CONWAY, ROSEMARY A.
Name: Rosemary A. Conway
Branch/Rank: Civilian
Unit: CIA
Date of Birth:
Home City of Record:
Date of Loss: 04 June 1975
Country of Loss: LAOS
Loss Coordinates: 175800 North 1023600 East
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno:
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action
Combat Casualty File.
REMARKS: 08/11/75 RELEASED
[ALTIDENT.TXT 06/20/92]
Transcript of story published in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside
County, California, Friday, June 19 edition.
THE ALTERNATE IDENTITY PROGRAM
By David D. Hendrix
The Press Enterprise
The staff of a select U.S. Senate committee is investigating reports
that as many as 300 American POWs from Southeast Asia have been
relocated throughout the world in a secret resettlement program.
Retired military personnel who say they are familiar with the program or
helped operate it say the far-reaching enterprise involves new
identities, the active cooperation of several governments and secret aid
to Vietnam.
The so-called "new identity" program's goal is to free prisoners while
avoiding embarrassment for U.S. officials and Vietnamese leaders. For
years, officials of both nations have said no American POWs were left in
Southeast Asia or no definitive proof exists of their presence.
The program stretches back to at least 1979, sources say, and was at its
height in 1985-86 when it was suspended because of the focus the
Iran-Contra revelations directed at the National Security Council. The
security council was involved in the program, which was revived in 1989,
a retired Air Force communications specialist said. Former National
Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, who was deeply involved in
American efforts in the mid-1980s to barter arms to Iran for U.S.
hostages in the Mideast, called the stories about the POW relocations
surreal. He said he never had heard of such activities. The Department
of Defense is not aware of any such operation, spokeswoman Capt. Susan
Strednansky said last week. Investigators for the Senate Select
Committee on POW/MIA affairs, however, have asked private researchers
for help to determine whether such stories are true.
Committee spokeswoman Deborah De Young said she could not discuss
specifics of any investigation. The committee was formed last fall to
investigate whether American POWs were left behind at the end of the
Vietnam War and whether any might still be alive.
Homecoming II, an organization of people who believe American officials
knowingly left U.S. prisoners in Southeast Asia at the end of the war,
wants any of the alleged returnees to telephone (919) 527-8079 for help.
According to a number of sources, including a former KGB general:
Selected American POWs, some of them alleged turncoats, were permitted
to return to the United States in 1979, shortly after U.S. Marine Robert
Garwood made his presence known in Vietnam and was returned home.
Garwood was court martialed and convicted of charges that he
collaborated with the enemy and struck a fellow prisoner.
The prospect of additional MIAs coming up alive was potentially too
embarrassing for U.S. officials, the story goes, especially after a
number of reports and commissions had determined there was no evidence
the prisoners existed.
In 1981, shortly after taking office, President Reagan was offered a
large number of prisoners for $4.2 billion but rejected the offer at the
advice of his staff. It was too much like the Iran hostage situation,
which had brought about his predecessor's downfall, and Reagan had taken
a tough stance against negotiating with hostage holders. Instead, the
administration mounted a series of expeditions into Laos, one of which
came back with at least one unidentified person.
At some undisclosed point in 1981, the United States and Vietnam decided
to begin exchanging prisoners for secret aid, similar to the later
Iran-Contra program, sources say. Unlike the well-publicized Mideast
hostages, however, the POWs could not be acknowledged. George Russell
Leard, then a 46-year-old retired Air Force communications and computer
specialist, discussed the new identity program in two July 1989
interviews in Las Vegas where he worked. Standing beside his battered
white van behind the Las Vegas Sun newspaper building, he smoked
cheroot-style cigars while describing a program that he said included
life and death.
Leard said that by the end of 1986 the program had funneled up to 275
Americans through a Pacific Ocean island complex specially fitted for
the project. About 35 were in such poor health that they died aboard
medical evacuation flights between Vietnam and the island, he said.
Leard, who said he was a specialist in the program, declined to name the
island but said the site was not in the Philippines, Guam or Hawaii. The
bulk of the returnees were brought back between 1984 and 1986, he said.
