Jailed Americans Still Alive in Russia, Records Suggest : Archives: 39 U.S. citizens missing since World War II are listed, Yeltsin military aide reports in Izvestia.

New evidence found in the recently opened top-secret KGB archives shows that some American citizens imprisoned by Soviet authorities during and after World War II are still alive and living in the former Soviet republics, according to an article published in a Russian newspaper Thursday.

“(We must) find them to correct the injustices against them and give them a chance to contact relatives currently living in the United States,” Col. Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a top military adviser to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, wrote in a front-page article published in the prestigious Izvestia newspaper.

Thirty-nine people holding American passports or born in America but with ethnic roots in one of the Soviet republics ended up in Soviet hands because of internment, border changes, repatriation or military operations, according to Volkogonov. And Soviet authorities tried to coerce them into renouncing their American citizenship.

“Those who refused were immediately given 15 to 25 years in prison camp for ‘spying,’ ” said Volkogonov, who is the Russian chairman of a joint Russian-American commission investigating the fates of missing Americans from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Most, however, agreed to give up their American citizenship--but were sent to prison anyway as Soviet citizens, he added.

“There is reason to believe that several of them are still alive and are living at this moment in the territory of the former Soviet Union,” he said.

Volkogonov’s revelations were one of the first indications that the joint commission has found information about missing Americans who are still alive and living freely in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

There have been complications in finding the 39 missing Americans, Volkogonov said, because the events happened so long ago and because some of them may be living in other republics of the former Soviet Union. A list of their names, Volkogonov said, will be published soon in Izvestia.

The information was uncovered by agents of the Russian Security Ministry, successor to the KGB, “from the depths of archives that were top-secret until just recently,” the article said.

Malcolm Toon, the American chairman of the joint commission, had no immediate comment on the general’s statement, saying he had not seen the text.

The search for Americans in the former Soviet Union “is a continuing process,” Toon said in a telephone interview from his home in Pinehurst, N.C. “Our first objective is to find out whether the Yeltsin statement at the summit conference in Washington was accurate--that there might possibly be live American POWs in detention. . . . On the basis of what we heard and saw in Moscow after the summit conference, we felt there was no information available that would support that.”

Volkogonov had previously been very conservative in his assessments of the likelihood of American POWs still living in the former Soviet Union. In June, he said Russian officials had received a report that one of the Americans who came under the control of the Red Army at the end of World War II may be still living in the Ural Mountains region.

After Yeltsin caused a sensation during a summit in Washington last month by declaring that American POWs from the Vietnam War may still be alive in Russia--and that if so, his government would return them--Volkogonov said his boss was mistaken.

According to Americans and Russians involved in the investigation, it is possible that the joint search commission could dig up information of the fates of thousands of Americans.

During a visit to Moscow in February, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) said that the United States has a list of 2,273 names from the Vietnam War and thousands more from the Korean War and World War II and that he hopes the commission will find information on many of them.

In a report issued in early June, before Yeltsin’s statement in Washington, the joint commission appeared to rule out the presence of any Vietnam-era American servicemen in the former Soviet Union, saying the only relevant records were of American deserters who had since left Russia.

After World War II, 24,000 American POWs were freed by the Red Army from German and Japanese prison camps, only to be interned in the Soviet Union, according to American officials, and about 23,500 were eventually returned to America. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, officials in Moscow had refused to even acknowledge the others.

The joint commission’s access to the former Soviet archives reflects the huge step the two countries have made toward cooperation since the Cold War days. It has already solved a number of cases, but none involving people who are still living.

So far, most attempts by officials and individuals to track down American POWs still living in Russia have turned into wild goose chases.

American investigators traveled to the remote Arctic prison camp PL-350-5 last month on a tip that an American was being held there, but they found no evidence that any American POWs had ever been at the site.

Kirill Belyaninov, an investigative reporter, has spent six months searching for American POWs in Russia for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the country’s biggest daily newspapers.

“I’ve talked by telephone with several people who say they are American POWs from World War II,” Belyaninov said. “I believe they are who they say they are. They speak Russian with a slight accent. But they all refuse to name themselves.”

He has also met with Russian relatives of American POWs who have recently died in Russia. In one case, a World War II veteran admitted only on his death bed that he was an American from New York. Belyaninov was able to check this man’s identity through the Pentagon and found that there was a missing American serviceman with such a name.

The search, Belyaninov said, has been frustrating because the missing Americans seem afraid to go public. Many of them reflect a general paranoia instilled in them through decades in the gulag. Others, he said, have set up new families and identities in Russia and do not want to admit so late in life that they have led double lives.

But he believes that there are American ex-POWs still alive in Russia and hopes some of them will eventually go on the record with their life stories.

Belyaninov’s next adventure will be to travel to a camp in Russia’s Far East where he has been told missing Americans, Japanese and Germans have been kept under KGB guard for decades.

Times staff writer Paul Houston in Washington contributed to this story.