Tip From Czech Defector Expands Search for MIAs to Eastern Europe

The search for soldiers still listed as missing from the Vietnam War is being expanded to Czechoslovakia and the files of other East European countries as a result of information from a high-level Czech military defector, who has told Senate investigators that American POWs spent time in Czech hospitals before being sent to the former Soviet Union.

According to a confidential memorandum prepared for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, a Czech general who now works for the Defense Intelligence Agency has told investigators that, before his 1968 defection, he saw intelligence reports on at least two groups of POWs, each numbering about 25 men, who passed through Czech hospitals en route to Soviet imprisonment.

While some intelligence officials are clearly skeptical of the claim, congressional sources said the Senate committee plans to ask Czech officials to investigate information it received last month from Maj. Gen. Jan Sejna, secretary of the Czech Defense Council before he defected.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee chairman, refused to comment on the startling claim or the memo, written by two committee investigators who interviewed Sejna at the DIA’s Washington headquarters on Oct. 21.

But he did say the committee plans to take a statement from the general and that it will ask former East Bloc countries for cooperation in checking his claim. The CIA has also been asked to investigate, other sources said.

After years of denials from Moscow, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin acknowledged in a letter to the committee this summer that the Soviet Union secretly imprisoned some American POWs from World War II, interrogated others captured during the Korean War and held at least 12 airmen shot down on Cold War spy flights during the 1950s.

Yeltsin said secret Soviet archives indicated that some Vietnam War prisoners may have been transferred to Soviet labor camps. But that assertion was later discounted by intelligence officials from both sides.