After being processed through the recovery and re-orientation camp, the
surviving prisoners were sent to military or veterans hospitals in the
United States, he said. Up to 100 were given new identities in the
United States; another 65 elected to return to Southeast Asia for
various reasons.
Leard's military records reveal a 20-year career that started with the
Marines, switched to the Air Force, and involved tours in Vietnam, where
he was nearly killed in a machete attack, and Korea.
In his later military service, he had stints in Virginia and Nevada for
special Air Force detachments where numbers disguise specific duties. He
held a top secret security clearance. Commendations and outstanding
performance reports praising his talents as a computer and scheduling
specialist fill his files.
Leard said people were selected individually for their talents to
administer the program, making it impossible to trace through specific
units. Leard, who since has moved to New Mexico, has been called by
Senate investigators but declined to talk to them on the telephone. De
Young, the select committee spokeswoman, declined to say whether Leard
would be subpoenaed to testify.
The retired Air Force specialist is not the only person talking about
secret returnees. In January, retired KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin testified
before the Senate select committee that his Soviet counter)intelligence
staff in 1978 interviewed three American prisoners in Vietnam held after
the war. The three were among a handful made available for the
interviews and one consented to act as a Soviet agent if returned to the
United States, he said.
Kalugin said that recruiting POWs was a major goal of his staff
following the successful recruitment of a British POW during the Korean
War.
Vietnamese officials, he said, told him the CIA, Navy and Air Force
officers were sent home in 1979. He said the KGB waited several months
"until these guys settled down" before trying to contact them.
But he said that either the phone numbers and addresses his agents were
given were false or something else had happened because the returnees
could not be contacted. In 1980, Kalugin said, he was reassigned to
other duties.
Oleg Nechiporenko, whom Kalugin said did the interviewing, said the KGB
General's account was not accurate )) that the talks with the three POWs
were held in 1973. Vietnamese officials called the story false.
The only American prisoners from the Vietnam War acknowledged as being
released, almost 600, were returned in early 1973 in Operation
Homecoming. More than 2500 MIAs, including Robert Garwood, remained
unaccounted for.
Kalugin, maintaining his account of the interviews was correct, said the
former Soviet Union's intelligence agency did not want to disclose old
programs. Besides, Kalugin said, Vietnam is one of the few intelligence
listening posts left for the crumbled former Soviet Union and his
disclosure was embarrassing to the Southeast Asian nation.
The three officers were not the only ones who returned secretly in 1979,
say other sources. Three missing Marine riflemen, each branded as a
possible deserter or turncoat, also came back to the United States that
year and two of them received new identities, according to William R.
Adkins.
Adkins, who served with the Army Special Forces in Vietnam, said he was
shown many classified documents revealing the program in 1979 while
gathering information about Garwood, the MIA who returned openly that
year and was court martialed.
Adkins was imprisoned in England in 1980 and in Virginia in 1987 on
charges of carrying concealed weapons. Both arrests came shortly after
he publicly discussed the program.
The return of one Marine, Jon M. Sweeney, was noted briefly by the New
York Times. Sweeney quietly was discharged without a court martial,
Adkins said.
Official Department of Defense record show Sweeney listed missing in
action in February 1969 in South or North Vietnam and "released in
Hanoi" in August 1970. No mention is ever made of any later return to
the United States.
Adkins said Marines Robert L. Greer and Fred T. Schreckengost, two other
1979 returnees, were treated quite differently than Sweeney and Garwood.
Greer and Schreckengost were given new identities and sent on their way,
he said.
A jawbone, 22 teeth and some small bone fragments were identified by
U.S. authorities early last year as the remains of Greer, of Pleasant
Hill, California and Schreckengost, of East Palestine, Ohio. Officials
said the remains were retrieved from an old grave site in Vietnam.
Men claiming to be Greer and Schreckengost, however, surfaced in 1987 in
New York and Bangkok.
