America's Abandoned Sons

By Robert S. Miller

"QUOTE"

Tens of thousands of America's WWII, Korean Conflict, and Vietnam War military servicemen ended up as hostages secretly hijacked into the USSR. Today this regrettable saga is still one of America's most closely guarded secrets. As WWII ended Stalin captured all of Germany's eastern areas in which tens of thousands of captured American POWs were then being detained by Hitler's armed forces. Stalin secretly held them as hostages and denied any knowledge of them as the Cold War began. Their status unknown, Washington eventually declared them dead when in fact they were still alive in captivity. Thousands more were lost the same way when the Korean War ended: China and the USSR secretly exploited these hostages for intelligence purposes and then also disposed of them. Vietnam saw still more held back by Hanoi after that conflict ended, for the same reasons again. Today these abandoned sons, a few of whom may still be alive in captivity as you read this, are considered one of Washington's most closely guarded secrets. Now is time to expose this secret and end this unfortunate Cold War saga.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469158839

Robert S. Miller

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Copyright © 2012 by Robert S. Miller.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012901609

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-5882-2

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-5881-5

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-5883-9

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Cover artwork by Brent Miller of, Scenic Art Studios, Singapore, Malaysia.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter 1      Introduction

Chapter 2      Those Captured?

Chapter 3      Then Some Go Missing

Chapter 4      Others Become Lost

Chapter 5      Lost Paper Trails

Chapter 6      Papering over History

Chapter 7      Deleting and Redacting Evidence

Chapter 8      Unveiling the Secrets

Chapter 9      Vietnam—The Last Rendition?

Chapter 10      Washington’s Gulag Analysis

Chapter 11      Buried in Haystacks

Chapter 12      Agendas, Negligence… or Worse?

Chapter 13      Smoke and Mirrors

Chapter 14      Consider the Unthinkable

Chapter 15      Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix

Definitions

Notes

Other Books On Us Pow/Mias In Ussr

About The Author

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Acknowledgements 

This book has been difficult to write. The mere fact that so many were secretly left behind in forced captivity after America’s 20th Century conflicts, and then their existence in captivity denied by Washington, is today a nightmare of biblical proportions. Most of those who came forward to talk about what they knew of this saga expressed fears of retribution and reprisal.

To those who encouraged me to speak out about so many honorable men who slid mysteriously and forgotten into history, I am deeply indebted. George Rossbach’s many contributions to this research were invaluable. Without his support and encouragement this work would never have been completed. Others to whom a deep debt of gratitude is owed are Dr. Stephan Karner, Dr. Barbara Stelzel-Marx, David A Ellis, Harry Almond, William Bale, Jacques P. Klein, John Zimmerlee, Mark Noah, Rolf Schneider, Robert Haynes, Dr. Paul Cole, Eleanor Gregory, Dolores Alfond and Lynn O’Shea, Irene Mandra, Robert Baer, Lee Linsung, former WWII POW Joseph Milliner, Dr. Aleksandr Orlov, and Gary Powers, son of our former U-2 pilot.

A special debt of thanks is also due to my editor, Jenny Andreasson, for her incredible attention to detail in this book. My deepest thanks also to the three POW/MIA family organizations of WWII, Korea and Vietnam, whose members always answered my phone calls and did what they could to help. And above all to my wife Margo, without whose support I could not have stayed the course.

Foreword 

The book before you is not a novel. Its content is not a work of fiction; the characters are not figments of the author’s imagination. Underlying the narrative are harsh facts, true names, and a perfidy, perhaps the most pernicious of all in the history of the United States: the abandonment of thousands of American soldiers to an ignominious end in the Gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerey) prison system of the Soviet Union. I have assisted the author with the research for this book, in hopes that the United States may one day make an honest accounting of its abandoned sons discussed herein.

These men were prisoners of war in Hitler’s Germany when WWII in the European theater was grinding to an end in the late winter of 1944 and early in the spring of 1945. To discourage potential escapees from American POW cages by making the march to their own lines in the west a long one and to facilitate the recapture of those who dared, the Germans kept the majority of their prisoners of the Western Allies in the eastern provinces of the Reich: their camps were scattered from a few located just east of the Elbe River to the bulk in locations as far away from the frontline in the west as East Prussia, Silesia, and the western half of Poland that had fallen to Germany as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939.

On March 30, 1945, four weeks and seven days before Germany’s unconditional surrender, a total of 85,645 of a total of 2,492,687 POWs in German custody were believed to be Americans… 487 of them civilian internees. Of the total number of American military prisoners, 23,555 were captured during the December 1944 German counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest, also know as the Battle of the Bulge. Being relentlessly squeezed by the steady westward push of Stalin’s Red Army toward Poland and the Baltic states in the north and toward Romania in the south in late 1944, the German High Command stopped shipping newly captured American, British, and Commonwealth soldiers to camps east of the Elbe River.

In October 1944, German Waffen-SS Maj. Gen. Gottlob Berger, in charge of Germany’s POW administration during the final nine months of the war, ordered the commanders of POW camps holding prisoners of the Western Allies in the eastern provinces to give the inmates the choice of staying in their camps under the command of their own senior officers to await liberation by the Red Army, or to join the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal to the West.

It was as unfortunate as it was understandable that a good many of the American POWs chose to stay put and wait for liberation by their Soviet Allies rather than risk the incalculable perils and hardships inherent in a withdrawal westward with German troops in the depth of winter and under deteriorating combat conditions, facing the Axis forces on all fronts. Persuaded by the intensely pro-Soviet war propaganda in the United States, they had every reason to believe that Uncle Joe would see to their repatriation tout de suite. It was a fateful decision. For rather than effecting a swift turnover to Anglo-American control at the demarcation line… as agreed upon between Stalin on the one side and Roosevelt and Churchill on the other at Yalta, in February 1945… Stalin ordered tens of thousands of liberated POWs of the Western Allies concentrated in a quickly erected complex of temporary holding camps near the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odessa. Of those, a total of only 2,983 Americans were repatriated by ship in 1945. The bulk of the rest disappeared in the Soviet prison system soon after the Soviet dictator had ordered the stop of the repatriation of Western Allied personnel by mid-1945: he did so in response to British and American field commanders’ changing the repatriation of liberated Red Army personnel from camps in the Western Zones of Occupation in Germany and Austria from forced to voluntary. The Soviet POWs were given the option of returning to Red Army control or staying in the West.

