Word: mia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...always been good business for defense contractors and arms dealers. But the Vietnam War gave rise to a dismal new enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended. Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about...
...recent weeks the MIA industry has been given a new lift by retired Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, who was forced to resign in 1990 after he became one of the agency's most truculent public critics. Kalugin has told several U.S. news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, that the KGB questioned "at least" three American POWs in Vietnam in 1978, five years after Hanoi said it had returned all living prisoners...
Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish because of the virtual impossibility of determining what happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam. After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and the Korean War. Yet perhaps because...
...have speculated that as many as 10 Americans could have been left behind in 1973, though he added that he believed they died at the hands of their captors. That possibility, unsettling in its own right, is a far cry from the outlandish claims by some members of the MIA industry. Millions of dollars are raked in every year through mailings from organizations that plead for contributions by raising the specter of large numbers of Americans being held in secret prison camps, waiting for rescuers who are being held back only by a lack of funds. Not one of these...
Photographs that supposedly depict Americans in captivity have a special role in the MIA industry because they make the most direct appeal to both reason and the emotions. But many of the most widely circulated pictures have been retouched or misrepresented. Over the past few years, for example, several pictures purporting to show imprisoned Americans have emerged from Kampuchea. They turned out to be altered images of Soviet citizens clipped from old magazines...