Scope and Contents

Contains information from all sides regarding prisoner interments, treatment in the camps, repatriation, prisoner testimony, sighting reports, and data on the resolution of the Prisoners of War (POW)/Missing in Action (MIA) issue, both during and after the war. While the main focus is on American POW/MIA's, there are also materials on North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and South Vietnamese prisoners. The materials date from 1945-1993 with the bulk from 1966-1978.

Most of the materials are described as either General Literature (e.g., reports, official accounts, and live sighting statements produced by U.S. government agencies) or Clippings from newspapers and magazines. Congressional hearings, committee reports and research requests on the subject of POW's began during the conflict and are represented here through 1993. The Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency produced papers on POW's and MIA's and sanitized sighting reports can be found throughout the materials. Also included is the 15-volume "Uncorrelated Information Relating to Missing Americans in Southeast Asia" report published by the Department of Defense in December 1978. Topics include recovering personnel, POW camps, gravesites, and crash sites. In the 1980's, when the POW/MIA issue again fell under public scrutiny, U.S. government agencies released reports and short letters in response to charges made by the press or POW/MIA groups. Much of the material by U.S. government agencies during the war consisted of bulletins produced by JUSPAO (Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office), USIA (U.S. Information Agency), USIS (U.S. Information Service), and FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Information Service) attacking the treatment of American POW's. The North Vietnamese countered these claims with their own newspaper and radio reports on the conditions of the POW's, many of which have been translated and transcribed.

After the war, the focus of government's information agencies shifted to other areas and it fell to civilian groups such as the National League of Families of American Prisoners and the Missing in South East Asia to keep public attention on the POW/MIA issue. These groups circulated newsletters designed to bring awareness of the POW/MIA issue to the public to build pressure on Congress to stay involved. Topics covered include early release of prisoners by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, conditions of the prisoners, peace talks, 1970 Son Tay POW Camp rescue attempt, Operation Homecoming in 1973 (i.e., repatriation of U.S. POWs from North Vietnamese prisons), the return of POW PFC Bobby Garwood in 1979, reports of sightings of living POW's left behind, and POW/MIA hoaxes in the 1980s-90s.

Biographical / Historical

Douglas Eugene Pike (27 July 1924 - 13 May 2002) was born in Cass Lake, Minnesota. He served with the United States Information Agency (USIA) as a Foreign Service Information Officer (FSIO) from 1960 to 1980, serving fifteen years in Saigon from 1960 to 1975. During that time, Pike became a leading American analyst and scholar on the Vietnam War and the communist movements of North and South Vietnam. After the war ended in 1975, he became a special advisor on Vietnam to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a member of the State Department Policy Planning Council. When President Jimmy Carter took office, Pike received an offer to work for Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress (on loan from USIA), where he wrote a study on Vietnamese Foreign Relations, wrote reports, testified before Congress and the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, and worked closely with Senator John Glenn and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

As he approached retirement in 1980, Pike received an offer to establish the Indochina Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also established the Indochina Archive. While at UC-Berkeley, Pike became the founder and editor of the quarterly journal Indochina Chronology (1982-2001), which featured scholarly analysis of the most recent research and publications regarding the Vietnam War. In 1997, Pike moved the bulk of his Indochina Archive to the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University.