Captured June 6, 1964,, while swimming in South Vietnam, Greer and
Schreckengost either were killed almost immediately, sent north to Hanoi
and escaped at least once enroute, or turned and actually fought against
American troops, according to official U.S. documents. But they weren't
returned to new lives in America, U.S. officials have said.
Not so, said Adkins. He said he showed the documents to Ann Mills
Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of
American Prisoners and Missing in southeast Asia, and to an investigator
for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
In an Oct. 26, 1980 column, Anderson wrote:
"As many as six Americans are believed to have taken up arms against
U.S. troops in Vietnam. At least two of these (both Marine privates) are
known to have joined in combat with the Viet Cong against American
forces. Yet these two men now live in the United States, unpunished,
under new identities furnished by the government itself."
In early 1987, two men in New York contacted writer Stephen Arkin and
said they were Greer and Schreckengost. The two said they wanted to live
in the open and offered to turn themselves over to military authorities;
they permitted themselves to be photographed.
Arkin negotiated with Col. Howard Hill, then the Defense Intelligence
Agency's chief of the MIA/POW branch, and arranged to have Hill meet the
two men. But Hill did not show up for the rendezvous and a Marine
lieutenant colonel refused to take custody of the pair, saying they
should turn themselves over to military police as deserters. The two men
declined, left, and called off the bid to publicly present themselves.
Hill said there was a mixup in arrangements. Arkin said last month that
he thought the two men were impostors, a conclusion supported by the
Defense Intelligence Agency. In May 1987, a man who said he was Robert
Greer, told his story in Bangkok to Rosemary Conway, one of the Vietnam
War's few women POWs. She was imprisoned in Vientiane in 1975 after
convincing Royal Laotian pilots to fly their aircraft to Thailand,
thwarting plans to turn the planes over to the victorious communist
Pathet Lao.
Conway, who did contract work for CIA officials in the waning days of
the war, now heads a national volunteer group for presidential candidate
H. Ross Perot.
In a May telephone interview, Conway said she was teaching English in
Bangkok in 1987 when another instructor agreed to introduce her to
officials at Satri Voranart School where he had been offered a job. He
told her he had just received a research grant from an American
foundation and would not need the school position.
Conway said she went with the man to the school, where she was
introduced and eventually earned a teaching job. Following the
interview, the man and Conway returned to her apartment where a photo of
her with Gen. William Westmoreland led to a discussion about POWs. After
Conway recounted her experience in captivity, the man said that he too
had been a POW.
He told a story of being sent to a Soviet Bloc nation and escaping
through a Scandinavian country, Conway recalls. He said he was returned
to the United States in 1979, given a new identity, sent to a school in
Florida, and then went to work in the Middle East where he met his wife,
a Thai woman. Not being particularly close to his family before joining
the Marines in 1961 and tired of roaming, he settled in Thailand.
Conway asked him what his name was. Robert Greer, he replied. The name
was not new to her. She says she had seen a government document in
Arizona in 1984 that said Greer and Schreckengost were given new
identities. "I was so startled to see it, I was flabbergasted", she said
of the document.
She also had talked to the Greer family before leaving for Thailand in
1986. Conway said she kept the man's secret until she returned to the
United States in 1989.
Ronald Greer, who lives in Northern California, said on May 22 that he
knew about his brother's alleged re-identification and the report of the
missed opportunity in New York in 1987. He said he had trouble
understanding Conway's story and the issue was eating up his family's
life. That's why, when military official said last year they had found
his brother's grave and recovered a jawbone and 22 teeth, Ronald Greer
said he accepted the identification. "I have very little doubt that
those remains were his", Ronald Greer said. He had an independent dental
pathologist check the teeth against dental charts. Yet, he admitted,
there is some concern with the identification process because the dental
charts (not X-rays) were provided by the U.S. government. "That's why
there's going to be a tiny little doubt", Greer said.
-------------------------------
Rosemary Conway is quoted in Nigel Cawthorn's book, BAMBOO CAGE where
she discusses "Donahue," and other prisoners. She also had information
on CHARLES SHELTON (see SHELTON bio.)
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