A Possible Pow Photo Message?

SPOKANE - When North Vietnam released nearly 600 American prisoners of war in 1973, Katheryn Serex watched television for days hoping to see her father.

"I kept thinking they forgot to tell us he's there. I kept thinking he was going to be the next one off the plane," recalled Serex, who was 11 at the time.

Air Force Maj. Henry "Mick" Serex never did come home. An electronic weapons' officer on a radar-jamming plane, he was shot down over North Vietnam in 1972 and listed as missing in action.

But last year a photograph surfaced that Katheryn Serex believes could mean her father was being held captive as recently as June 1992. The Vietnamese government denies having any U.S. prisoners of war.

"If my dad is there, I want him back," she said in a recent interview.

In 1992, a special Senate committee on prisoners of war and those missing in action was looking at aerial intelligence photographs from Southeast Asia.

In one 1975 satellite photograph of Dong Mang prison near Hanoi, some photo interpreters had seen the Morse code configuration for the letter K - a distress signal - on the building's roof.

The Defense Intelligence Agency suggested comparing the 1975 picture to a June 1992 satellite photograph of the site. The Senate committee asked Robert Dussault, who taught evasion and resistance skills at Fairchild Air Force Base during the war, to review the photos. He had since gone to work for the Defense Department agency

that devises distress symbols and teaches pilots how to use them.

When Dussault looked at the 1992 photo, he said he saw the letters S-E-R-E-X marked in a rice paddy near the prison. He also saw 72TA88 along with nine or 10 other digits. He checked Maj. Serex's authenticator code, the secret numbers and letters given to air crews so they could identify themselves to rescuers, and found the last four digits matched. And '72 was the year Serex was shot down, Dussault noted.

"My eyebrows went way up," he recalled.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for checking reports of possible prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, contends that the photograph along with many others reviewed during the committee hearings were anomalies.

The agency's experts in photo interpretation contend that letters and numbers can occur when shadows, trees and other vegetation combine in nature. When the SEREX photo was enlarged, the letters disappeared, the agency said.

Bob Taylor, the committee's chief investigator on photographic evidence, said he saw the word SEREX in the picture.

"If grass can spell out people's names and a secret four-digit code, then I have a new-found respect for crabgrass," Taylor said.

Air crews are taught to use existing vegetation and structures as part of their distress symbols, altering them slightly so captors would not notice, Taylor said.

Nothing definitive came out of the Senate select committee. A pair of independent photo interpreters looked at the picture. One called it an anomaly; the other said there was a 70 percent certainty the symbols were man-made.

The photograph is classified because of what it might reveal about the nation's spy satellite capability, but federal law says at least one member of the Serex family is entitled to see it.

Katheryn Serex, now a 30-year-old nurse in this Eastern Washington city, wants to see the photograph. "Show me the photo and then tell me it's an anomaly," she said. "People lie, but photographs don't lie."