Posted on 05/14/2005 6:05:01 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
For years, the frightening, ugly truth about the fate of American prisoners of war captured during World War II and the Korean War lay in smoldering documents hidden in U.S. government archives. They finally caught fire in the early 1990s as newspapers and researchers began revealing the story: Thousands of Americans had been packed off to the Soviet Union by the trainload, from German POW camps in Soviet-occupied Europe and later from camps in North Korea ... and Vietnam.
This summer, however, a more disturbing truth gradually emerged in hearings before a House National Security subcommittee chaired by Rep. Bob Dornan, a California Republican: The North Koreans and Soviets not only kept prisoners for their intelligence value but also used the largely forgotten Americans in grisly medical experiments aimed at testing the endurance of the human psyche. A former intelligence officer calls them "Nazi-like," and the disturbing revelations about the prisoners shed new light on the fate of at least 900 POWs the government now concedes were abandoned to Communist captivity in North Korea.
In June, a witness named Insung O. Lee, who works for the Department of Defense's Special Office for Prisoners of War, told Dornan's committee that a North Korean defector has revealed the country still holds as many as 15 Americans - more than double the six defectors the Pentagon has said live there by choice.
"Definitely, there's more than one group of Americans there," he told the committee. That same day, Dornan released a secret Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, report that detailed information from a defector who turned out to be former Czech Gen. Jan Sejna, an employee of the agency. "During the Korean War, a Soviet and Czech drug-testing program utilized American and other United Nations POWs as laboratory specimens," the report said. At the conclusion of the testing program a number of American POWs were executed ... to preclude exposure of the information."
The report said "the purpose of the program was to develop comprehensive interrogation techniques involving medical, psychological and drug-induced behavior modification," a chilling scenario reminiscent of Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate, the story of an American held captive in Korea, brainwashed by Soviet and Chinese captors, then sent home to assassinate the president.
Though Sejna is not identified in the report, the Associated Press said that a note attached to the document, authored by Lt. Gen. James Clapper, said the "source had been a reliable U.S. agent for more than 20 years," and "personally saw progress reports on the work in North Korea that were forwarded to top leadership in the Czech Central Committee and Ministry of Defense." Sejna, who repeatedly has passed lie-detector tests on the subject, told Dornan's committee in September that prisoners were "used to test the effects of chemical and biological war-fare agents and to test the effects of atomic radiation." Others may have been used as specimens to help Communist doctors perfect their techniques of amputation.
Sejna also told the committee he helped organize the shipments of POWs to the Soviet Union, saw Americans arrive in Prague and, according to the Washington Times, "estimated that at least 200 were sent by that route to the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1968." Sejna believes that all but 100 of the American subjects of medical experimentation who had been Korean War POWs were killed. The same thing happened in Vietnam and Laos," Sejna said. "The only difference is the operation in Vietnam was better planned and more American POWS were used."
Documents the subcommittee made public show that President Eisenhower may not have pursued peace talks with Korea if he had known 900 Americans had not been returned during "Operation Big Switch," the exchange of American and North Korean POWs. According to a memo dated Dec. 22, 1953, which details a conversation between Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens and Ike, "The president made this statement that he was not sure that if he had fully appreciated the situation he would have considered it wise to go into the forthcoming conference. Perhaps we should have insisted on their return as a precondition to the conference."
These documents and Sejna's revelation confirm the story of retired Army intelligence officer Col. Phillip Corso, a military aide to Eisenhower. Since the early 1990s, when first approached by investigative reporters, Corso has maintained Ike knew American prisoners were shipped to Moscow. "In 1953," he told the committee, "500 sick and wounded American prisoners were within 10 miles of the prisoner-exchange point at Panmunjom but were never exchanged." Corso told the committee that the 900 prisoners were "to be exploited for intelligence purposes and subsequently eliminated."
The story has received worldwide press coverage since the New York Times broke it on the front page the morning of Sejna's testimony, and the Washington Times followed with a front-page story the next day. AP reporters have been filing numerous stories for years. But some skeptics wonder why three decades passed before Sejna's chilling information was revealed. Was Sejna withholding information with the hope he could release it a little at a time to ensure his continued value to U.S. intelligence officials?