In part, this policy change resulted from the mass hysteria, culminating in multiple suicides among Soviet soldiers slated for transfer to Soviet control. Riots in resistance to forced repatriation threatened to go out of control when American and British escort personnel, who had accompanied Red Army POW convoys across the demarcation line, brought back eyewitness accounts of summary executions of returning prisoners immediately upon arrival on the Soviet side.

It should be recalled here that Stalin, infuriated by the surrender of Red Army units during the first months following Hitler’s June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and in keeping with his colossal disregard for humanity plus his proletarian confidence in the power of sheer repression, had issued his Order no. 227 in August of the same year. On the strength of it, any member of the Red Army taken alive by Germany and becoming a prisoner of war… regardless of the circumstances of capture… automatically was held guilty of treason, a capital crime for which the Soviet penal code provided only two forms of punishment, death or twenty-five years of katorga imprisonment with hard labor.

Every Red Army soldier was familiar with the letters of Order no. 227, but few of those who had survived the long years of privation under the harsh realities of German captivity and were longing for reunion with their families and loved ones still took them seriously in the summer of 1945. Although they should have known better, many of the prisoners trusted in Stalin’s forgiveness and opted to go home. A good many of the returnees, particularly officers, immediately died with a bullet to the back of their head, the Bolsheviks’ customary method of execution while the majority was sent to Siberia and the Gulag… for ten to twenty-five years of unspeakable misery. Even after they had served their terms by the end of 1970, the survivors, as a rule, were not permitted to return to their home communities. Although no longer incarcerated and subjected to the brutalities and indignities of katorga life, they were nonetheless forced to remain in banishment in the areas of their former imprisonment. It was not until 1992, after Russian president Boris Yeltsin had decreed an amnesty for political prisoners and the rehabilitation of former Red Army soldiers sentenced to prison terms for treason on the grounds of their WWII German captivity, that they were permitted to go home.

In 1995, on the occasion of attending an international symposium of historians on prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, chaired by Prof. Dr. Stephan Karner of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut fur Kriegsfolgen-Forschung (Graz and Vienna), held at Schallaburg Castle in Melk, Austria, I was able to speak with Vladimir Pereladov, one of the Red Army POWs in German captivity who had survived Gulag imprisonment. It was he who gave me cause to believe that even today, some of America’s abandoned sons might still be alive in the former Soviet Union.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Pereladov was a sophomore at Moscow University. His entire class volunteered for service in the Red Army. After minimum training as an officer candidate, he was commissioned a lieutenant and posted to the front. He saw action against the Wehrmacht almost immediately upon joining an infantry unit near Smolensk, was heavily wounded, and carried unconscious from the battlefield by German medics. Released from the hospital after several months, the Germans confined him in a POW camp for Red Army personnel in the western part of the Reich. In the summer of 1943, he was transferred to Northern Italy and assigned to a field fortification construction detail in the Apennines. Thanks to the laxity of his Italian guards, he and several other Red Army personnel were able to escape and join a band of Communist partisans, mainly operating against Benito Mussolini’s troops in the mountains near the Abruzzian Pass in Upper Italy. When Montgomery’s forces occupied that area, he and his fellow Red Army prisoners reported to the nearest British command post and requested repatriation. It was effected in late 1945: he and 2,500 ex-Soviet POWs were taken to Odessa by ship from Naples via Egypt.

Upon debarkation, he was placed under arrest, handcuffed, and hustled to the city jail to be subjected to hostile interrogation by personnel of SMERSH, the dreaded counter-intelligence organization of the Peoples Commissariat for Defense of the USSR: it involved cruel beatings, deprivation of sleep over long periods, and a starvation diet. He was charged with treason, being a British secret agent, cowardice, and desertion when captured in 1941. The charges against him were never proved and court-martial handed him the customary sentence of twenty-five years at katorga in a Gulag camp near Novisibirsk. As he was marched in chains out of Odessa, people on the streets angrily cast insults, Ugh, Ugh, Ugh… You filthy Traitor. Others threw garbage and excrement at him. After release at the end of his twenty-five year sentence, he was confined for another twenty years in the Novisibirsk area. He was only able to leave then because of President Yeltsin’s rehabilitation decree of 1992.

When I met Vladimir Pereladov in mid-1995, he was seventy-five years old; a tall and lanky man with a thick shock of silvery hair. His face was as gray as a tombstone, with crags and deep grooves as if time in prison and Siberian banishment had clawed it and the wounds had mended only recently, but his pale gray eyes were as alert as a young kestrel’s, and his mind keenly aware of everything that went on within and beyond his sight… the eyes of a survivor.

The former Red Army lieutenant had then been the chairman of an association of former WWII Red Army POWs in Germany. The organization is headquartered in Moscow. Its chief objective, Pereladov said, was the handling of red tape required to collect the pittance in compensation payments, due the circa five thousand association members as a result of their rehabilitation. Asked if the five thousand men were the total of WWII Red Army POW survivors of katorga imprisonment, he shook his head sadly. Perhaps another twenty thousand or more, but they are afraid… and ashamed… to come forward. Somehow, he suggested, they probably managed to blend with the local population, somewhere in the vastness of the former Soviet Union in some remote community, where their histories as ex-POWs never surfaced. They are skeptical of Yeltsin’s reforms and their longevity, he added. They prefer to live out in peace and anonymity what little time is left to them to coming out of hiding to collect compensation payments.

Unaffected neither by perestroika nor by glasnost of the Gorbachev era nor by the reform efforts of Boris Yeltsin, Stalin’s spirit is still alive and well in Russia. The seventy-three years of Marxism-Leninism preceding Yeltsin’s rise to power in the Kremlin have guaranteed enough of a psychological malformation of the mental condition of Homo Sovieticus to have him spit on people like Vladimir Pereladov and to consider him and his kind traitors in Russia even today.

