Friday, June 22nd 2007, 4:00 AM
AP Photo-04/24/07

Good thing for Henry Kissinger that he won't be in the States when President Bush meets with Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet.

A White House spokesman confirms to us that "a high U.S. priority" during the historic Oval Office summit would be "accounting for Americans still missing since the war."

But while Bush says he's eager to pry open the painful issue of prisoners of war, Kissinger tells us he has no interest in revisiting the subject.

The former secretary of state recently received a copy of "An Enormous Crime."
The new book, by former Rep. Bill Hendon and Elizabeth Stewart, contends Kissinger and President Richard Nixon secretly promised $4.75 billion in aid to North Vietnam in exchange for the return of all POWs.

According to the book, the North Vietnamese returned half the POWs in 1973. But when Watergate came crashing down on Nixon, he sought a quick end to the POW mess and chose not to pay the money or to press for the unaccounted soldiers. Former Queens congressman John LeBoutillier, who sent Kissinger the book, included a letter telling him that it "proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Hanoi purposely kept 700 U.S. POWs behind as insurance."
LeBoutillier told Kissinger: "Hundreds of U.S. pilots and servicemen remain alive in captivity ... You need to address your mistakes - and the fact that the North Vietnamese 'took' you at Paris. ... You are directly responsible for this tragedy. It is still not too late for you to help ... bring these men home."

Kissinger calls the book's allegations "irresponsible" and "insupportable."
"There was some discussion [during the Paris peace talks] of economic aid that we might give [the North Vietnamese]," Kissinger told us this week before leaving for Asia. "But [the aid] didn't have anything to do with the prisoners. The prisoner release was supposed to be finished in April 1973. The economic aid question didn't arise till after that." He added, "We didn't pay them because they never carried out the agreement."

Kissinger argued that "if the Vietnamese held prisoners back in order to get more money, why didn't they ever say they had [the extra 700] prisoners?"

As for the book, "I'm not going to read it." Despite the authors' assertion that it draws on thousands of pages of declassified documents, "I would be amazed" if there was anything new, he said. "Congress went through all of this in the hearings [chaired by Sen. John Kerry in 1991]," said Kissinger. "

I testified for two days then. ... There's no other subject on which my colleagues and I worked as hard."

Says LeBoutillier: "Of course the guy's not going to admit he got duped. He won a Nobel Prize for this. What a weasel!"
 

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