Not according to Al Santoli, Dornan's staff assistant handling the POW issue, who confirms Sejna was the source for the information in the DIA report. "He tried telling DoD" over the years, Santoli says. "They wouldn't listen." Santoli says the DIA "found no evidence of deception" in Sejna and, indeed, that is exactly how Clapper described the DIA's trust in Sejna's information. "If you look at the history of the gulag," Santoli says, "they did human experiments. That's beyond reproach. Secondly, they took Americans. What we are trying to do is bring those two things [together]. If they're experimenting on their own citizens, why wouldn't they use foreigners?"
So Sejna's word isn't doubted. But government bureaucrats, and how they handled information on POWS, are. They knew independently of Sejna that prisoners not only from the Korean and Vietnam wars but also from World War II had been shipped to the Soviet Union. Declassified government reports such as U.S. Citizens Detained in the USSR contain reams of information on Americans in the gulag. So what really dismays Dornan and other government critics is that the top U.S. officials buried the information to cover it up, a process that began in the forties when the Soviets refused to release American prisoners liberated from German POW camps at the end of the war.
Indeed, the coverup has gotten some contemporary officials in hot water with Dornan's subcommittee. Santoli tells Insight that at least one CIA official "working at DoD is under investigation for tampering and interfering with investigations by the Defense Department on information that Americans were transferred to the Soviet Bloc." Some government employees even have refused to interview foreign officials with knowledge of POWs, Santoli says.
Dornan now is pushing for legislation to establish procedures on handling Americans either missing or believed captured. The bill includes five significant provisions, the first of which would require American military commanders on the scene to make the first report that a soldier is missing two days after he disappears in action. Dornan is dismayed that a Senate version of the bill would loosen the requirement to 10 days. Capt. Scott O'Grady, the Air Force pilot shot down last year in Bosnia, "was a miracle to last six days" behind enemy lines, Santoli argues. And a pilot shot down over water won't last 10 days either, he adds.
The Dornan bill's second provision concerns soldiers last known to have been alive in enemy hands. The Pentagon would be required to review these files every three years to ensure they are kept up to date and in proper order. Third, it would punish any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds information, and it forbids military officials from declaring a serviceman dead without solid forensic proof. The law also would require the government to carry civilian employees of DoD as real prisoners of war for the purpose of tracking their whereabouts.
On the POW issue as a whole, Santoli and others argue, government officials "are feeling embarrassment" now that the truth finally is beginning to seep out of government files via declassification.
Jim Sanders, one of the authors of Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union, thinks the reason is fairly obvious. POWs, especially potentially live ones, he says, are a thorn in the side of policymakers who "buried the issue" after a Senate select committee investigating the matter drew few, if any, conclusions.
Official Washington, Sanders says, wants to "get on with the recognition of Vietnam," and news that prisoners may have been used in experiments, killed or shanghaied to the Soviet Union would substantially slow - if not stop - diplomatic progress. Before proceeding with recognition, Clinton must verify for Congress that Vietnam is cooperating on the POW issue, Sanders says. "If this thing gets brought up, Clinton looks bad," especially in light of his antiwar activities in England and rumors he dallied with the KGB while enjoying Soviet hospitality in Moscow during the Vietnam War. Clinton "has to guarantee to Congress that the Vietnamese are fully cooperating on POWs. They aren't, but nobody cares."
Don't ever believe that our government tried to get the POW's. The families got lip service and an empty cup - still goes on today.