I have sketched the fate of Lieutenant Pereladov, because it suggests an analogy with that of the American soldiers who, in the thousands, disappeared in Stalin’s Gulag prison system after World War II. Moreover, it lends credence to the author’s suggestion that some of those missing Americans could have survived… both their imprisonment and subsequent banishment, somewhere in the boundlessness of Siberia even to this day. Why should some have not? The Russian lieutenant did and so have many of his fellow prisoners. Today, there are thousands of old World War II veterans still living among us here in the United States. For those who may have survived in Russia today, these men probably have families with children and grandchildren who are as Russian as the environments into which they were born. For the majority of our boys who did not make the boats in Odessa, there can be no doubt; they must have long gone to lonely graves. However, a few, at the end of World War II as young as Pereladov, could have survived as he did. Seven decades of detention under conditions impossible to envision for westerners may have caused some to suppress their origins, even to forget their names and mother tongue. It is a long known practice of Soviet security organs to force foreign prisoners to accept Soviet citizenship, adopt Russian identity, and fictitious legends for their past as a condition of their release from the Gulag.

So much for Stalin’s American Gulag victims from WWII. There were other wars involving the United States and the Soviet Union since 1945, and beginning with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, there could be no doubt that the Cold War would be both prolonged and bitter. The war in Korea, instigated and abetted by Stalin began on June 26, 1950… only two years after the combined resolve of America and her Western Allies of WWII, Britain, and France, by way of a gigantic and sustained airlift of food and other vital supplies into the beleaguered city had foiled the Kremlin’s attempt to starve and freeze 2.5 million West Berliners into submission.

By the time the cease-fire at Panmunjom was agreed upon on July 27, 1953, the North Koreans and Red Chinese had transferred an uncertain number of American POWs, particularly flying personnel of the United States Air Force, to Soviet control. In 1950, for the purpose of screening and initial interrogation of these prisoners, the Soviet Ministry for State Security (MGB, Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoe Bezopasnosti), supported by a group of Soviet General Staff intelligence analysts, established a special interrogation center, a transshipment and temporary holding point for American and other United Nations POWs. This facility was at Khabarovsk, the regional capital of the Soviet Far East District near the Soviet-Manchurian border on the banks of the Amur River.

Large shipments of handpicked American POWs were taken to Khabarovsk by rail from the small Soviet naval port of Pos’yet, just across the border of North Korea on the Sea of Japan. Thence, they went forward to unknown locations for continued intelligence exploitation farther inside Russia. Another location serving as a rail border crossing point for United Nations POWs, including American, into Soviet territory was Lupin, also known as Manzhouli. In Heilungkiang Province of northwest Mongolia, from Manzhouli, US Military Intelligence was able to track Korean War POW rail transports by ELINT surveillance as far as Chita, the regional capital of the Soviet Trans-Baikal military district, where the trail went cold. Other POW transshipment points within the Soviet Union were the Siberian towns of Novsibirsk and Irkutsk.

Soviet intelligence interest especially in technologically knowledgeable USAF prisoners was high, and efforts to gain access to them were extraordinary. Of top priority, too, was a MGB-levied intelligence collection requirement targeted against the USAF’s North American F-86D Sabre jet all-weather fighter-bomber aircraft. It was America’s first-line combat aircraft in Korea, flying the bulk of combat missions on the side of the United Nation’s forces. The Sabre jet was superior to the Communists’ MiG-15, and the Soviets were eager to get their hands on at least one undamaged exemplar for technical analysis and reverse engineering by one of their own aircraft design bureaus. In pursuit of this goal, the Soviet air force organized and deployed a special fighter-interceptor squadron consisting of nine topnotch MiG-15 aircraft manned by top guns drawn from air regiments at Mary Airfield, a Soviet air defense base in the Turkmen SSR, and another base in the Primorskii Region, on the Soviet-Pacific coast. The squadron was commanded by General Blagovezhchenskii, allegedly a WWII Red Army ace. It operated subordinate to General Georgii A. Lobov’s 64th Fighter Aviation Corps, which fought on the North Korean and Red Chinese side throughout the war. By the time it ended, several hundred American airmen are known to have been captured alive and did not return. Several were available at the time in the Moscow area for consultation with Soviet designers. In 1993, Prof. Yevgeniy I. Ruzhitsky, a former chief of the Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau and the then Chairman of the above institute’s Historical Division, admitted he knew about the American prisoners being exploited for their intelligence value.

When Secretary Albright visited Hanoi on June 26, 1997, she submitted the names of 1,584 American soldiers missing in action since the war ended in Indo-China almost a quarter of a century before. A good number of them had been pilots of America’s most sophisticated combat aircraft or were electronic experts familiar with the workings of our air force’s top secret black boxes. Every one of them was an invaluable prize, a repository of top secret information, sought after by Soviet technical intelligence more eagerly than the devil seeks souls. Judging on the grounds of their utmost efforts to gain access to similar American personnel during the Korean War, it only stands to reason that they would have collected as many of them as possible from the bamboo cages in North Vietnam. Considering Hanoi’s near total dependence on Moscow for the means with which to conduct the war, there is little reason to believe that the north Vietnamese would have denied the Russians possession of any US POWs they asked for. While it must be assumed that most of the 1,548 names on the secretary’s list may have already been executed by the north Vietnamese in the intervening years, those taken by the Soviets could well still be alive in Russia today.

Based on the foregoing and an abundance of other evidence found in post-Soviet-era state archives and former officers of the Soviet armed forces and/or security organs which had seen or personally dealt with imprisoned American POWs as far back as the Second World War and Korean War, who were removed to the Soviet Union for exploitation and never returned, there can be no doubt that they were there in large numbers. It follows that only a mind closed to every logic would dismiss the probability that more Americans have been detained in the Soviet Union after Korea. There are some two hundred Cold War USAF missing aircrews, who while engaged in electronic intelligence (ELINT) ferret missions along the borders of the Soviet Union were attacked and shot down by Soviet air defense elements during the Cold War and most probably parachuted to safety and were later captured on the ground or at sea. When added to the thousands still MIA in the Soviet Union from World War II, the story, if made public, threatens both the new Russian leadership and those in the United States who would prefer this saga never be publicly revisited. In this case, there are still enough of the old-school patriots left in today’s Russia, still imbued with the spirit of Stalin, and as the author of this book has suggested, are ready to lend a hand in removing the living proof… for the greater glory of the Rodina.

