William Martin Hendon

Born 9 November 1944 in Asheville, North Carolina.

Attended Asheville public schools. Graduated Lee Edwards (now Asheville) High School 1962.

B.S., M.S. in Business Administration, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Thesis: An Analysis of the Businessman’s Demand for Commercial Airline Services [A semantic differential analysis].

Graduate Teaching Assistant and later fulltime Instructor, Department of Marketing and Transportation, College of Business Administration, UT-K.

No military service. College deferment 1962-1966; medical deferment 1967.

Returned to Asheville from Knoxville in 1969. Worked in family business and, following death of father, as Manager of a West German-based manufacturing plant in the Asheville area.

Active in church, civic and political affairs. Episcopalian. Republican.

Chairman, 11th District Republican Party, 1979-1980.

Elected to U.S. House of Representatives 1980. First Republican to represent Western North Carolina’s 11th District in the U.S. House in 52 years.

Served during 97th Congress as member of House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and as ex-officio member of the House Task Force on POWs and MIAs. Made six secret, official trips to Laos during 1981 and 1982.

Narrowly defeated in 1982 mid-term election.

Served as Consultant on POW/MIA Affairs with an office in the Pentagon, January-June 1983.

Reelected to House seat in 1984.

Served during 99th Congress on Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Committee on Veterans Affairs and as ex-officio member of the House Task Force on POWs and MIAs. Traveled to Hanoi as member of congressional delegation in February 1986.

Narrowly defeated in 1986 mid-term election. Announced he would not seek another term as Congressman.

Served as fellow at the American Defense Institute, a pro-defense Washington think tank during 1987 and from late 1987-1991 as Chairman of the non-profit POW Publicity Fund. Traveled extensively to Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Hong Kong to publicize a $2.5 million reward the Fund offers for the safe return of an American POW from the Vietnam War. (See www.powreward.com).

Served from fall 1991- June 1992 as Intelligence Investigator assigned (fulltime) to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs from the office of Sen. Robert Smith, (R-NH), Committee Vice-Chairman.

Traveled extensively throughout northern Vietnam from 1993-June 1995 inspecting or attempting to inspect numerous prisons and/or locations where postwar U.S. intelligence indicated American POWs were being detained after Operation Homecoming. Protested publicly in Hanoi in early June 1995 when Vietnamese authorities barred him from inspecting several prisons where large numbers of American POWs had reportedly been held long after Operation Homecoming. Vietnamese officials responded by declaring Hendon persona non grata and ordering him deported.

From September 1981, when he first traveled to Laos, until June 1995, when he was deported from Vietnam, Hendon traveled to South and Southeast Asia and other locations in the Far East some 33 times in an effort to help determine the fate of the approximately 2,500 Americans who remained unaccounted for at war’s end. He is considered one of the free world’s foremost authorities on the postwar Vietnamese and Lao prison systems and the postwar intelligence telling of American servicemen detained in those prisons. He has appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s 20/20, Dateline NBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, the NBC Today Show, Saturday Today, CNN’s Larry King Live and on a number of network news and talk shows.

Hendon and co-author Elizabeth Stewart, whose father is Missing in Action in North Vietnam, began writing a history of the POW issue, An Enormous Crime, soon after Hendon’s forced return from Vietnam in June 1995. The book is based on now-declassified postwar intelligence and now-declassified official U.S. records chronicling how seven presidential administrations; a House investigatory committee (in 1975-76); a presidential investigatory commission (in 1977) and a Senate investigatory committee (in 1991-93) dealt with what President Ronald Reagan so correctly called this “sorest wound” of the Vietnam War. An Enormous Crime is published by Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press.