The refugee went on to describe the K-4 complex as being a former South Vietnamese military police training center with a prison adjacent to it that had been used during the war to hold Viet Cong prisoners. He said that the victorious North Vietnamese had confiscated the facility when they had swept through Xuan Loc on their march toward Saigon, and that after the fall of the South they had combined the two portions of the facility into a prison. He said the facility was located south of Xuan Loc town on the west side of National Route QL1 at a point directly across the highway from what the local people called "General Ty’s Garden and Orchard," an area landmark named after its former owner, a South Vietnamese General who had been killed during the Diem years.

The refugee described the prison facility as it existed when he was detained there in mid-1975 in detail and drew two detailed sketches. According to what he said and drew, the facility in mid-1975 was not walled but was surrounded by barbed wire and had guard towers strategically placed along its perimeter. 75

[Around the time this former inmate’s report had been received from France, the Special Office had received reports from two other former K-4 inmates who also said that the facility had been a police facility before the fall of the South. One described K-4 as "the old provincial Police Headquarters and military dwelling quarters of Long Khanh sector." 76 The other said that before the fall of the South, K-4 had been "the Police Headquarters of Long Khanh province, comprising the remand center [prison], soldiers quarters of the 18th Infantry Division and fruit plantation of the late general Le Vam Ty." This former inmate also reported that a massive stone wall topped with an electrified barbed wire fence had been built around the facility after 1975 and that construction of the wall had been completed in 1979. 77]

A second sighting of American prisoners being detained after the war in Long Khanh (Dong Nai) Province had been reported by a former South Vietnamese Navy petty officer who had been held in the old "Blackhorse Camp" - the former U.S.11th Armored Cavalry base located south of Xuan Loc at Long Giao 78 — which the Communists had converted into a re-education camp after the war. (Authors’ map entitled "Postwar POW Sightings Long Khanh (Dong Nai) Province," point 3) The former petty officer reported that one evening in the late summer of 1976 while confined to his barracks he saw 20-30 prisoners he believed to be American POWs being brought into an isolated section of the camp for the apparent purpose of spending the night

The former petty officer reported that on the night the sighting occurred, he and all of the South Vietnamese inmates at Long Giao were ordered to their barracks early and forbidden to go outside. He explained that he and his roommates were unable to sleep and that late in the evening, about ten or eleven o’clock, they heard and then saw a convoy of Molotova trucks pull into the adjoining, unoccupied barracks compound. He said that as he and the others watched, guards jumped down from the trucks and unloaded very tall prisoners dressed in striped American POW uniforms and escorted them into the barracks. He said the guards used "electric torches" (flashlights) to direct the American prisoners and because the night was not dark he could very clearly see the lights flashing on the prisoners uniforms. In all, he said, there were between 20 and 30 prisoners in the group, each carrying a bedroll. The petty officer told U.S. officials the prisoners were gone when he awoke the next morning and that he never saw them again. He further said that he and his roommates all believed, given (1) the lockdown conditions at the camp that night, (2) the circumstances of the sighting, (3) the height of the prisoners and (4) the fact that they were all dressed in either red or black striped uniforms, that the prisoners they had seen were American POWs. 79

Three more postwar sighting of American POWs in Long Khanh (Dong Nai) Province had taken place in late 1977 when a Northerner who had come south to help construct forced labor areas for captured South Vietnamese saw on three separate occasions more than 20 American prisoners being held in a bamboo-walled prison near Cam My, a small village located some five kilometers (approximately three statute miles) southeast of the former Blackhorse Camp at Long Giao. (Authors’ map entitled "Postwar POW Sightings Long Khanh (Dong Nai) Province," point 4). The Northerner had told U.S. officials after his escape from Vietnam in 1980 that he had served as secretary to a Communist Colonel who was in charge of selecting and developing areas suitable for New Economic Zones in the Long Khanh area and that he was performing his official duties in a remote area near Cam My when he discovered the camp holding the Americans. He said he personally observed the prisoners working at chores inside the bamboo-walled prison on three different occasions. He said the prisoners were all Caucasian and were all tall, strong and healthy. He said they were dressed in a mixture of tattered fatigue shirts and short pants and that all had beards and hairy legs. The Northerner said that at one point he asked the Colonel he worked for who the prisoners were and the Colonel replied "foreigners." The Northerner said that he later posed the same question to a team of cadre from the North who had come to the area to assist in planting corn and papayas and that the team members replied the prisoners were "people who flew airplanes." He reported that the last time he saw the American prisoners inside the prison compound was in December 1977. 80