George Rossbach

Worpswede, Germany.

October 2011

Chapter 1

Introduction 

1

A myth is a statement of ostensible historical events concerning a practice, a belief, or a natural phenomenon. The United States Government’s position regarding the possibility that significant numbers of American servicemen were ever held as prisoners of war or missing in action (POW/MIA), in the twentieth century, is that it is a myth. Washington argues that if it were not a myth, Washington would have so informed the public of this fact long ago. Conseqently Washington describes those who disagree with its position, as irresponsible troublemakers and conspiracy theorists.

Few outside the US government and the US military truly understand the steppe-like mentality of Communist leaders of the last century. Theirs was a system intertwined in a sea of secrecy, silence, fear, and authority worship. Historically, this enabled the worst atrocities in human history to occur… unnoticed and unspoken of among those to who witnessed them. Those with state secrets all know the sanctions for violation of these secrets, and must therefore think carefully before revealing them. And when such secrets involve a gross injustice or horrific events which should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, then those with these secrets must agonize over their need to remain silent. For many, even today, this is still the case for those with the secrets of what became of so many American servicemen who were secretly kidnapped by Stalin into the Gulag as World War II was ending. Their fates have never been publicly acknowledged because their still classified saga, we are informed by those who know… its all a myth.

The holding of captives and using them as slave labor is a time-honored tradition of many governments, and to date, this practice, among others, has involved the Soviet Union. It began there with about two thousand held in World War I, another twenty-seven thousand in World War II, and about two thousand from the Korean conflict. Several hundred more are known to have also ended up in the USSR from the Vietnam War. In each instance, their presence has been strenuously denied by the Kremlin while Washington largely pays lip service to those who hold to the notion that the Soviets were lying. Pragmatic men in the West, with few acceptable alternatives, have sought other ways in which to ameliorate the problem. New American laws enacted during World War II facilitated the ability to largely ignore this scandal by allowing missing American servicemen to be automatically declared dead after one year - if nothing further had been heard from them in that year.

With the breakdown of communism in the Soviet Union and China in the early 1990s, many historians hoped that an accounting of those lost in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War might take place. Both the American and Russian national archives, as you will see, contain records pertaining to American prisoners missing in the former USSR. But without access to them, the secret remains impenetrable. For this reason, many in the early 1990s were disappointed that none of this information came to light because the Russian KGB never allowed anyone into its Gulag camp archives. These contain millions of highly detailed dossiers for all who perished in the Gulag. All three archive systems (American, Russian, and Red Chinese) have effective safeguards, internal vetting, and promotion systems that insure the protection of state secrets. They also contain severe sanctions for those who inadvertently, or on purpose, violate this sensitive information by making it available to the public.

In reality, little is known about those entrusted with the long-term control and storage of sensitive historical archives here in the United States and Russia. These are the men who keep the secrets. In this book, you will meet a host of those involved in keeping these secrets as they relate to the POW/MIA question-in America, in Europe and in Russia. You will learn how Washington insiders, as World War II was ending, became increasingly frustrated about Soviet intransigence and refusal to allow US inspectors into Eastern Europe. At issue there was the recovery of thousands of live American POWs known to be held in German POW camps overrun by the Red Army. Hesitant to list these men as POWs of the Soviets, Washington listed them instead (for awhile) as KIA/BNR (killed in action/body not recovered). To have done otherwise would have been a legitimate casus belli for World War III to get under way before the middle of 1946. With the conflict in Europe over and Soviet forces already outnumbering those of the US by five to one, the US alternatives were initiate nuclear war or ignore the issue for the time being and search for ways to diplomatically resolve it with Moscow. This approach as you will see came to naught with the early onset of the Cold War, and in the ensuing years, Washington gradually converted their status from KIA/BNR to POW/MIA. This is that story.

As the keepers of past and present secrets, those entrusted with them in Washington represent the epitome of silence for the secrets in their care. And from time to time the system fails, and the public may obtain a brief glimpse of goings-on behind closed doors. In historical terms, it is only from the various national archives, years and decades later, that one gets new insights into the historic events. This information largely emerges through the normal declassification schedules and, on occasion, when someone breaches their oath of silence. An interesting example of the latter was that of Soviet-era KGB archivist Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin who was born in Russia on March 3, 1922, and died January 23, 2004, in England. In 1992, Mitrokhin defected to Britain and delivered some twenty-five thousand pages of classified Soviet-era material to MI6, British Secret Intelligence. Mitrokhin’s information provided unique insights into Soviet secret archival procedures between 1940 and the end of Soviet communism.

As World War II began, Mitrokhin took a job in the military procurator’s office in Moscow, which was an NKVD controlled assignment. As Soviet forces pulled back toward Moscow before the German Blitzkrieg of 1941, Mitrokhin and other archivists were ordered to evacuate the NKVD’s voluminous archive records from Moscow to the city of Kharkov in the Ukrainian SSR. In 1948, three years after the war ended, he was promoted to the Ministry for State Security (MGB) as a foreign intelligence officer. Following intensive training as a case officer, he got numerous foreign postings in the early 1950s. In 1956, he accompanied the Soviet Olympic team to the games in Australia, and later that year, he bungled an operational assignment and was removed from operational duties and reassigned to the archives of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (Foreign Espionage) in Moscow. Because of his mistake, he was told he would never do field work again. Already annoyed over his punishment, Mitrokhin dates the beginnings of his post-Stalin-era disillusionment to Khrushchev’s February 25, 1956, address before the Communist Party’s 20th Congress in which Khruschev denounced Stalin as a criminal. For years, Mitrokhin had listened to broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America and noted the gulf between these reports about world events and issues and Communist propaganda. When he began looking into old archives, he was shocked at what he discovered about the KGB’s systematic repression of the Russian people. I could not believe such evil, he recalled many years later in the West. It was all planned, prepared, thought out in advance. It was a terrible shock when I read things.¹ Between 1972 and 1984, Mitrokhin supervised the gradual transfer of archived material of the First Chief Directorate (Foreign Espionage of the KGB) from the Lubyanka in downtown Moscow to the KGB’s new headquarters at Yasenevo, just outside the Moscow beltway. While moving these documents, he made thousands of copies, which he secretly removed to his residence and hid. He continued to make more and more of them until he retired in 1985.

