HANOI: Top-secret intelligence flows into the United State's military missing-in-action (MIA) compound in Hanoi: a black American soldier is being forced to work in chains under armed guard near the Cambodian border.
The last American prisoners might have left Vietnam officially in 1973 but no chances are taken. The information is analysed in Hawaii and at the Pentagon by intelligence experts and a crack investigator is dispatched from Bangkok.
Under special arrangements, Vietnam grants the investigator a visa at short notice without knowing the full details of the mission.
Passing over minimum information, he gets co-operation from Vietnamese security forces and tracks down the sighting.
He finds a rather lanky, dark-skinned ethnic Cambodian-Vietnamese working in a lumber camp, dragging logs with chains. Vietnamese soldiers patrol nearby, securing the border from their former Khmer Rouge comrades.
More than 90 such live sighting investigations, all with full Vietnamese backing, have ended this way since the inception of the US MIA office in Hanoi in 1992.
Live sightings are considered the priority, and the threshold to start a full search not especially tough as a result, defence sources warn, despite a wealth of US intelligence collected in Vietnam long after 1975.