A Cold War Story Awaiting an Ending

I met him in Berlin in the early part of 1952. He was fresh from a rather dangerous trip to Poland. He had heard about me and our New York outfit, Foreign News Service, operated under the auspices of Free Journalists from Eastern Europe, and wanted to help. I never learned his name or his nationality. He was a short, husky little man who had lived under communism and had decided to devote his life to inform the West about the real nature of the Soviet Union.

By the time I was ready to board my plane home, we had made a deal. He would send us material obtained within the Soviet orbit, but only under strict conditions: We could never reveal our source, never even hint his location. He did not want to be paid. He asked only that we cover his expenses, with money to be sent to a Vienna bank account. From then on, a steady stream of items arrived at my desk. And this is how I suspect that the latest reports about Americans still living in North Korea does not tell the full story.

On Nov. 15, 1951, newspapers had reported the mass killing of Americans by the Chinese and Korean communists. The report of the event was sent to Gen. Matthew Ridgway, then the commanding officer of the United Nations forces in Korea, by Col. James M. Handley, judge advocate general of the Eighth Army. It accused the enemy of slaughtering more than 2,500 captured American soldiers, and it gave names, dates and places. Handley was surprised by the outcry, since almost a year earlier he had sent a film showing the recovered bodies of American prisoners shot in the back of the skull and buried with their hands still tied behind their backs--the same way that thousands of Polish officers were killed by the Russians in the Katyn Forest.

The indication that a number of Americans captured by North Koreans had been sent to the Soviet Union came from a number of anonymous sources, and my Berlin contact was one of them. I subsequently wrote about his tale of American prisoners being shipped to the Soviet Union in the May 1953 issue of Esquire magazine. Much later, during the perestroika period, it was indirectly confirmed by Soviet authorities.

One of the detailed reports that he sent indicated that a number of camps that housed American POWs were in northwestern Siberia. The city of Molotov, formerly known as Perm, was an industrial and manufacturing center and the headquarters of the Soviet political police. This is where interrogation and screenings were conducted. Men considered active anti-communists and others viewed as potential collaborators were separated from the rest. South Korean prisoners usually were classified as traitors. They were denied POW status and treated as common criminals. Americans were given a choice of collaboration or harsh detention camps.

At the time that we received our reports, about 900 non-Korean POWs--mostly Americans, but also some British and Turkish soldiers--lived in the camps. Their locations included Chita, east of Lake Baikal, and Shivanda, which offered relatively mild treatment for men willing to cooperate, and Komi-Permiak for men who stood by their rights and refused to work for their captors. The selection and final screening were conducted in the town of Yakutsk. Col. lvan Achsagnyrov was in charge. He and his subordinates were particularly eager to identify American Air Force officers, tank specialists, artillery men and other skilled technicians. Once identified, they were shipped to special camps on the Chinese side of the Yalu River and then to other camps in isolated parts of the Soviet Union.

To this day, I have no way of confirming the veracity of our informer’s stories. My inclinations, however, are on the side of the little man. He had nothing to gain by cooperating with us. Furthermore, some of his other stories--like the one about a police raid on a school in Chapaev in Western Kazakhstan after a number of students were accused of listening to the Voice of America--were confirmed by U.S. government sources.

The saga of the American soldiers still unaccounted for from the grim days of the Korean War is far from being finished.