Soviets Held Korea War POWs, U.S. Says : Prisoners: The findings in a government report have been presented to Russian officials.

The U.S. government has confronted Moscow for the first time with evidence that hundreds of U.S. Korean War prisoners were secretly moved to the Soviet Union, imprisoned and never returned.

The allegation, supported by new information from a variety of American and Russian sources, was made in a detailed presentation by a State Department official at a meeting with Russian officials in Moscow earlier this month.

The evidence is spelled out in a government report titled “The Transfer of U.S. Korean War POWs to the Soviet Union.” It was given to the Russians at the Moscow meeting, but the Clinton Administration has not released it.

“The Soviets transferred several hundred U.S. Korean War POWs to the U.S.S.R. and did not repatriate them,” the report says. “This transfer was mainly politically motivated with the intent of holding them as political hostages, subjects for intelligence exploitation and skilled labor within the camp system.”

It asserts that the evidence gave a “consistent and mutually reinforcing description” of Soviet intelligence services forcibly moving U.S. POWs to the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviet military was active in North Korea.

It does not assess how long the American servicemen may have lived, or whether any might still be alive.

Just last year, the U.S. government said it had no evidence of such transfers. Washington has known, though, since the end of the war that some evidence existed that U.S. POWs from Korea had been taken to the Soviet Union. It asked Moscow for information on this in May, 1954, and July, 1956. Both times the Soviet government denied any knowledge of U.S. POWs on its soil.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin last year said Soviet records showed that 59 captured U.S. servicemen in Korea were interrogated by Soviet officials and that 12 crew members of U.S. aircraft shot down in reconnaissance missions unrelated to the Korean War were transferred to Soviet territory. But the Yeltsin government has yet to concede that Americans were taken from Korea.

In the three years of fighting in Korea, in which the United States led a U.N. force on the side of South Korea against China-supported Communist North Korea, 54,246 Americans were killed. The government lists 8,140 as unaccounted for, although the number of missing for which there is no direct evidence of death is estimated at 2,195.

The 77-page U.S. report on U.S. Korean War prisoners delivered to Russia gives no specific figure, but the analysis seems to indicate it is fewer than 600.

It identifies by name 31 missing Air Force F-86 fighter pilots who are among the most likely servicemen to have been taken by the Soviets for their knowledge of the plane’s capabilities, plus six other Air Force aviators about whom the U.S. government believes Russia has additional information.