The Schanberg MIA Thing

During the post-Vietnam uproar over alleged American servicemen allegedly deliberately left behind by the Pentagon as prisoners, a major website wrote admiringly of the assertion to this effect by Sydney Schanberg, reporter for the New York Times. At the time I was a military writer in Washington and deeply immersed in the story, based in large part on nonsense. I wrote the webmaster of the aforementioned site pointing out that Schanberg’s assertions on technical aspects were profoundly ignorant. Below are the relevant parts of my letter, name changed.

“Jack,

You are at your best at numerical analysis, as for example in those wonderful and logically irrefutable pieces on … and least good when writing about the military.

Below a few graffs from your essay on POWs and comments

“Nov. 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

▲▼The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground—a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang —could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by U.S. planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors—as U.S. pilots had been trained to do—no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos. Alfond added, according to the transcript, “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”

Let’s look at this.

First, Pave Spíke was not a sensor at all, but an LD pod–laser designator–and had no relation whatever to air-dropped sensors. Laser pods do not gather information.

Wikipedia: “The Westinghouse AN/ASQ-153\AN/AVQ-23 Pave Spike is an electro-optical laser designator targeting pod used to direct laser-guided bombs to target in daylight, visual conditions. It contained a laser boresighted to a television camera, which displayed its image on a cockpit screen.”

The program the MIA/POW folk thought they were thinking about was Igloo White:

Wikipedia:   Operation Igloo White

This was the operation that dropped sensors. The Wikipedia entry is far too long to cut and paste, but you might find it informative.

Second: “…the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.” The MIA/POW people were thus asking the Senate committee about data collected by devices that did not collect data. That the committee did not question this curious request suggests that they knew no more about Pave Spike and Igloo White than did the MIA/POW people.    This too is not surprising. Senators seldom know anything about technology, much less that of classified military programs.

Third, the idea that Igloo White sensors contained  data links of some sort for downed flyers is silly. The long, technically detailed Igloo White Wikipedia entry makes no mention of such rescue gear. In the diagram below of an Igloo White sensor, the absence of keyboard and of commo circuitry is evident.

Since the “rescue gear” did not exist, the story of the twenty PoWs or pilots and their authentication number is false.

Fourth, “…a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners…” The  batteries in the sensors lasted less than two months (see Igloo White Wikipedia entry) making the claim that signals were received a year later false.

Fifth, signals from the sensors had to be picked up by orbiting EW birds and relayed to NKP in Thailand. A year after the prisoners were supposedly returned, how many American electronic warfare planes were orbiting over the Trail?

The story of the twenty POWs is clearly a fabrication, not a mistake. Having been intimately involved in the MIA fracas, and knowing how journalism works in Washington, I will speculate with some confidence that an interested party fed the PAVE SPIKE-rescue-capability story to the MIA people who, being unfamiliar with military technology (often housewives) believed it because they wanted to believe it. Today, fact-checking a story like this takes a few minutes on Google, but the MIA people had neither the internet nor, it seems, the inclination. The paragraphs quoted at the beginning of this email contain other highly dubious claims but, since they cannot be demonstrated with a link, I pass over them.

Best,

Fred

Dave Miller
Dave,

That Unz accepts every conspiracy theory had has heard of isn’t important, but that Schanberg wrote this gunch, thus putting the prestige of the NYT, behind it, is a bit more disturbing.

On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 1:12 PM David Miller <mail@davidbmiller.com> wrote:
Unz is clearly wrong.  The best info from the HCM Trail came from clamps put on the ground cables by SF people which recorded and sent up the traffic.  From there it went to analysts who untangled the multiple signals.  The NVA had very little understanding of this 1966-? program.

The housewives may be wrong but the “trampled in the grass” call signs, the “we somehow misplaced the call-sign codes for the missing aviators” and the sheer impossibility that every single living flyer who went down alive in Laos and couldn’t be rescued vanished (with the NVA saying then and later “the pathet lao took them prisoner”) tells me something important happened.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 7:58 PM Fred Reed <jetpossum@gmail.com> wrote:
Dave,

If memory serves, Montreux Convention was 1936, not 1923, though it doesn’t matter. I ge in a fair amount of trouble by not buying the sillier of conspiracy theories, and your mention of flags in Ex reminded me of the MIA-POW nonsense which I suffered through. Ron Unz, who believes every conspiracy theory he has ever heard of, quoted Schanberg’s piece on the subject with religious faith. It was sonsense to anyone with the slightest familiarity with military tech, but they never check. Anyway, my comments:

”
“Ron,

You are at your best at numerical analysis, as for example in those wonderful and logically irrefutable pieces on race and crime, and least good when writing about the military.