Mitrokhin made no attempts to contact any Western intelligence service until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in 1992, he travelled to Estonia with copies of some of the documents he had secreted away and walked unannounced into the American embassy in Tallinn, Estonia. The CIA officers there did not consider him trustworthy and concluded that his documents were forgeries. Mitrokhin then went to the British embassy in Tallinn and spoke with MI6 officers. They immediately recognized his potential and following consultations with London, accepted Mitrokhin as a British agent. Clandestine operations then followed to retrieve the rest of the twenty-five thousand pages of files hidden in Mitrokhin’s house in Moscow. These dated from the 1930s to the time of his retirement in 1985. He and his family were then spirited out of Russia to Great Britain. Today, his stolen documents are known as The Mitrokhin Archive, most of which has since been published in books by Mitrokhin and a British coauthor, Christopher Andrew. Mitrokhin’s published books are The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB; The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World; The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. His information provided a comprehensive insight to the Soviet Gulag prison system and the prisoners detained there.²

2

Public opinion on the Vietnam POW/MIA question in the early 1990s forced Washington to consider a public review of its POW/MIA history. The Mitrokhin Archive had also just become known to US intelligence… but there was little public impact on that review because it was still not public information in Britain or the United States. While Washington’s latest mid-1992 POW/MIA hearings resulted in what appeared to be one of the most comprehensive reviews ever undertaken, in fact Washington had succeeded once again in avoiding the truth about the larger reality of Americans still missing in the Gulag. The 1992 hearings resulted in a report by the 103rd Congress, titled, Report on the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, The 1,223 - page tome that soon thereafter emerged, was dated January 13, 1993.³ It reassured the American public that their government had revealed all, would henceforth look into the issue more diligently and not repeat mistakes of the past. Its opening words were, We owe a special debt of respect and gratitude to those who were captured and yet still kept faith, even while deprived of their freedom, victimized by brutal tortures, and forced to battle not only their captors, but the temptation to yield to self-pity and despair.⁴ Events since the 1993 report suggest the public’s trust has once again been misplaced.

Whether by design or by fiat the official American POW/MIA accounting undertaken in the last fifteen years has, like those before 1993, been an exercise in prearranged bureaucratic group-think at the highest levels. In too many instances, the conduct of the post-1993 accounting has convinced onlookers that the United States was still pursuing its pre-1993 agenda to predetermine and preshape the outcome. The cognoscenti then and now had another word for it - agenda setting. But to even publicly admit this is difficult… and in fact it almost never is. The 1993 Senate Select Committee did admit that the previous DIA effort to challenge, dispute, and debunk information regarding still missing and detained POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia was no longer acceptable. So many contradictory POW/MIA facts had surfaced that the public needed a convincing interim riposte, one that would defuse the public’s anger, make them believe they now knew the truth, and quieten the fringe elements, while at the same time allowing national security interests to be protected. Agenda setting largely succeeded through the decades leading up to the 1992 hearings and has continued to do so in the decades after 1993. By the early years of the new millennium however, suspicions arose anew and POW/MIA families’ trust of government once again sank to a new low; so low in fact that in early 2005 the membership of all three national American family groups (World War II, Korea, and Vietnam) unanimously passed votes of no confidence in those entrusted with the mission of accounting for their missing loved ones. Since then, DPMO’s bureaucracy has been in a state of flux and confusion.

At the end of World War II, United States senior leaders realized that their former Soviet ally had almost instantly become their new enemy. US/Soviet agreements hammered out only months earlier at Yalta (February 4-11, 1945) were already null and void ninety days later. A new agenda became the need of the hour as a wartime alliance of convenience had suddenly become transparent for what it really was: an ugly marriage of convenience. A new US group-think policy was urgently required if a reformatted agenda was to be realized.⁵ The new agenda required a pragmatic solution to extremely thorny questions that even the devil himself could not have anticipated. America’s wartime ally to whom Washington had provided $11 billion in Lend-Lease assistance was holding significant numbers of captured American servicemen for undetermined reasons. How many? Secret postwar estimates ranged between twenty-five thousand and twenty-eight thousand, and America was not alone. Another eight thousand British troops were also being detained by Moscow. Both American and British numbers paled beside those of other European nationalities then known to be en route to Siberia. These others were conservatively in the millions, and Moscow said nothing, admitted nothing, feigned ignorance, and denied everything. What were the United States and Britain to do? In all wars, prisoners are taken and some go missing while others lose their homes and are displaced, but the loss of American soldiers in the USSR was not a unique Twentieth century experience in the annals of American history.

Washington’s postwar options were clear: (a) Challenge Moscow and risk Stalin’s refusal to enter the war against Japan. (b) Open a second war front against Soviet forces in Europe and attempt to drive the Red Army back into the Soviet Union, and in the process liberate American POWs then in Soviet hands. (c) Ignore the issue until some future date and then attempt to negotiate their release. Each alternative posed serious problems. The first presented an incredible risk for the United States, especially if its secret Manhattan Project were to fail. Without atomic weapons, US Army casualty estimates for the forthcoming invasion of the Japanese home islands exceeded millions. This estimate mitigated opening a second front against Soviet armies in Europe. Soviet forces in Europe already outnumbered Allied forces in every area when Germany surrendered and then quickly worsened as American forces in Europe were quickly drawn down in preparation for a final push against Japan. The third alternative - while obviously also unpalatable - was the least dangerous to American national security interests. Thus a new group-think policy to ignore the POW/MIA reality for the moment became the new national security policy of the hour. But to be effective, the reality had to be kept on a close-hold basis, at least until some future date when the issue could be addressed diplomatically with the Kremlin. Efforts were subsequently made by Washington to resolve the issue in the late 1940s but it never got anywhere.

