"An Enormous Crime" is the authoritative account of a seminal twentieth-century drama: Vietnam, the American war prisoners left there after the war, and the ultimate debasing of American government. The product of twenty-five years of research, "An Enormous Crime" tells the story of living American POWs held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973. Some 700 POWs were unaccounted for, ultimately detained after the U.S. government reneged on a handwritten wartime promise. Based on open-source documents and reports, thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, and author interviews and personal experience, this is a story unlike any other: ugly, harrowing, and true. From the Bay of Pigs, in which the Kennedy's did what it took to rescue captured American fighters, to the Paris Peace Accords, in which Kissinger and Nixon sold American soldiers down the river for short-term political gain, we see for the first time a history of America's leaders, of lost men, and of life-and-death decision-making based on politics, not intelligence.