Below a few graffs from your essay on POWs and a few comments you might peruse. As I have no intention of posting it anywhere it is of no practical importance. I do not send it to anger you as I have nothing to gain by doing so but because you might find it of use. The following bit is from the Schanberg piece you have posted.

“Nov. 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

▲▼The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground—a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang —could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by U.S. planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors—as U.S. pilots had been trained to do—no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos. Alfond added, according to the transcript, “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”

Let’s look at this.

First, Pave Spíke was not a sensor at all, but an LD pod–laser designator–and had no relation whatever to air-dropped sensors. Laser pods do not gather information.

Wikipedia: “The Westinghouse AN/ASQ-153\AN/AVQ-23 Pave Spike is an electro-optical laser designator targeting pod used to direct laser-guided bombs to target in daylight, visual conditions. It contained a laser boresighted to a television camera, which displayed its image on a cockpit screen.”

The program the MIA/POW folk thought they were thinking about was Igloo White:

Wikipedia:   Operation Igloo White

This was the operation that dropped sensors. The Wikipedia entry is far too long to cut and paste, but you might find it informative.

Second: “…the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.” The MIA/POW people were thus asking the Senate committee about data collected by devices that did not collect data. That the committee did not question this curious request suggests that they knew no more about Pave Spike and Igloo White than did the MIA/POW people.    This too is not surprising. Senators seldom know anything about technology, much less that of classified military programs.

Third, the idea that Igloo White sensors contained  data links of some sort for downed flyers is silly. The long, technically detailed Igloo White Wikipedia entry makes no mention of such rescue gear. In the diagram below of an Igloo White sensor, the absence of keyboard and of commo circuitry is evident.

Since the “rescue gear” did not exist, the story of the twenty PoWs or pilots and their authentication number is false.

Fourth, “…a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners…” The  batteries in the sensors lasted less than two months (see Igloo White Wikipedia entry) making the claim that signals were received a year later false.

Fifth, signals from the sensors had to be picked up by orbiting EW birds and relayed to NKP in Thailand. A year after the prisoners were supposedly returned, how many American electronic warfare planes were orbiting over the Trail?

The story of the twenty POWs is clearly a fabrication, not a mistake. Having been intimately involved in the MIA fracas, and knowing how journalism works in Washington, I will speculate with some confidence that an interested party fed the PAVE SPIKE-rescue-capability story to the MIA people who, being unfamiliar with military technology (often housewives) believed it because they wanted to believe it. Today, fact-checking a story like this takes a few minutes on Google, but the MIA people had neither the internet nor, it seems, the inclination. The paragraphs quoted at the beginning of this email contain other highly dubious claims but, since they cannot be demonstrated with a link, I pass over them.

Best,

Fred

Unz Airliner

Bickering onward and upward

Ron,

I sent you the link to my old story hoping to suggest that I have some familiarity with the military and to hint politely  that you don’t. It didn’t work. I confess to being annoyed, after spending well over two decades covering the military, at listening to nonsensical stories from one voluminously unfamiliar with the armed forces who didn’t bother to investigate. And I note that with the predictability of sunrise, you didn’t provide the lab and radar reports. I suggest that they do not exist. Whether you know they don’t exist is an interesting question.

I did not mean to insult you by referring to your apparent lack of reportorial experience. However, your near-perfect dearth of verifiable

sourcing is not consistent with newspapering as I knew it. Here is a column I wrote for the Unz Review covering, toward the bottom, how the Navy actually does live-fire exercises, what it uses for targets, and the extreme caution involved. It should have revealed how painfully silly the TWA story is, but it didn’t. In real journalism, at least until recently, having some slight familiarity with your subject was thought advisable.

A prime rule of reportorial journalism is Always check with the other side. Did you check with the Navy? Did your sources? Why not? A reporter would have.

The lack of substantiation matters. It would keep your AmPrav piece out of any paper. Working in daily journalism instils discipline in that desk editors expects sources for things stated as fact. This is not true of blogs. In the present case, you offer a conspiracy theory in an account apparently based on books by other conspiracy theorists and then refuse to verify the most damning of evidence.