In addition to the above sightings of American POWs being held in the province in 1975, 1976 and 1977 (three sightings), the Special Office had also received a report telling of the confinement of 80 U.S. prisoners at a prison camp in Xuan Loc province town in 1979. (Authors’ map entitled "Postwar POW Sightings Long Khanh (Dong Nai) Province," point 5). The information in this report had been provided to JCRC officials by an ethnic Chinese (Hoa) refugee who had lived in the area for 50 years prior to his escape from Vietnam in mid-1982. This refugee told U.S. officials that one of his employees who lived in Xuan Loc had told him prior to his departure that he, the employee, had personally observed 80 American prisoners under guard in a prison camp at Xuan Loc on an unrecalled day during 1979 and that the Americans had been moved to Xuan Loc from a prison at Lang Son near the Chinese border "to escape the Chinese invasion." The Hoa refugee said the employee had told him that he had been present in Xuan Loc when the Americans, all of whom the employee said were Caucasian, had been brought into the camp. The Hoa refugee further stated that his employee had told him that he and other residents had been allowed to observe the newly-arrived American prisoners and give them food. After relating his employee’s account, the Hoa refugee told U.S. officials that he believed what his employee had told him was true. 81

The above four reports (#’s 2,3,4 and 5) telling of six separate sightings of American prisoners being detained after the war in Long Khanh (postwar Dong Nai) Province, then, were in the Special Office files when the CIA report about the MOI informant’s sighting of the 20-30 American POWs getting off a Prisons Management Department bus inside the Xuan Loc K-4 prison in late 1979 was received from CIA on 14 August 1984.

Disposition of the Case: When the CIA report telling of the Lieutenant’s sighting at Xuan Loc K-4 was first read by officials at the Special Office, one of those officials, leaving little doubt what the Office had in mind for the Lieutenant and the American POWs he had seen, underlined the sentence that stated the Lieutenant had passed a CIA polygraph and wrote in the left margin, "Oh Hell!" and then, at the bottom of the page, "Bob, We better re-poly this guy." 82

Senior Vietnam Analyst Robert J. "Bob" Destatte received the CIA report and, like the official who had penned "Oh Hell!" in the margin, quickly grasped the fact that this case, like the high profile case of the American POWs reported held at Lien Mac, also had the potential to be very troublesome if not aggressively pursued.

Destatte had good reason to be concerned. First, given the results of the CIA polygraph, the Lieutenant appeared to be a credible witness. Second, the reported statement of the Lieutenant’s associate, Ba Hung, that the American prisoners the two saw getting off the bus inside K-4 had been transferred to the facility from Hanoi dovetailed nicely with other reports the Special Office had received telling of the movement of American POWs from camps and prisons in the North to camps and prisons in the South during the time of the Chinese invasion (See An Enormous Crime, Chapter 18.) And third, it appeared from the earlier reports that had told of American POWs being detained at Xuan Loc K-4 in 1975; at the nearby Blackhorse Camp in 1976; at nearby Cam My village in 1977 and again at Xuan Loc in 1979 that the Communists had long considered the area a safe place for the detention of American prisoners.

A team comprised of the Office’s Deputy Chief, Charles W. Trowbridge, Destatte, and Destatte’s most trusted junior analyst, Tourison, was formed to investigate the important sighting. 83

The three had no more than begun their work when, on 23 August, CIA officials informed them that CIA agents who were still interrogating the MOI Lieutenant at a CIA safe house in Malaysia continued to be impressed with the Lieutenant and the new information he was providing. Declaring that they had gleaned information from the Lieutenant concerning the SRV Ministry of Interior that "so far looks very good," the officials went on to say that "[a]pproximately 12 reports are presently being processed for publication" [and distribution within the intelligence community] and that "[t]he subject has been polygraphed regarding various topics, including the PW/MIA issue – no deception indicated."84 It was unclear whether the portion of the message referring to the polygraph meant that a second polygraph had been administered and the Lieutenant had again passed or was simply a reference to the first polygraph mentioned in the initial CIA report dispatched on 14 August.

