Vietnam is charging the Pentagon as much as $10,000 for a single page document containing information on missing U.S. service members from the Vietnam War, according to a report by a POW advocacy group.
Despite spending over $86 million since 2016, just 25 cases of missing soldiers have been resolved and Vietnam appears to be using recovery efforts to extort money from the United States, the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia reports.
“Vietnam has transformed the POW/MIA accounting mission into a revenue-generating enterprise rather than a humanitarian obligation,” the report says.
According to the report, Hanoi demands as much as $10,000 per document and $15,000 per artifact, in effect selling back to the U.S. evidence gathered on missing American service members.
At the same time, Vietnamese officials continue to access U.S. military archives at taxpayers’ expense with no reciprocal transparency.
The National League is a major POW/MIA advocacy group, and thus its report carries considerable political weight.
Disclosure of the reported Vietnamese scamming of Pentagon POW/MIA accounting effort comes as the Trump administration announced a major trade deal with Vietnam this week.
“It will be a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries,” President Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the deal.
Under the deal, Vietnam will pay a 20% tariff on all goods sent to the United States and a 40% tariff on transshipped goods. In return, Vietnam has promised “total access to their markets” for trade at zero tariffs, Mr. Trump said.
The 40% tariffs on transshipments through Vietnam are targeted at China, which has used Vietnam in the past to avoid tariffs in getting its products into the U.S. market.
Over the past two decades, successive Democrat and Republican administrations have sought to gain favor with Vietnam, still run by a communist government, in confronting Chinese expansionism in the region.
The report on POW/MIA cooperation with Vietnam stated that the Pentagon is being charged “astronomical” fees for operational cooperation in the search for missing soldiers and civilians from the war.
The Pentagon estimates more than 1,500 U.S. troops remain missing from the Vietnam War. Many are classified as “non-recoverable.”
“This suggests that Vietnam’s operational cooperation is centered more on financial benefit than on humanitarian cooperation or advancing U.S.-[Socialist Republic of Vietnam] bilateral relations,” the report said. “The amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent in Vietnam is a scandal waiting to explode.”
A second type of cooperation from Vietnam is described in the report as “knowledgeability cooperation,” or Hanoi’s willingness to unilaterally provide archival materials and conduct deep research into existing military, government, and communist party records.
This should include government and party agencies providing documents and copies of personal media taken from captured or deceased U.S. personnel.
Vietnam, over the past 30 years, has provided some material such as grave registrations, shootdown records, and information culled from military publications.
“Moreover, every search request generates an invoice for payment,” the report said.
The report criticized the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for inaccurately praising Vietnam’s cooperation on recovering remains, apparently out of concern that Hanoi would shut down cooperation if pressured to do more.
“For DPAA to admit that the Vietnamese are charging exorbitant fees, restricting excavation teams to fifty-centimeter test pits (allegedly approved by both parties), and grudgingly providing archival material would call into question what DPAA has achieved since its inception in 2015,” the report said.
“According to a review of DPAA’s annual reports from 2016–2024, it has accounted for only 25 American MIAs in Vietnam in nine years. No clarification is provided as to how many of these were unilateral turnovers.”
Spokesmen for DPMIAA did not return email requests for comment. A Vietnamese Embassy spokesman also did not respond to email requests for comment.
The report was written by Jay Veith, a respected military historian and expert on missing service members who has conducted research in the past in Vietnam on missing troops.
“Despite DPAA’s claims that Vietnam is providing excellent cooperation on locating American MIAs, that statement does not stand up to scrutiny,” Mr. Vieth told The Washington Times.
Mr. Veith said operational cooperation has been generally excellent, but is predicated on charging DPAA exorbitant fees for limited return.
Knowledgeability cooperation is even worse, he said, as identification media from U.S. MIAs is being displayed in Vietnamese museums while Hanoi has failed to provide information to DPAA investigators on those cases.
The 25 cases of Vietnam War recoveries highlight the suspect cooperation of the Hanoi government since most of the 25 cases were handed over by Vietnam and were not the result of investigative work by the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the report said.
Mark Sauter, an advocate for greater efforts in resolving cases of missing U.S. service members, said the U.S. government has long suspected Hanoi of “warehousing” remains of hundreds of American prisoners of war and missing in action ,and in effect selling the remains back to the United States. Those held remains have been returned to the U.S., he said.
Mr. Sauter, who has extensively investigated missing POWs, said there is substantial intelligence that the Vietnamese government held back Americans captured after Operation Homecoming in 1973, when all captured Americans were to have been released.
“Meantime, Hanoi was running a major disinformation campaign against U.S. intelligence called the ‘Dog Tags’ operations, where Vietnam arranges for U.S. intelligence to be flooded with fake reports of information on unreturned Americans — typically based on bogus ‘dog tags,’” Mr. Sauter said.
Hanoi is also suspected of “salting” suspected MIA sites with remains or documents of U.S. POWs before U.S. teams arrived to investigate.
The report said the National League is frustrated that DPMAA has not done more to pressure Vietnam into providing greater cooperation and lower costs.
“Moreover, it has become clear that DPAA is shifting its priorities to ‘all wars,’ including disintering World War II and Korean War casualties that were not identified shortly after those conflicts ended,” the report said.
“However, DPAA continues to profess that Vietnam is still the highest operational priority, meaning that the largest portion of its budget goes to Vietnam because of the prohibitive costs imposed by the [Vietnam’s Office for Seeking Missing Persons].”
The Vietnamese cooperation is suspect because the communist government has not changed its ideology, the report concluded.
“It is a realistic view that Vietnam’s communist party may adopt flexible tactics but that its ultimate goals remain unchanged,” the report said, noting that an indoctrination phrase used by the communists after the fall of South Vietnam was “our party never changes.”
“Hanoi has never ‘cooperated fully’ on providing the US with all its information on missing Americans, and the US government has always known this despite claiming the contrary to the American people and Congress,” Mr. Sauter, the POW investigator, said. “The excellent new report just provides more evidence.”
Mr. Sauter also said the Pentagon has kept secret some decades-old intelligence reports on Americans reported alive in communist hands after the Vietnam War. He is among a group of researchers and family members of POW/MIA Americans suing the CIA and National Archives to declassify the records from Vietnam, the Korean War and the Cold War.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.