It was the POW/MIAs of World War II who started out to be the main focus of the author’s interest in America’s abandoned sons, until it became apparent that America’s World War II experience was not unique and in fact mirrored America’s experience in other conflicts of the last century. Simply stated, what happened in World War II was that thousands of American prisoners were captured by the Germans and confined to some thirty POW camps throughout Germany, Austria, and Poland. These were then overrun by the Red Army as the war ended. These camps were known variously as Stalags, Oflags, and Dulags (Stammlager, Offizierlager, and Durchgangslager). In the closing months of World War II, tens of thousands of Americans were recaptured in these camps by Red Army forces as they advanced across Eastern Europe and the eastern provinces of Germany in the final phase of the war. The German army POW administration had kept the bulk of American and British prisoners in the eastern areas of the Third Reich to make escape more difficult. As these eastern camps were overrun, the Red Army immediately replaced former German guards and posted Red Army troops. They then set up new defensive perimiters around each camp to make sure no one could escape. American inmates in these camps were ordered to remain in place until Moscow arranged for their repatriation. Red Army guards informed inmates that those who tried to leave would be shot. America and Russia after all were war Allies, so most Americans in these liberated camps believed the Russians would arrange their return to American lines. Some Americans did escape and on their own hook, made their way west to Allied lines in the final days of the war. The few who made it were lucky. They reported what they knew about the state of other Allied POWs still in Soviet hands and American intelligence debriefers quickly raised alarms to their superiors. Others who tried to escape were not so lucky; many were recaptured, others were killed in strafing and bombing attacks along roadways and in towns in the final weeks of the war, while still others were killed by the Soviets.

Numerous American attempts to reach these camps were turned back by Red Army forces at gunpoint and forced to depart Soviet-occupied areas. In several instances, American truck convoys entering Red Army-occupied areas encountered heavily armed roadblocks and were forced at gunpoint back to American lines. In other instances, still considered secret by both sides to this day, American Air Force cargo planes and B-17 bombers converted to a cargo configuration were accompanied by fighter escorts and flew into Red Army-controlled areas in an attempt to reach specific German camps in Red Army-occupied Eastern Europe. These too were intercepted by formations of Soviet fighter aircraft, and in swirling air battles, Red Army and US aircraft fought it out until the Americans were overpowered and forced to withdraw. A number of Russian fighters were also shot down by American aircraft in these encounters. What is apparent now, six decades later, was that Soviet forces across Eastern Europe at the time were deporting hundreds of thousands of people eastward from their newly occupied territory and did not want American and British eyes to observe their activities. For all of these deportees, some of whom were undoubtedly Americans, there was no Soviet record available of their passage east into the Odessa area and then further east to the final destinations in Siberia.

Today, the MIA/KIA records in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, about all these men are disordered, incoherent, confused, spotty, or missing. What is available clearly points to an enormous backlog of unresolved and unaccounted for American servicemen who suddenly became MIA as World War II drew to a close in the European Theater of Operations. Nowhere is there a discussion about how the accounting system massaged the details for so many so quickly from a POW status to a presumption of KIA/BNR status. When the war in Europe ended, the Adjutant General Office’s final accounting of all MIA servicemen in Europe was reported to be less than one thousand. Then, as the years slowly passed, the numbers began to change and today that number alone stands at seventy-eight thousand for World War II. Corresponding statistics for the MIAs in World War I was less than one thousand; for Korea, eight thousand; and for Vietnam, 1,800. The real reason why the number is so high for World War II in Europe still remains hidden behind high-classification markings.

For the reader of this book, the government’s explanation as to why there were so few at the end of World War II and so many now is that the difference is made up by soldiers who perished when their ships sank, their aircraft exploded in flight, their tanks blew up with crews incinerated inside, by those who were vaporized in the explosions of incoming artillery fire and aerial bombs, and by those who stepped on mines and were blown into oblivion. But this line of reasoning accounts for less than half of the seventy-eight thousand. An examination of DPMO’s updated mid-2007 website for the seventy-eight thousand names still MIA from World War II is also interesting. Just the list for US Army personnel KIA/BNR in World War II whose last names start with the letter O is 304 names long.⁶ The 304 include twenty-two whose death is listed as having occurred between mid-1945 and late 1946. The DPMO list does not reflect them as killed or missing; it only reflects their Date of Loss.

This Date of Loss heading is misleading because the war had in fact already ended, with the formal capitulation of Japan on August 14, 1945. So what does the term Date of Loss actually mean? The twenty-two KIA/BNRs obviously were not lost in the eighteen months after the end of the war. In fact, they had neither died of wounds received during the war, nor had been determined dead during the war, but were subsequently transferred from an MIA column to a Date of Loss column. But there was no MIA column in any of the Provost Marshal’s immediate postwar statistical loss summaries. The Provost Marshal’s lists for the six months after the end of World War II and into early 1946 reflect less than a few hundred still in an MIA status. MIAs only begin to appear in substantial numbers many years after the war ended. The above referenced DPMO list for the 304 army men with last names beginning with O, starts with 2Lt Ernest C. Oats and ends with Pvt S.F. Ozimkiewicz. Other World War II lists for those with last names beginning with the letter O, such as the US Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy contain another nine hundred names; many of those also reflect Dates of Loss long after the war had ended in Europe. If the reader is confused by the above, so have hundreds of others who have tried to make sense of a government record which, in retrospect, now appears to have been deliberately altered to conceal the truth.