Regardless, shortly after receipt of the CIA update, the decision was made to dispatch Tourison to Kuala Lumpur to interrogate the Lieutenant and assist in the administration of another polygraph. In preparation for his trip, Tourison sent a formal request to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations requesting that their Far East polygrapher based at Clark Field in the Philippines be dispatched to Kuala Lumpur to conduct the polygraph examination. In his official request, Tourison stated that the purpose of the polygraph was "to verify [the] claimed sighting of U.S. PWS in SVN in Dec 1979." 85

Tourison departed for Kuala Lumpur in early September. Once there, he interrogated the Lieutenant for two days. According to Tourison’s report of the interviews, the Lieutenant repeated the same information he had provided earlier to CIA, i.e., while visiting the K-4 Prison just south of Xuan Loc province town in December 1979, he had observed a group of foreign prisoners descending from a prison bus under guard inside the prison and had been told by a follow MOI officer present at the time that the prisoners were "American PWs who had been relocated from Hanoi to the South." 86

Tourison then assisted with the polygraph examination, which was administered on 13 September by a certified polygraph examiner from AFOSI at Clark Field. The AFOSI examiner’s official report of the polygraph examination, cabled to Washington five days later, read in part:

1.  ON 13 SEP 84, SUBJECT EXAMINEE WAS ADMINISTERED A POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION BY [NAME AND DATA REDACTED].  PRIOR TO THE EXAMINATION, EXAMINEE VERBALLY CONSENTED TO POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION IN THE PRESENCE OF MR. SEDEWICK [sic] TOURISON (DIA/DC-2) AND MR. [NAME REDACTED]. FOLLOWING ARE THE RELEVANT QUESTIONS ASKED AND THE ANSWERS PROVIDED BY EXAMINEE DURING THE EXAMINATION: APPROX JUST PRIOR TO TET 1980, DID YOU PERSONALLY SEE A GROUP OF FOREIGN NATIONALS GET OFF A BUS AT CAMP K4 NEAR XUAN LOC TOWN?  ANS:  YES DID BA HUNG TELL YOU THE GROUP OF FOREIGN NATIONALS YOU SAW AT K-4 WERE AMERICAN POWS?  ANS:  YES WERE YOU TOLD BY BA HUNG THOSE FOREIGN NATIONALS YOU SAW AT K-4 WERE TRANSFERRED FROM HANOI TO THE SOUTH?  ANS:  YES WERE YOU EVER PROVIDED ANY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION REGARDING THOSE FOREIGN NATIONALS YOU SAW AT K-4?  ANS:  NO AFTER AN ANALYSIS OF THE POLYGRAMS PERTAINING TO THIS EXAMINATION IT WAS THE OPINION OF THE EXAMINER THAT THERE WAS NO DECEPTION INDICATED IN EXAMINEE’S RESPONSES TO THE RELEVANT QUESTIONS. 87

To use Tourison’s earlier words, the source had "verif[ied] the claimed sighting."

In his report of the day's proceedings, Tourison informed the Special Office that the source’s polygraph results were "NDI," meaning "no deception indicated on all relevant questions," and then went on to offer the following observations from among others he had derived from his extensive pre-polygraph interrogation of the source:

BASED ON THE AGES, CLOTHING WORN, PHYSICAL CONDITION, OBSERVED CIRCUMSTANCES, AND OVERALL INTUITIVE JUDGMENT IT APPEARED THE INDIVIDUALS WERE WHAT [Ba Hung] STATED THEY WERE.

[SOURCE’S] EXPLANATION RE HIS TRIP … WHICH CAUSED HIM TO BE IN THE VIC OF THE K-4 REED CAMP APPEARS PLAUSIBLE.