Peacetime naval deployments in domestic waters are public record. Did you, or your sources, check to see whether there actually were warships near New York? Specifically which ships, also public record? A reporter would have. The presence of those ships, if they were present, is crucial to your story but the vagueness and passive voice, characteristic of conspiracy theories, suggest that no one checked.

Were these warships, if they existed, of the sort that fire antiaircraft missiles? Do you know what kind of ships do this? I do and a reporter would have checked.

If “Navy ships” shot down the plane, at least five hundred sailors the Navy command, and all their families and friends would know. So, probably would everybody in every bar within fifty miles of base. A reporter would have tracked this down. Did your sources? Have you? There would still be people who remembered.

The story would before long have been all over Navy Times, now part of Military Times. Since the paper came out weekly, it would have taken extraordinary agility for conspirators to bring the staff, many of whom I knew, into the plot to prevent publication. Did you read Navy Times?

Military reporters in Washington do read Navy Times. They also have contacts all through the military. They mostly work for daily papers or television. There is a newsroom on the E-ring with maybe a dozen wire and other reporters there all day, probably checking with Chinfo daily. Were they brought into the conspiracy so as not to write about it, after the event, or was the event planned in advance with many hundreds of journalists brought in forethoughtedly?

The lab doing the chemical analysis would have known what happened, as wood everybody in the radar installations you mention bud mostly do not identify. Did you talk to them? Did your sources? You mention the FAA report. Link? I wonder why they spontaneously kept the shootdown a secret. A reporter would think about these things.

The 278 people who “saw a missile: Source? Did someone interview all of them?  A reporter would check.  Standard missiles, designed to intercept aircraft at over Mach 1 and, for some time ICBMs, accelerate phenomenally and flight time to a low-flying plane would have been a very few seconds. Is this what the 278, if they exist, claim they saw? Did they report a huge, brilliant orange flash of the alleged explosion? No explosion, no missile. Such explosions are dramatic enough that anybody seeing one would remember it. Did you make an effort to find out? Or did you rely on books of conspiracy theories without question?

The FBI agents who “were seen” hammering on the wreckage and people seen stealing incriminating pieces: Source? Who actually reported seeing these things? Who told your sources? These, like the chem analysis and radar reports, so completely confirm your story that not providing them suggests that they are what they seem, fabrications. Prove me wrong.

Note that we now have the Navy chain of command, CIA, FBI, FAA, many hundreds of sailors and their families, a chemical laboratory, several radar sites, the major media, and the specialized military press in on the coverup. Reporters, most of whome would vivisect their grandmothers to break such a story, no say nothing. Mum was the word.

It is true that I have not read the books you mention on the TWA adventure, having read enough on conspiracy theories as not to want more. (Most recently, The JFK Assassination Dissected by Cyril Wecht, a hodgepodge of contradictory absurdity.) An interesting book on conspiracy theories, Conspiracy, by Michael Shermer, endeavors to explain why intelligent people believe in things that are obviously false.  But you can easily prove my doubts wrong simply by posting the lab and radar station reports, and verifiable proof of the FBI hammerers and choice-piece stealers. Regarding Schanberg, he may have been a superb reporter as you say. I don’t know. I knew him only slightly. However, every technical objection I made to his story is rock-solid, just basic military knowledge, which you can easily check either in the Wikipedia or many military publications. If you like, go through what I said, fact by fact. Schanberg couldn’t even get the name of the program right, much less the hardware. He was blankly, demonstrably ignorant, as any of Washington’s “defense intellectuals” would have seen at a glance, and his reporting on the matter amateurish. His publishing such twaddle without checking it leads me to doubt his credentials in general, but here I may be wrong. You also posted it without checking, leading me to wonder about other unsupported assertions by you. See above.

I have suspected that proponents of conspiracy theories (whose condition John Derbyshire has astutely described as likely a minor mental disorder, “like OCD”) avoid sourcing and specifics because they realize, consciously or otherwise, that these can be checked. For example, if you named the alleged Navy ships, their whereabouts at the time of the shoot-down could easily be checked. If you stated how the Twin Towers were rigged for demolition, a call to Controlled Demolitions Inc. would reveal the plausibility of the theory. Unless, of course, CDI was in on the plot. And the most parsimonious explanation for the lack of press interest is that reporters recognize that the stories are poppycock.

All in good fun,

Fred