Bump for later
(snip)
Besides evidence contrary to DPMO's stated position on the "Cuban Program," the documents I examined reveal:
the possibility that a number of American POWs from the Vietnam War had been held in Los Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro's G-2 intelligence service. The Cuban who claims to have seen them later escaped and made it to the United States, and was reportedly debriefed by the FBI;
a Cuban Official had offered the State Department to ransom some American POWs from Vietnam, but there was no follow up;
that Cubans, along with Russians, guarded a number of American POWs in Laos;
the Cubans photographed a number of American POWs in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia;
that besides the "Cuban Program," the Cubans were very heavily involved in Vietnam. They had several thousand "engineers" in Vietnam constructing, repairing and guarding the Ho Chi Minh Trail where a large number of Americans disappeared; the possibility that American POWs were "treated" in Cuban hospitals in Hanoi;
the Cubans had a permenant DGI agent assigned to the COSVN headquarters in Cambodia, the North Vietnamese command center directing the war in South Vietnam.
(Snip)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1209454/posts?page=201#201
(snip)
The loss of pilots was further exacerbated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Dr. Strangelove-like obsession of directing targets to be bombed at the same time every day. To some, it seemed as if DOD, led by McNamara, was intentionally aiding the communists by providing them with some of our best and brightest military minds [e.g., one F-111 pilot was shot down over North Vietnam shortly after leaving the Gemini space program.] Concurrently the Soviet equivalent to the Gemini program made quantum leaps over the next two years in the area of the F-111 pilot's specialty. An F-111 capsule was found in a Russian museum by U.S. investigators. There are several other similar examples of vast improvement in communist technologies after the capture of these pilots. According to DIA's "asset", the American POWs were "a gold mine of information to brief ... specialists in the technologies used by the enemy."
Michael D. Benge
2300 Pimmit Drive, #604-W
Falls Church, VA 22043
Tel: (703) 698-8256 (H)
(202) 712-4043 (W)
October 4, 1999
___________________
Michael D. Benge spent 11 years in Vietnam, over five years as a prisoner of war--1968-73, and is a diligent follower of the affairs of the region. While serving as a civilian Foreign Service Officer, he was captured in South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese, and held in numerous camps in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam. He spent 27 months in solitary confinement and one year in a "black box." For efforts in rescuing several Americans before being captured, he received the Department of State's highest award for heroism and a second one for valor.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1209454/posts?page=204#204
The Venona Cables
Links:
NSA Web site, "Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations, http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html
NSA Web site, "Introduction to the VENONA Project,"
http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/index.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1209454/posts?page=227#227
John Kerry, VVAW and the FBI files.
SO WHAT? And who cares? After any plane crash, train derailment, or industrial accident, experts conduct analyses and seek to determine the culpability of anyone who had the slightest connection with what occurred. Likewise with crime: in a lawful society, even petty offenses are subject to investigation, judgment, and punishment, and serious offenses all the more so. War crimes? The embers in Bosnia had not yet cooled before an international tribunal was established to look into the atrocities committed in that conflict.Will politicians ever have the stomach to examine this holocaust on humanity? A full reckoning of communism's crimes may take a hundred Nuremberg trials.Only the USSR has been given a special dispensation. What happened there was a catastrophe that affected practically every country in the world, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, took scores of millions of lives, and nearly brought about global destruction, and yet no one, no one, has been brought to account.
Perhaps the best we can do is hang a few of our local 'progressives'.
"How old is this article? Dornan and Clinton are both gone." - KidGlock
Exactly. This is an important story, but it is totally bone-headed for Insight Magazaine and Tailgunner Joe to date it as current.
bump
thanks for the posts, bttt.
Excellent work Calpernia. ~jj
And I'd be very careful with relying on Gen. Sejna's information. For example: Does anyone recall the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Do you really think the KGB would have entrusted the Czechs to carry out experiments on POWs AT THE SAME TIME they were distrusting them enough to invade them to keep them from turning to the West??
FootNote to Post 19
Points of contact cite:
Major Tim Falkowski, Project Manager
Chief Petty Officer Michael Allen, Gulag Study Analyst
are no longer current contacts for the Gulag study.
They were contributors to the intel product that is posted and were contacts at that time.
THANK YOU so much for the link!! I try to hold onto these things when I can find them...
If you have a McCain ping list, please add me. But I will do my part and keep my eyes open.
I sincerely hope he is NOT a candidate for President.
Thanks again! ~jj
As we all know, Communism does a poor job at producing technology.
bttt
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