Panel on POWs Deeply Divided Over Direction : Vietnam War: Some senators feel the investigation has turned away from learning whether Americans were held long after conflict.

WASHINGTON —  Even as the United States moves toward normalizing relations with Hanoi, a special Senate committee on POW-MIA affairs is deeply divided on the question that prompted its creation: Were American POWs imprisoned in Vietnam and Laos long after the war in Southeast Asia ended?

With less than six weeks to go before the expiration of its 18-month mandate, the panel that produced many revelations and compelling insights into the POW mystery is now so split that it is in danger of being dragged into the same emotional vortex of mistrust and bitterness that has swirled at the center of the POW-MIA debate since the Vietnam War’s end.

At least one member, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), is so upset at his colleagues that he canceled plans to participate in the Vietnam trip and is now said by aides to be thinking about resigning from the 12-member panel. The panel’s Republican vice chairman, and a growing number of investigators on the committee staff, are also beginning to complain bitterly of the way the probe is being handled.

The split--which centers on the way the committee has investigated live-sighting reports, satellite imagery and other intelligence suggesting that POWs remained in Southeast Asia long after the war--has been overshadowed in the past few weeks by Vietnam’s recent decision to open its archives on missing servicemen to U.S. field experts.

Now in Hanoi to press the Vietnamese for further cooperation, Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass) said Wednesday that “we are finally on the road to getting answers” to resolve the fate of many of the 2,221 Americans officially still listed as missing.

After touring a secret defense complex in central Hanoi and examining a cache of flight suits and other U.S. military artifacts long hidden there, Kerry predicted that President Bush, before leaving office, will reward the Vietnamese for their cooperation by easing an economic embargo in force since since the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“Many options are available for the President,” Kerry said, describing a letter from Bush that he delivered to Vietnamese President Le Duc Anh. “He (Bush) did not say specifically which he would exercise . . . but he did say he would act.”

But back in Washington, some members of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs are starting to object to what they believe is an attempt to turn the committee investigation into a way of accelerating the establishment of diplomatic relations with Vietnam, a process the United States has long made dependent on resolution of the POW-MIA issue.

In particular, they are upset by what they see as an increasingly aggressive effort by Kerry and his allies to steer the committee’s investigation away from what they believe is compelling evidence that POWs could have been held in Vietnam as recently as 1989.

Reached at his Iowa farm, Grassley said he was appalled by the discovery of two recent memos suggesting that testimony of key government witnesses at a recent committee hearing on satellite imagery had been “scripted in advance” by Kerry and his staff. Although Kerry vehemently denies the charge, Grassley is not alone in making it. Several members of the committee’s investigative staff have begun to complain in private about the way the probe is being handled.

Sen. Robert C. Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who serves as vice chairman of the panel, is also said by aides to be deeply upset by the memos, which refer to a hearing last month in which Pentagon officials dismissed the significance of satellite photographs showing unusual ground signals that could have been made by POWs.

One memo, written by Ronald J. Knecht, an aide to Assistant Defense Secretary Duane P. Andrews, described an Oct. 7 telephone conversation he had with Kerry in which the senator urged the Pentagon to “come on very strong” at the Oct. 15 hearing and “put a lie” to claims by “those who do not want to deal with reality.”

Expressing dismay that classified information had been leaked to the media, Kerry, according to Knecht, advised “the department to (say) . . . : ‘We are appalled. These leaks jeopardize any American in captivity who would try to signal. It is dishonest to leak information obtained in closed hearings knowing the department cannot discuss intelligence sources and methods in public.’ ”

Andrews and other officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency made similar arguments when they testified before the committee a week later.

Asked about the Knecht memorandum, Kerry said he was only trying to pressure the officials into being more open by repeating in public the arguments they had already made to the senators in a closed-door hearing on satellite imagery. “I was not trying to coach them in what to say,” he said.

He added that he believes the tactic worked because Andrews’ subsequent testimony included the most detailed account of imagery analysis yet offered in public.

Grassley and Smith remain unconvinced. “This issue raises serious questions about the integrity of the entire investigation, and I am taking it very seriously,” Grassley said. “Sen. Kerry has explained it to us. I’ve heard his side, and after listening to him I am still taking it very seriously.”

Asked about reports that he may resign from the committee, Grassley said only, “I’m keeping all my options open.”

The Iowa senator said another memo, written Oct. 6, also upset him. It was in the form of a handwritten note to Kerry from his committee staff director, Frances Zwenig. It referred to a firm that asked to perform an independent analysis of the satellite imagery and ended with the notation that, “I am working on the script w/DIA,” a reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Neither Kerry nor Zwenig, who accompanied Kerry to Vietnam, could be reached for comment about the memo.

Interviews with a number of committee staff members over the past several days suggested that, far from being resolved, internal differences that have plagued the panel from its inception have widened as the deadline for drafting a final report approaches. “There is a lot of mistrust and frustration on the staff,” one committee investigator said.

After obtaining the declassification of thousands of documents and taking testimony from hundreds of witnesses, including former presidential candidate Ross Perot, the committee appears likely to conclude that some POWs probably were left behind in 1973, when America withdrew from Vietnam.

But it is likely to remain bitterly divided over the larger, more emotional questions it was called upon to answer--whether any POWs have been desperately trying to tell of their plight via signals meant for satellite detection and whether any could still be alive today.