Tale of Betrayal Must Be Pursued

A House subcommittee has heard chilling testimony indicating that the U.S. government may have abandoned more than 900 American prisoners of war after it signed an armistice with North Korea and China to end the Korean War 43 years ago. Supporting evidence comes from a Pentagon memo recently found in the papers of then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Retired Col. Phillip Corso, an Eisenhower aide, told the subcommittee that hundreds of U.S. POWs who were known to have been captured did not appear at the prisoner exchanges that preceded the armistice. The fate of those who might have been left behind is unknown. Some, young men at the time, could still be alive.

Why the government did nothing at the time to demand freedom for the prisoners, why Eisenhower, with a lifetime of military service behind him, did not personally insist that all the Americans whose names were on the prisoner list must be accounted for, why contemporary documentary information seems to have disappeared from Pentagon files are questions that demand answers. A Czech intelligence official who defected to the West in 1968 told the subcommittee that hundreds of American prisoners were taken to the Soviet Union and made the subjects of medical experiments. No effort should be spared to determine the truth of that gruesome assertion.

There have long been rumors that the government chose to keep silent about American captives it knew had been left behind in North Korea. That suspicion has gained greatly in credibility. Somewhere in the government’s vast classified archives, information that could point to the truth surely must exist. Somewhere retired officers other than Corso who worked on the prisoner issue might be ready to come forward with corroboration. There is absolutely no case to be made for secrecy now, if indeed there ever was one. The clear moral responsibility of the government is to track down every bit of information that exists on Americans who might have been abandoned in North Korea, to release that information and to explain why it is decades late in doing so.