U.S. Envoy Says Yeltsin ‘Misspoke’ About POWs : Diplomacy: Former ambassador Toon has found no evidence of missing Americans still in Russia.

After days of intensified searching for signs of missing American prisoners of war, envoy Malcolm Toon said Friday that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin must have been confused or mistaken when he held out the hope that American POWs could still be alive in the former Soviet Union.

“It is clear to me that he misspoke,” Toon said of Yeltsin’s sensational comments during last week’s Russian-American summit, “because we have found nobody here that will tell us that Mr. Yeltsin’s information was correct based on solid information.”

“I think he was acting genuinely,” Toon told a small group of reporters at the American Embassy here. “But I think he misspoke.”

Yeltsin’s comment--that some Americans captured in Vietnam were moved to labor camps in the Soviet Union, and “we . . . can only surmise that some of them may still be alive”--set off shock waves in America. It brought renewed accusations that the United States government had lied when it discounted relatives’ claims that American servicemen could still be held somewhere behind the old Iron Curtain.

President Bush, vowing that “if anyone’s alive, that person--those people--will be found,” immediately dispatched Toon to Russia on a renewed POW quest last week.

Toon, ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1979, already co-chaired a Russian-American commission founded to search for evidence of American soldiers held in Russia. This spring, the panel had announced that it found no trace here of American servicemen from the Vietnam or Korean wars.

But Toon jetted back to Moscow and on to the Ural Mountains city of Pechora, where an American POW from the Korean War was believed to have been held in a prison camp. The search turned out to be a wild goose chase.

Russian officials have acknowledged that about 23,000 Americans were held in the Soviet Union after the Red Army liberated German and Japanese prison camps as World War II was ending, but most were soon released. They also admit to capturing American flyers shot down in the 1950s.

Toon, however, said he believed that Yeltsin had been referring to four American Vietnam-era deserters who were shown off for their propaganda value and then allowed to leave.

“These were not POWs; they were deserters,” he said. “Apparently, (Yeltsin) may have . . . misunderstood that and came up with this statement that he made.”

Despite Toon’s skepticism, the search continues. The American envoy has taped a televised appeal, to be broadcast Sunday across the Commonwealth of Independent States, asking for any information on living American POWs and providing a call-in number for viewers.

And Dmitry Volkogonov, Yeltsin’s military adviser and Toon’s co-chairman on the Russian-American commission, has pledged to deliver definitive word in two weeks on whether any living American POW is being held in a Russian camp or mental hospital.

Volkogonov has speculated that a World War II-era American POW may still be living in Russia somewhere, but searches of KGB documents and newly opened archives have yielded nothing.

Russian television last week showed unique footage of an American security agent, identified as Victor Hamilton, who spied for the KGB and has spent the last 30 years in a psychiatric hospital near Moscow, purportedly to hide from American retaliation. But the man, who refused to talk to the Russian journalists, had come to Moscow voluntarily and could not be considered a POW.

The network of former Soviet prison camps is vast, and a prisoner could conceivably have gone unnoticed for years, his case too dusty to be re-examined despite the monumental change sweeping the country. Or he could have been released to lead a quiet, Russian-style life in the hinterlands.

But after seven years of glasnost, those scenarios are undeniably far-fetched, and the Russian-American commission has thus far turned up only the death certificates of eight Americans from just after World War II.

“My gut feeling,” Toon said, “is that there’s nobody alive under Russian control.”