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RUTHERFORD WOMAN FIGHTS FOR M.I.A.'S
CONVINCED that United States officials have been covering up the retention of American servicemen in Indochina, Josephine McAtarian is fighting to open up the issue and bring the men home.
When she first founded her organization, the Red Ribbon-Red Badge of Courage Campaign, three years ago, Mrs. McAtarian was often dismissed as a crackpot. But recently, even President Reagan has acknowledged that a ''number'' of former prisoners of the Vietnam War have told of men who have not returned.
Mrs. McAtarian, a registered nurse who runs her campaign from her Rutherford home, persuaded the municipality to proclaim itself MIA (Missing in Action) Town U.S.A. for a week, and on April 17 bells tolled and sirens wailed here for those still missing in action.
Mrs. McAtarian and other of her fellow activists cite a number of factors which, she says, bear out her contention that American prisoners were left behind following the Paris peace accords of January, 1973.
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For example, they note that Henry A. Kissinger, then the National Security Adviser, wrote in his memoirs that both he and President Richard M. Nixon were under enormous pressure to reach a settlement before Congress unilaterally ended the war.
As a result, the activists assert, Dr. Kissinger left some issues unresolved - including a full accounting of prisoners - on the assumption that they would be taken up during ensuing economic aid talks. However, the talks collapsed the following June.
''We believe as many as 500 men were held back by the Communists,'' Mrs. McAtarian said, adding: ''Nixon and Kissinger should be tried for high treason.'' A former Defense Department official, Roger Shields, testified before a Congressional committee in 1979 that 150 ''hard-core'' cases of unacknowledged prisoners, for which the United States had evidence, had been presented to the Vietnamese, but with no results. He said this number represented only a small fraction of such cases.
According to Defense and State Department correspondence, several weeks after the peace-pact signing, Dr. Kissinger gave Hanoi the files on 80 servicemen that the United States strongly believed had not been freed.
The issue did not begin to gain much recognition until 1979, when George Brooks of Newburgh, N.Y., director of the Washington-based National League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, released a compendium of ''sightings'' obtained from refugees.
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Soon after that, the Pentagon admitted, the Government deemed all reports of such sightings secret. To date, the Pentagon has 486 eyewitness accounts of American servicemen having been seen alive in Vietnam and Laos, with more than 60 such reports in the last 12 months alone.
In an address to families of missing servicemen in Washington last January, President Reagan called most of these reports ''credible.'' What he did not mention, says Col. Earl Hopper of Arizona, a league director, is that nearly all the witnesses passed Government polygraph tests and that Department of Defense intelligence officials told him that 98 percent of the reports were highly credible.
Mrs. McAtarian first got interested in the issue when she saw a telecast saying that Swedish construction workers had come across a chain gang of Americans north of Hanoi in 1981. (As with other sightings, the State Department called the report ''a rumor.'')
Mrs. McAtarian then got in touch with the League of Families and others interested in the missing and compiled documents which, she insists, prove a high-level conspiracy by the Government to bury the issue.
She said she hoped that other communities would follow Rutherford's example by declaring themselves an MIA Town U.S.A. Three others plan to, she said, but declined to name them.
The organization that Mrs. McAtarian heads is financed by her husband Frank, a businessman. It sends packets of information all over the nation, and a number of groups have taken up the ''red ribbon'' theme.
Mrs. McAtarian believes that President Reagan is using the missing in action-prisoner of war issue for political expedience. The Administration is asking the families to create public awareness, she said, when he could easily do that job himself.
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''Why the hell didn't he bring this up in his State of the Union message?'' rather than wait for the meeting of the missing-in-action families in January, she asked.
''The Vietnamese are certainly to blame, too,'' Mrs. McAtarian asserted, saying that Hanoi has always been cagey on the subject. In response to these charges, Nguyen Can, a high-level official at the Hanoi mission to the United Nations, said that ''a segment of the American press'' was trying to ''smear'' his country. He said that all American prisoners had been freed in 1973, but he did not directly respond to a question as to whether any prisoners might have been overlooked or had ''chosen'' to stay.
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