THE SIGHTING OF THE INDIVIDUALS WAS FOR SEVERAL MINUTES FROM A DISTANCE OF APPROX 20 METERS. THE DETAILS [source] CAN PROVIDE REGARDING THE INCIDENT APPEAR TO BE WITHIN REASONABLE AND CREDIBLE LIMITS CONSIDERING THE TIME LAPSE/DURATION OF THE SIGHTING. 88

On 19 September, Tourison cabled further developments. The MOI Lieutenant, Tourison now reported, had been re-interviewed yet again and his story had not changed. Tourison went on to report that after two weeks of almost continuous interrogation by three CIA station representatives and almost a week of interrogation by Tourison himself, neither he (Tourison) nor his CIA counterparts had detected any "problem of any inconsistency on his (the source’s) part." 89

What occurred next was, by any measure, beyond the pale.

Destatte, after digesting the latest news from Kuala Lumpur, composed a memorandum that included the facts of the Lieutenant’s sighting and DIA’s official interim assessment of the case. In the memorandum, Destatte acknowledged that the MOI Lieutenant was not seeking any money or favors in return for his testimony; acknowledged that the Lieutenant had now passed two polygraph examinations; and acknowledged that Xuan Loc K-4 was a "known camp" and that the Special Office possessed satellite imagery of the camp. Then, without offering any justification, Destatte declared that the Lieutenant was a "probable fabricator with no useful knowledge." 90

Next, as they always did when multiple polygraphs indicated the source was telling the truth, Destatte and his men turned to the satellite imagery and attempted to use it to "prove" that the source was lying. In this case, Destatte, Tourison and Trowbridge "analyzed" the imagery of K-4 and declared that it proved the Lieutenant was lying because it showed that the facility where he reported he had seen the American prisoners getting off the Prisons Management Department bus under guard in December 1979 was not a prison at all, but was a cemetery for PAVN and VC war dead, and that the persons the Lieutenant had seen descending from the bus were most likely members of a group of foreign tourists paying a visit to that cemetery AND NOT American POWs disembarking under guard after a trip down from Hanoi. "If [the Lieutenant] saw any group of foreigners," Trowbridge later explained in a letter to CIA, "he saw a group of foreign tourists [at the cemetery], has falsely implied they could have been U.S. PWs, has deliberately misstated either the location or circumstances of the sighting, and has somehow avoided detection by the polygraph…." 91 The K-4 prison, DIA ruled, was a cemetery for PAVN and VC war dead.

Later, Hendon and his activist colleagues discovered that the imagery really showed the K-4 prison at the exact location the MOI Lieutenant had said it was, and that the cemetery where Trowbridge and his men claimed the Lieutenant’s sighting had taken place was in downtown Xuan Loc, almost two kilometers (approximately 1.2 statute miles) north of the K-4 prison.* (Authors’ annotated 1:25,000 color wartime map derived from airbreather photography of Xuan Loc area, entitled "Proximity K-4 Prison to PAVN Cemetery in Xuan Loc, SRV). Upon making the discovery, the Congressmen demanded that the "cemetery ruling" be rescinded and the investigation be re-opened. The analysts and managers at the Special Office reluctantly agreed, but, as the congressmen would discover years later, the team of Trowbridge, Destatte and Tourison were not to be deterred. Records declassified in the early 1990’s showed that, as the activist congressmen had demanded, the Special Office team had corrected the official record to show that, yes, the prison did appear in the satellite imagery at the exact point the Lieutenant had described and that, yes, the facility was a prison as the Lieutenant had said and not a cemetery as Trowbridge had previously informed CIA. Tragically for the POWs, however, the records also showed that the DIA team had then simply "re-analyzed" the imagery of the prison and come up with a new reason why it "proved" the MOI Lieutenant was a liar. A thorough re-examination of the imagery, Tourison had written in DIA's second "final evaluation" of the case, had led the analysts to "conclude" that the Lieutenant had in fact been inside the K-4 Prison, but not in 1979 as he had stated, rather some three-four years later, probably in 1983. Tourison then declared that because the Lieutenant had visited the prison in 1983, he could not possibly have seen U.S. POWs there in late 1979 as he "claimed." "[Lieutenant’s name redacted] is not truthful in his account of the PW sighting, polygraph results notwithstanding," Tourison declared on 2 December 1986. Final, official DIA evaluation: "Fabrication." 92 **