Sen. John McCain warmly greeted Vietnam Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet during a 1992 visit to Hanoi. Kiet was a ranking communist party member of the secret Central Committee of the former National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and was part of the elite clique responsible for setting policies and directing the communist war waged against the pro-democracy Vietnamese as well as U.S. forces in South Vietnam. As a senior Central Committee member, Kiet ordered American POWs to be punished by execution and helped formulate the Vietnamese communist policy which resulted in the murder of thousands of pro-U.S. South Vietnamese in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Communist Party henchmen executed over 5,000 men, women, and children, burying many of them alive in mass graves during the brief time North Vietnamese troops held that historic ancient Vietnamese city. 
Col. Bui Tin, a former Senior Colonel in the North Vietnamese Army (he had actually interrogated McCain and other U.S. prisoners) testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992. At least 55 American POWs were murdered by their interrogators and guards while in North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps. Pictured right: During a break in the hearing, Sen. McCain moved to where Col. Bui Tin was seated and warmly embraced him as if he were a long lost brother.
"Dr. Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist residing in Cuba, returned from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam . . . he brought back some journalistic news: an interview with a North American pilot captured in the DRV after bombing Hanoi on 26 October 1967. The meeting between him and the pilot took place in an office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi. The pilot interviewed is Lt Cmdr John Sidney McCain, son and grandson of American Navy Admirals. "In the course of the interview, on various occasions he showed that knowledge of the language, saying some words, dates, and so forth in Spanish, or [using it] when he thought the interpreter was seeking the corresponding French word. "Naturally, from the beginning this established a more direct communication between us, and more than one question or my response was made directly in Spanish." Havana Granma January 24, 1970
July 11, 1995, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., (right), and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., (center), gave President Bill Clinton, (left), the valuable political cover he needed to remove the U.S. imposed trade embargo against communist Vietnam. All major U.S. veterans organizations, the two POW/MIA family groups, and the majority of Vietnamese Americans in this country opposed Clinton's lifting of the embargo.