the newspapers it appeared that, “The Vietnamese and Lao delegations of the United Nations con- firm that they are holding an American citizen in custody.” And I said, “By golly, we and our State Department are going to press for an identity.” Because doesn’t it say that the president is required to safeguard American citizens in hostile hands? And I knew when we pressed what would happen. Richard Walsh would be identified. Who is he? A prisoner of war. Hooray! Now the log jam is broken. And who can Walsh testify to? The other men he was with. And they can testify. Were going to get them all out now, even though it's going to cost us something. Did you ever see Richard Walsh’s name identified? I didn’t. Mrs. Walsh showed me a newspaper article that said where a Air Force casualty offi- cer came to her at this time and said, “Your husband is alive. He’s a prisoner of war. We have high hopes he’Il be coming 42¢NEXUS JUNE-JULY 1992 oners of war left alive.”