Russia Invites U.S. Officials to Camp for POW Inquiry

Russia invited U.S. officials to a northern prison camp Thursday to investigate reports that the former Communist government may have held an American pilot shot down during the Korean War.

The invitation to American members of a joint U.S.-Russian commission on POWs followed President Boris N. Yeltsin’s statements this week that American servicemen might still be on Russian soil.

Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, said 2,800 U.S. citizens “found themselves on Soviet soil” after World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He said it is possible some may still be alive.

But the co-chairman of the POW-MIA commission, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, expressed doubt that any American POWs might still be alive in Russia. The commission said in March it had found no evidence of American servicemen from the Vietnam or Korean wars in the former Soviet Union.

“The last five years were absolutely open, and if there was an American (POW), he would have stepped forward,” Volkogonov said in Washington in an interview on Russian television Wednesday.

Yeltsin’s disclosure caused a sensation in the United States and prompted suggestions by some in Congress to delay Western aid to Russia until it provides further evidence about the fate of American POWs.

Members of the joint U.S.-Russian commission on POWs and MIAs planned to fly to northern Russia’s Pechora region today to search for information on an American, 1st Lt. Robert Martin.

Martin was a pilot captured by the North Koreans and sentenced to one year in prison for striking an interrogator, according to Russian television and the Ark Project, an American organization searching for POWs.

Boris Yuzhin, Ark’s associate director, said it was unclear whether Martin was taken to the Soviet Union or was interrogated by Soviet officers during his captivity in North Korea.

In New York, Vietnamese officials on Wednesday rejected as “not at all credible” statements by Yeltsin that some Americans taken prisoner in the Vietnam War were transferred to Soviet authorities and may still be alive.

“Frankly, we don’t believe at all the recent statements by Boris Yeltsin,” said Nguyen Ngoc Dinh, a diplomat at Vietnam’s mission to the United Nations in New York.

Nguyen noted that Yeltsin had not come up with any specifics about Vietnam-era POWs.