During a trip to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, actor Jane Fonda betrayed U.S. prisoners of war by giving messages they handed her to their North Vietnamese captors.
In 1972, so the internet story goes, the award-winning American actor Jane Fonda traveled to Hanoi, North Vietnam, in the midst of the Vietnam War. At some point in her visit, Fonda met with U.S. soldiers being held by the North Vietnamese military as prisoners of war. While a camera allegedly recorded the meeting, the POWs supposedly managed to pass Fonda scraps of paper containing their Social Security numbers in the hopes they could be smuggled back to the U.S. to confirm they were still alive.
Instead, the story goes, Fonda handed the slips to a North Vietnamese officer as soon as the camera shut off. Three prisoners purportedly died from subsequent beatings and a fourth barely survived, living to tell the tale of Fonda’s traitorous behavior.
It’s a rumor that’s been spreading for decades as of this writing, and we consistently receive reader mail requesting a fact check. We have in fact debunked the rumor,
Our conclusion, however — that the specific tale about Fonda handing over the messages is false — hasn’t changed in the past 26 years.
Fonda did visit North Vietnam
The story is loosely rooted in a context of truth, as many myths are. Fonda did visit North Vietnam as an antiwar activist in 1972, and, while there, she did meet with U.S. prisoners of war. She acknowledged this in a page on her website separating truth from fiction about her visit.
According to Fonda’s account, she was one of roughly 300 Americans who traveled to Vietnam with the aim of ending the war throughout its course. One of her main goals was to tour and document a series of dikes and levees in the agriculturally important Red River Delta. The U.S. Air Force had reportedly bombed the dikes on purpose, possibly hoping to cause a catastrophic flood.
Upon seeing the dikes, Fonda concluded — as did some other observers — that the U.S. was intentionally bombing them. She shared her conclusion at a news conference in Paris not long after returning from Hanoi, according to contemporaneous reporting from The New York Times.
While in North Vietnam, Fonda also made statements on Radio Hanoi, a radio station that broadcast English-language propaganda aimed at demoralizing U.S. troops. “I implore you, I beg you to consider what you are doing,” The New York Times reported her as saying.
The anti-aircraft gun photo
But the most likely reason the secret messages story struck such a lasting chord is because of an infamous, widely published photograph of Fonda sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. As soon as the photo was released in the U.S., many began calling Fonda a traitor and referring to her by the nickname “Hanoi Jane.”
Fonda has said repeatedly in the years since the picture’s release that she regrets being photographed in that pose. She recalled online that the photo was taken of her on her last day in Hanoi. Exhausted from her trip, she was taken to meet North Vietnamese soldiers, Fonda said. They sang her a song in Vietnamese, and then she sang them a Vietnamese song she had memorized for the occasion. The soldiers loved it, applauding and laughing.
Amid the revelry, according to Fonda, someone led her to the anti-aircraft gun and snapped the photo without her being fully aware of what was happening.
“It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned,” she wrote. “I will never know. But if they did I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen.”
The photo was published and Fonda gained a longstanding reputation in some circles as anti-American and treasonous. That reputation, deserved or otherwise, made it easier for some to believe that she might have quite literally betrayed U.S. prisoners of war by revealing secret messages entrusted to her to their captors.
Debunking the ‘secret messages’ myth
Since 1999, the story about the POWs’ messages has generally appeared in the form of this copypasta. It is relatively unchanged from its email chain message origins in the late ’90s:
From 1963-65, Col. Larry Carrigan was in the 47FW/DO (F-4E’s). He spent 6 years in the “Hanoi Hilton”. . . The first three of which his family only knew he was “missing in action.” His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned-up, fed and clothed routine in preparation for a “peace delegation” visit.
They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they were alive and still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security Number on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man’s hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: “Aren’t you sorry you bombed babies?” and “Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?” Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.
She took them all without missing a beat. . . At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him all the little pieces of paper…
Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Colonel Carrigan was almost number four but he survived, which is the only reason we know of her actions that day.
As previously stated, Fonda did meet with prisoners of war — exactly seven of them — at one point on her visit. But Larry Carrigan (a real POW), wasn’t one of them. In 1999, he told
The Minnesota Star-Tribune ran an article (part 1, part 2) debunking the claim in 2005, quoting Edison Miller, who did actually meet with Fonda while a POW. “The whole email story about Jane Fonda is just malarkey,” he said.
Miller told the Star-Tribune he didn’t pass Fonda a slip of paper, nor, to his knowledge, did any of the other POWs who met with her that day. He said Fonda didn’t ask them any questions beyond their names — which raises another point: Why would the POWs have needed to pass Fonda their Social Security numbers?
By the time of Fonda’s visit in 1972, some prisoners of war released back to the U.S. had described horrid prison conditions and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, which later memoirs and reporting confirmed but also suggested had began to improve around 1969.
(This, in and of itself, is another discrepancy. The Star-Tribune also spoke to Mike McGrath, a former Navy pilot who ran the NAM-POWs veterans group in the late 1990s. He said there had been no known cases of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam being beaten to death since 1969, three years before Fonda’s visit.)
Even assuming the torture had continued (and had not been documented in the following 50 years), the North Vietnamese would have wanted to maintain appearances of at least decent conditions within the prison camps. That would have included letting Fonda (and through her, the outside world) know with whom she was meeting. Fonda would have had time to memorize the names of the people she met and report them afterward — and Miller noted that she did specifically ask their names.
As one final note: The full copypasta also purported to relate accusations made by a different prisoner of war, Jerry Driscoll. According to the text, he spat at Fonda and was beaten for it when she visited in 1972. Speaking to the Star-Tribune in 2005, Driscoll not only denied those claims but denied ever meeting Fonda at all.
