More From the Archives
Today, another FBI document recently released as part of a much larger collection of “stuff” by The Government Attic. As with yesterday’s releases, it’s extracted from one of the much larger PDF files found here. While yesterday’s stuff was concerned with political trivia from the ’50s, today’s is the details of a very interesting “international incident” alleged to have taken place in the summer of 1980: the capture and temporary imprisonment by Vietnam of a handful of U.S. citizens who apparently accidentally sailed into (disputed) Vietnamese territorial waters.
Most of the details have, of course, been redacted, but here’s what I can figure out: Two men were sailing a 41-foot, two-mast “ketch” called the Sea Tiger in an undisclosed area when they became caught in a storm, and eventually found themselves floating near an island - not just any island, but a “disputed” one, at that. A number of 40 or 50-foot “American made” patrol boats intercepted the “Sea Tiger”, and took the crew captive; they were brought ashore - blindfolded - and driven in a Jeep-like vehicle a short distance to a compound which “appeared to have been some type of school when previously controlled by the Americans”. There, they were interrogated, and accused of being “spies” by “SRV authorities”. (SRV - which obviously should have been redacted, but wasn’t, is the abbreviation for “Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.) They were eventually released in late 1980 or early 1981, it appears, after several months in captivity; one can make quite a few interesting inferences from the redactions, as well as things that weren’t redacted.
The incident, it appears, didn’t come to the attention of the government until 1987, and then only as part of the ongoing search for POWs from the Viet Nam war. What kind of follow-up, if any, ever happened is unclear; the report - from the FBI’s Los Angeles field office - was forwarded to the Defense Intelligence Agency in May 1987. Googling the few details in the report, I can’t immediately find any reference to the incident online, but it’s clear that a little bit of research and analysis should be able to ferret out at least a few of the details that are still classified. The island, for instance, is probably part of the Spratly Islands, perhaps Southwest Cay.
If you’d like to take a crack at solving this 28-year-old mystery, you can download the PDF file right here (474KB). Be sure to post any interesting discoveries as comments, below.
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