The next year, newly elected president Jimmy Carter launched yet another inquest, which similarly found that no American P.O.W.'s remained alive, but added that "it is probable that no accounting will ever be possible for most of the Americans lost in Indochina."

Meanwhile, there ensued a flood of reported "live sightings" of American P.O.W.'s by refugees streaming out of Vietnam, several of which were deemed credible enough to prompt further investigation. In 1981, human intelligence reports about a possible American P.O.W. prison in Central Laos, reinforced by air reconnaissance photos, were tantalizing enough to prompt President Reagan to order a Delta Force team to prepare a rescue operation. (It was abruptly called off, however, for reasons that remain unclear.) The scrubbed rescue attempt in particular remains a bitter point of contention among P.O.W./M.I.A. families and their supporters; it calcified the conviction among many that the U.S. government was lying to them.

Yet even as his interest in prisoners of war deepened, Egan viewed the P.O.W./M.I.A. movement with skepticism. The rallies struck him as noisy and ineffectual (and again, he was never a joiner). Ultimately, acting on an impulse that seems too naïve to believe (and that McCreary, the lead Senate Select Committee attorney, would challenge over and over during the deposition), Egan says he decided, rather than banging on doors, to simply walk in. He had been amazed during a high-school trip to the United Nations that diplomats from "enemy countries" such as Vietnam could live and work in New York, and it was toward these insiders that he directed his energies, as he recalled in his deposition.

Egan: My intention was always to form a relationship with the Vietnamese so I could be of some assistance on the POW issue.…

McCreary: How did you first meet Vietnamese officials?

Egan: I just called them up … You have to understand something. At the time here, they didn't have a lot of friends.

Over a period of several months, Egan had called the Vietnamese U.N. mission nearly every day, chatting up whoever had answered the phone. "I said I wanted to form a friendship, [that] I have some concerns, [that I want to understand] why I have this hate inside me for them," Egan recounted in the deposition. His persistence paid off. He was eventually invited to meet representatives from the mission, and began seeing them regularly, usually for coffee in one of the diners around the U.N. Egan would pepper them with questions about Vietnam—its history, its politics, the envoys' experiences in country during the war. However, he would never mention his interest in P.O.W.'s. "I didn't want to blow my cover," he told McCreary in the deposition.

The seemingly bemused Senate Select Committee lawyer stopped him there:

McCreary: When you say cover, that's usually a term used by intelligence people. Are you using it in that sense?

Egan: Yes.

McCreary: Are you an intelligence person?

Egan: No. Could I comment on that?

McCreary: Please.

Egan: I think that now, after my many, many years of involvement on this issue and my many years involvement with the Vietnamese, that I've learned from the best …

McCreary: So you just took it upon yourself; is that right, to butt into this?

Egan: Not to butt in. To become a part of the solution … I couldn't believe that none of our intelligence agencies—and still cannot believe none of our intelligence agencies have infiltrated the Vietnamese in the manner that I did.

Egan says he realized early on how vulnerable the envoys were. "They were lost in New York City," he explains. "I couldn't believe that the feds and the C.I.A. didn't exploit their human nature of being lonely, being bored, sitting around for years on end and not be able to go to a movie because their resources were very short, you know? So I chose that area to exploit them, to make them comfortable here." He'd take them out for dinner, to football games, fishing. "I maintained my position with them, right, at the lowest of all possible levels," he says. "I was a chauffeur. Sometimes I was the doorman for their embassy, at times for [embassy] functions. Sometimes I was the gofer—go get them this, go get them that … I was their jackass. I was their coolie."