Word: schweitzers
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...Schweitzer could find no American publisher willing to finance the research project. The Pentagon, weary of con artists peddling phony stories of U.S. prisoners still said to be alive in Southeast Asia, at first brushed him off. Schweitzer finally reached Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Carl Ford, who recognized that the Vietnamese were prepared to hand over something of a treasure trove...
...with Washington over the missing service members in order to get the U.S. to lift its trade embargo but had backed themselves into a corner with their earlier declarations that no prisoner records existed. McConnell suggests that Hanoi needed an unofficial way to turn over the material and saw Schweitzer as a ``face-saving conduit...
...museum curator handed Schweitzer a faded red ledger. Its 208 pages contained a surprise: the index for a vast archive of documents, photos and military artifacts concerning every American taken, dead or alive, during the Vietnam War. The ``Red Book,'' as it was called by the Vietnamese, turned out to be the key to discovering the fate of some of the 2,211 service members the U.S. listed as missing in action in Indochina. Schweitzer worked quickly to scan the pages, storing the images on a thin magnetic tape in his machine. Back at his hotel, he telexed...
Vietnam and the U.S. are about to open liaison offices in each other's capitals, another step toward healing the wounds of a war fought more than two decades ago. In a new book, Inside Hanoi's Secret Archives, author Malcolm McConnell recounts how Schweitzer helped speed that process--and how the former librarian for an international school in Bangkok became a covert U.S. operative who helped break the diplomatic logjam over the missing service members. The U.S. Defense Department had assumed all along that Hanoi was keeping detailed records on captured U.S. soldiers, though Vietnamese officials insisted that most...
...Schweitzer, who collaborated with McConnell on the book, stumbled into being an intelligence operative. From his librarian's job he moved to the U.N., serving as a relief official in Indochina until 1983, when he organized a nonprofit charity to aid Vietnamese boat people. Six years later, during a trip to Hanoi to arrange a hospital visit, he asked his Vietnamese hosts on a whim if he could tour the Central Military Museum, which housed the Defense Ministry's war artifacts. The Vietnamese agreed, permitting him to browse through displays of uniforms and equipment taken from members...