Some ten books have already been written in the past fifty years by other authors who tried to explain these World War II MIA statistical anomalies. Each was intrigued by how so many seemed to simply have disappeared when they were reported alive only months earlier in German captivity. Each of these authors also document credible accounts reported years later by international travelers, émigrés, and defectors who had come out of the USSR. These people reported knowing, seeing, and having heard about large numbers of American servicemen being detained at various locations across the Soviet Gulag and GUPVI systems. GUPVI in Russian stands for Glavnoye Upravelenie po delam Voennoplennych i Internirovannych, or, The Main Administration for Prisoners of War and Internees. When created by Stalin during World War II, GUPVI was operated by the Ministry of Interior under the NKVD (and later under the MVD and finally the KGB). All GUPVI and Gulag related records today are still under the control of the FSB (Federalnaya Slzhba Beznopasnosti, Russia’s new intelligence organization, which superceded the KGB), and stored at its CChIDK archive in Moscow, known as CChIDK (Centre Chaneniiya Istoriko Documentalnych Kollekcij). In English it stands for the Center for the Storage of Historical Documentary Collections. Others of this records group are also at the FSB’s Lubyanka headquarters at Dzershinski Square. Gulag in Russian stands for Glavnoye Upravlenie Lagerij, or, the Main Administration of Penal Camps. It too, as already stated, has over the decades been operated by the Ministry of Interior under the NKVD, then the MVD, then the KGB, and today the FSB. Some experts today speculate that because of the sensitivity of these American-related files still in the Russian archives, the files may no longer be filed at CChIDK, and for increased security, were physically moved sometime in the late 1990s, most probably to the FSB’s headquarters at the Lubyanka in downtown Moscow. In either instance, they are under the control of the FSB, whose current leader (as of August 2008) is Maj. Gen. Vasili Krystoforov.

Virtually all of these eyewitnesses and the authors who documented their testimony about Americans at various locations in the former USSR, for inexplicable reasons, have been relentlessly debunked, challenged, ignored, and denigrated by Washington’s bureaucracy responsible for finding these missing POW/MIAs. Throughout the Cold War, Washington’s concern might understandably have been that this information, if proven true and revealed to the American public, could easily have triggered a nuclear war with the USSR.

President Dwight Eisenhower had good reason to believe that the number of live Americans in North Korean captivity at the end of the Korean War in 1953 was as high as 8,100. The North Koreans said nothing, and behind closed doors in Washington, the brass agonized over the total. Comprised some 4,250 MIAs, about 2,050 POWs, and suspected 1,800 KIAs, no one could confirm the subtotals without North Korean confirmation, and the North Koreans were saying nothing. The estimates were a purely American guess then, and still is today. As former Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, General Eisenhower had already been exposed to Red Army POW/MIA perfidies as the war ended. He and General Marshall had exchanged messages of concern in early 1945 about twenty-five thousand American POWs then reported unrecovered from Red Army-controlled areas of Eastern Europe. And now, Eisenhower’s worst nightmare was happening again, this time eight years later in Korea. The North Korean communists had failed to repatriate all American POWs, and now Eisenhower was receiving messages reporting the transshipment of thousands of captured American prisoners from North Korea into USSR. Once again, as had been the case in 1945, there were few American options available to the United States short of starting a nuclear war, this time with both China and the USSR. US Army Colonel Corso, a military intelligence officer in Korea and one of Eisenhower’s national security advisors, had personally informed him of these transshipments in 1954. Eisenhower told Colonel Corso in the Oval Office that since nothing could be done to help those still alive in captivity in China and those being moved into the USSR, that US (secret national security) policy on this matter would continue unchanged.

According to Col. Corso’s 1992 testimony at the United States Senate hearings, both Eisenhower and Truman’s top priority policy at the time was the avoidance of a nuclear war with the Soviets at all costs. For Eisenhower, the clandestine shipments of American POWs from Korea to the Soviet Union left him with no alternative but to avoid informing the American public, who would be kept in the dark about these events. No one, including

the next of kin of these unfortunate Americans, would be informed that their loved ones were known to be still alive in Soviet custody. And to prevent a nuclear war with Moscow, the prisoners’ families would therefore be informed through official channels that their loved ones had been killed in action or otherwise lost their lives while in enemy custody before the war had ended. Eisenhower’s dilemma, like Truman’s before him, resembled the student of higher mathematics who is struggling on the blackboard with an equation containing three unknowns; it was easier to take a wet sponge and wipe the problem off the board than to try solving it.

This insoluble equation also explains why no comprehensive study or in-depth analysis of the Soviet Gulag system was ever undertaken by Washington until the middle of the first decade of the new century - sixty years after World War II. Instead, a policy of stubborn denial was struck throughout the duration of the Cold War and then for yet another decade after its end. Three of the gravest American betrayals of the twentieth century has been kept deep down in the well and allowed to pass into the dustbin of history without ever being openly and honestly addressed. By and large, those who have raised challenges have come from America’s POW/MIA families, those with the greatest interest in finding out what became of their loved ones. These families by the nature of their association with those representing their interests, as a rule are hapless neophytes on the margin of international political game-playing. As a group, they have largely shown themselves singularly incapable of soliciting honest answers. Singly and in small groups, those who have courageously demanded answers from their public servants from time to time have been taken aside to have their patriotism impugned with suggestions that their true motivation was the intentional embarrassment of the United States government, including even the president of the United States. By and large, these families of missing soldiers have simply been unable to match the manipulating wiliness and ruthless cynicism of a half-century-old bureaucracy dedicated to conceal the truth. For most, it is only a federal job with excellent pay, benefits, and retirement.

It took DPMO almost two decades after the end of the Cold War before they considered doing a Gulag study. Addressed initially in 2001, this impoverished analysis suggested there was a tremendous amount of work still to be done. The 2005 updated Gulag study expanded on the initial findings of 2001. Their 2005 report also admitted for the first time that some Americans might somehow have become inexplicably lost over the decades in the Soviet Gulag. Despite DPMO’s mountains of secret and top secret evidence that thousands of Americans were already in the Gulag, they stuck to their minimalist, let’s-not-rock-the-boat approach. Norman Kass, the then Deputy Director, publicly announced that even in his worst-case scenario, possibly as many as two hundred American MIAs might have ended up in the USSR since World War II. Thousands of American POW/MIA families were never-the-less overjoyed. It was the first public admission that even one might have been lost in the Gulag, let alone thousands, and the families hoped that a long-locked door might finally be opening.

