Thac Ba Lake: the prison DIA said did not exist

Vietnam · Yen Bai province · 1976-1977 · Never resolved

Status: reported by a single witness, Robert Garwood. The Defense Intelligence Agency said as late as June 1992 that no prison had ever existed at Thac Ba Lake. Vietnamese officials confirmed the prison to the Senate committee’s chairman and vice chairman in December 1992. Whether Americans were held there has never been resolved.

For years the Pentagon’s answer to one witness’s account of American prisoners on Thac Ba Lake was that the prison he described did not exist. Then the Vietnamese government told two U.S. senators that it did.

What was reported

Robert Garwood was a Marine private captured in South Vietnam in 1965. He later cooperated with his captors, stayed in Vietnam until 1979 and was convicted by court-martial of collaborating with the enemy after he came home. He spent much of his later captivity at the Yen Bai prison in northern Vietnam. Thac Ba Lake, a large reservoir with many islands, lies in the same province.

Garwood said he saw American prisoners in a prison camp at Thac Ba Lake in 1977, and in a boxcar at a railway crossing in 1976. His accounts varied in the telling, and DIA and other critics have called them inconsistent. The Pentagon has rejected his reports of Americans held in Vietnam after 1973.

The prison that was said not to exist

As recently as June 1992, the Defense Intelligence Agency stated that no prison had ever existed at Thac Ba Lake. In December 1992 Vietnamese officials confirmed the prison’s existence to the committee’s chairman, Sen. John Kerry, and vice chairman, Sen. Bob Smith. The committee wrote in its final report that whether Americans were ever held there, and moved through a railway crossing as Garwood said, “remains under investigation.”

In 1993 Garwood returned to Vietnam with Sen. Smith and an ABC News crew. PIP has not found a published official finding on whether Americans were held at the lake.

What remains unresolved

If Americans were held at Thac Ba Lake after 1973, who were they, and where did they go?
What the investigation the committee described in 1993 found.
How DIA came to say the prison never existed, and what it had checked.
Whether any other source, Vietnamese or foreign, ever described foreign prisoners at the lake or on the Yen Bai rail line.

Request for information

Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.

Accounts from anyone held at, guarding or living near the Thac Ba Lake prison in the 1970s of foreign prisoners there.
Accounts of foreign prisoners moved by rail through Yen Bai province from 1976 to 1978.
What became of any foreign prisoners held at the lake.

DIA said the prison did not exist; Vietnam said it did. Was Garwood right about the prison and wrong about the prisoners? Right about both? Or did he know of the place from his own years at Yen Bai and build a story around it?

Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.

Sources

Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, final report, January 1993, chapter on intelligence, “Thach Ba Lake” and “Robert Garwood.”

Tiếng Việt

Hồ Thác Bà: trại giam mà phía Mỹ từng nói là không tồn tại

Robert Garwood, một lính thủy đánh bộ Mỹ ở lại Việt Nam đến năm 1979, cho biết ông đã thấy tù binh Mỹ tại một trại giam ở hồ Thác Bà năm 1977. Cơ quan Tình báo Quốc phòng Mỹ từng nói trại giam này không tồn tại, nhưng tháng 12 năm 1992 phía Việt Nam đã xác nhận với hai thượng nghị sĩ Mỹ rằng trại có tồn tại. Việc có người Mỹ bị giam ở đó hay không vẫn chưa được làm rõ.

Nếu quý vị từng bị giam, làm việc hoặc sống gần hồ Thác Bà hay các trại ở Yên Bái trong những năm 1970 và từng thấy tù nhân nước ngoài, xin liên hệ với chúng tôi. Chúng tôi chỉ đề nghị hồi ức cá nhân; xin đừng gửi tài liệu thuộc bí mật nhà nước. Quý vị cũng có thể nhắn tin mã hóa qua ứng dụng Signal, tên người dùng PIP.21. Chúng tôi không công bố tên người cung cấp tin nếu không được phép. Email: contact@powinvestigativeproject.org