As Dept. is likely aware from press reports, actress Jane Fonda arrived in Hanoi July 8 via Aeroflot from Moscow. Subject was not carried as passenger on Aeroflot manifest deposited during Vientiane transit morning July 8 nor did she disembark to transit lounge.
Fonda had left the United States, traveled to Paris and, fittingly, flown from there to Moscow. Boarding an Aeroflot flight in the Soviet capital, apparently incognito, she remained on the airplane when it landed in supposedly neutral Laos and exited only when she arrived in Hanoi, North Vietnam. "Clad in black pajamas [typically worn by the Viet Cong in the South] and a white tunic, Jane stepped off her Aeroflot jet on July 8, 1972. … She arrived, she told her uniformed, helmeted hosts, with 'greetings' from revolutionary 'comrades' in America."
Fonda had come to Hanoi — as had [Tom] Hayden, Joan Baez and other Americans before her — willingly and knowingly to provide grist for the North Vietnamese propaganda mill.
Despite the "public-relations" risk of torturing American prisoners of war, the North Vietnamese chanced it because of the high value they placed on propaganda. At no time was this more apparent than in 1967, when the Communists opened yet another POW facility in Hanoi — this one "devoted specifically to the production and dissemination of propaganda." Among its several prisoner-given names, it is probably best known as the "plantation." "The Vietnamese converted a portion of the facility into a Potemkin village of sanitized cells, garden patches and scrubbed corridors that would serve as a showplace for displaying the captives to visiting delegations and conducting photo sessions and other propaganda activities."