3

Washington’s approach to the resolution of what it referred to as an unresolved POW/MIA humanitarian mystery in 1992 was seriously flawed. The new accounting structure it created to replace the former DIA POW/MIA organization contained all its genetic flaws. The new structure brought in military-and intelligence-related institutions already inoculated with suspicion, built-in caveats, bureaucratic interests, and above all the same men steeped with keeping secrets. These were then placed across the table from their bureaucratic Soviet equivalents. The timing too for the creation of the new organization was truly Machiavellian in that the early 1990s were an incredible time of openness in Russia, and the new US/Russian organization’s hidden charter was to prevent the emergence of the truth regarding the real fate of tens of thousands of Americans lost in the Gulag. That this new structure has shed little new information into the public realm in the last two decades since 1992 should surprise no one.

A European-based POW/MIA research model, which also came into being between Austria and the Kremlin around the time of the new US Russian Joint POW/MIA Commission, was devoid of the built-in bureaucratic intelligence firewalls, so obvious in the American model. The European model was also devoid of the high level government-to-government group-think and gamesmanship that has been the hallmark of U.S/Russian relations. Virtually everything produced in the American-Russian model is classified information by both governments and seldom available to the public until declassified decades in the future. The United States and Russia have even agreed that any POW/MIA documents or information exchanged between the two governments is to be afforded protection at the classification levels indicated on the documents. All documents exchanged have been classified, secret, or higher. The cooperative US/Russian Joint Commission is therefore a model more akin to the secret deliberations of the Spanish Inquisition as opposed to an open forum solving peoples whereabouts. The Austrian POW/MIA model with Russia on the other hand has been involved in identical work but has resulted in the publication of numerous scholarly reports and books that are available to the public. Austria describes its work with Russia as a historical scientific project, while United States describes its POW/MIA discussions with Russia as a humanitarian effort. As a former American military expert commented when informed that the new US/Russian 1993 effort was humanitarian… the damned Soviets were our Allies during World War II, and Allies do not capture large numbers of soldiers of their Allies and hold them captive in secret until they perish in some prison. The investigation into what happened to the missing has to be scientific in nature. The Russians have no respect for humanitarian things.⁷

Various American postwar military records of the Provost Marshal, Department of the army, and others all report that US authorities in Western Europe had already accounted for virtually all MIA Americans in the western areas of Europe, and that it was only in the eastern areas controlled by the Red Army where, because of no access, large numbers still remained unaccounted for. JPAC’s mission statement mentioned earlier, acknowledges that they could account for over half of the still missing seventy-eight thousand MIAs if they were told where to look for them, and this is a unique admission in the annals of the American POW/MIA conundrum. JPAC admits about half of the seventy-eight thousand MIAs from World War II in Europe are deemed recoverable. And what do JPAC and others in the government’s POW/MIA program say about those who are unrecoverable? That they are they whose remains were entombed in sunken ships, incinerated in burning tanks, or unrecoverable from the explosions of ordnance and mines. And the balance of the total? Recoverable, if JPAC knew where to look for them. Based on a mid-1990s Russian offer to the United States to account for an initial four thousand of these thirty-five thousand, it is probable that Moscow knows exactly where tens of thousands of these American MIAs remains lie in lonely graves scattered throughout the former Soviet Union. While their precise number is not known to the US government because Washington was never able to confirm their postwar fates in Red Army-occupied areas of Europe after World War II, Moscow knew then, and still does today, their exact number and what subsequently became of them. Indicative of the American Congress’s frustration with the slow pace of DPMO’s recovery efforts of this total, the Congress in 2009 authorized a new $100 million dollar JPAC headquarters in Hawaii and mandated that DPMO and JPAC must double its existing recovery rate and account for two hundred annually after 2015.⁸

The question of how many American servicemen were alive in German hands toward the end of World War II in Europe is also addressed in this book. However, the United States government’s information, even a half century later, is still inexplicably confused and the records concerned, virtually impossible to decipher. A host of nongovernment historians sifting through this data at the National Archives have all come to the same conclusion. Why is the data available so confusing, contradictory, and incomplete? The public has repeatedly asked the same question. How could so few have been listed as MIA after World War II by the Provost Marshal, the department of the army, and other official publications of the American government, while today their number is in the tens of thousands? Most who become aware of this huge historic dichotomy simply find it hard to believe that their government abandoned these men in foreign lands, but they can offer no other conclusion. Others point out that it simply cannot be, because the United States and USSR were wartime Allies, and the Yalta Accords stipulated the manner in which the Allies were to repatriate their prisoners. They would be exchanged across the front lines when the two Allies met in Germany. But weeks later, Moscow abrogated the agreement in favor of shipping everyone to Odessa on the Black Sea.

Roosevelt’s military and political staff at Yalta, not anticipating the rapid rate at which forthcoming realities would evolve on the ground between Soviet and American armies in Europe, appear to have unwittingly made the Odessa solution unavoidable for themselves and Stalin. It would be two months before the two armies met west of Berlin, and until they met, there were no pre-agreed turnover points for their respective liberated POWs to be repatriated. Roosevelt knew that many tens of thousands of captured Americans were then being held in German Stalags in Germany’s eastern areas, while Stalin knew his captured Russian troops were mainly in the western areas of Germany. A Top Secret/Priority message on April 23, 1945, to Eisenhower’s PW staff at SHAEF and Washington points out that the Russians’ unanticipated rapid advance westward had enabled them to overrun scores of eastern German Stalag camps with American POWs. It states that these liberated Americans were probably being evacuated east to Odessa because no other prearranged turnover points then existed and would not until US forces met Soviet forces along the Oder and Neisse Rivers. The Oder-Neisse Rivers were the pre-agreed halt line for American and Soviet forces at wars’ end. The message concludes, "Do you wish us to approach Moscow to secure their agreement and issue of instructions to Russian Commanders that British PW