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War era, a disproportionate several dozen
to our advisor on this decision of the TSK
These two cables—both sent to Marshal
failed to appear among the ranks of the
KPK [the Central Committee of the Chinese
Stepan Krasovskiy, chief of the Soviet gen-
repatriated U.S. POWs when prisoners were
Communist Party], requested that our advi-
eral staff in Moscow—were found in the
exchanged in 1953.
sor help the Chinese investigators organize
Soviet military archives in Podolsk by civil-
The documents on American POWs
the interrogation of the prisoners of war and
ian Russian researchers working under the
from Soviet military archives, taken together
oversee their work. The MGB advisor was
direction of Dr. Paul Cole, then with the
with the testimony of Soviet veterans of
ordered by us to render such help.”
Rand Corp. Cole’s project was authorized
Korea and now-declassified papers from
A second document that illustrates the
under a Pentagon contract with Rand to search
U.S. archives, clearly point to Soviet com-
involvement of Soviet military intelligence
for information in Soviet archives dealing
plicity in the disappearance and probable
in the interrogation of American POWs in
with Americans missing after World War II,
death of dozens, if not hundreds, of those
Korea deals with the 4 December 1950
the Korean War and Cold War.
POWs who were not repatriated.
shootdown of a USAF RB-45 reconnais-
The cables in the McDonough-Lovell
Soviet military data dealing with Ameri-
sance plane.
RB-45 case were made available to the Ameri-
can prisoners in Korea began making its way
None of the four men aboard the plane—
can side of the Joint Commission within a
to U.S. authorities and private researchers in
the pilot, Capt. Charles McDonough, two
short time after Cole learned of them in the
the winter of 1991-92, as the administration
other crewmen, and Col. John R. Lovell, a
fall of 1992 and ultimately became a part of
of Mikhail Gorbachev was giving way to his
top-ranking Air Force intelligence officer
the large repository of Joint Commission
rival, Boris Yeltsin.
believed to be on a mission from the Penta-
documents that comprises the results of the
During what many would later charac-
gon—made it back to the U.S.
commission’s efforts.
terize as a brief “window of opportunity,”
Thus, like the Cold War spy flights, the
After being translated, documents re-
when a mood of genuine reform and open-
RB-45 case was wrapped not only in the
ceived from the Russian side of the commis-
ness about past misdeeds seemed to emanate
difficulties of unraveling any MIA case
sion, along with transcribed minutes of the
from Moscow, government and private re-
from the tangles of the Korean War but also
Joint Commission’s regular meetings (usu-
searchers seeking answers about U.S. POWs
in the sensitivity that attaches to intelligence
ally three times a year), are placed on file at
and MIAs attempted to turn the moment to
missions and personnel.
the Library of Congress.
their advantage.
The key document discovered so far in
Besides filling gaps in the world’s ex-
A number of interested parties in the
the RB-45 case revealed not only that at
panding knowledge of Soviet behavior and
U.S. government—the State Department,
least one of those aboard was captured alive,
policies, the still-growing collection of docu-
Pentagon, National Archives, Library of
but also that Soviet interest and involve-
ments, summaries of papers, lists and trans-
Congress—decided on a unified approach to
ment in the case was high.
lations now available to scholars and the
gaining access to files related to missing
A cable dated 17 December 1950, stated
general public may ultimately help resolve a
Americans, and supported the creation of
in part:
significant number of American MIA cases.
the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission. Each
An aircraft shot down on 12-4-
To date, the Joint Commission’s record
agency or department appointed a represen-
50 of the B-45 type fell in a region
on that score has been modest. Only one
tative to the commission, whose co-chair-
70 km to the east of Andun (Man-
actual Cold War MIA case—a U.S. fighter
men were former U.S. ambassador to Mos-
churia). The aircraft caught fire in
pilot whose remains were retrieved from an
cow Malcolm Toon for the U.S. and the late
the air and upon falling to the earth
uninhabited coastal island in the Russian Far
Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a historian and
burned up completely. The crew
East after a Russian man who took part in the
military adviser to Yeltsin, for the Russians.
bailed out on parachutes. The pilot
original burial came forward with details of
The commission began its work in rela-
125 COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT BULLETIN
tive obscurity. But in a move whose motiva-
tion and meaning to this day remains some-
what of a mystery, Yeltsin in June 1992
suddenly announced that a number of Ameri-
can military prisoners had indeed been held
on Soviet territory. And he vowed an inves-
tigation that would determine whether any
remained alive.
His statement revived the hopes not
only of thousands of families seeking infor-
mation about MIAs in Indochina—the most
vocal and media-noticed segment of the
POW/MIA community—but also of a qui-
eter and more patient community represent-
ing the families and friends of nearly 8,200
unaccounted-for men from the Korean War
and dozens more from the shootdowns of
U.S. spy planes during the 1950s and 1960s.
This community—unaligned with and
largely separate from the academic commu-
nity that had begun to forage in Soviet ar-
chives for its own purposes—had two pow-
erful allies in its search for information about
American MIAs assumed to be in Russian
hands.
Each of these allies—the Senate Select
Committee on POWs and MIAs and the
U.S.-Russia Joint Commission—would end
up disappointing the Korean War and Cold
War MIA community in its own way.
The Senate committee, whose co-chairs
were Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and
Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire, lasted
for one year and drew significant media
attention. But, predictably, it spent the vast
majority of staff time and investigative ef-
fort on Indochina. The life of the committee
was marked by private and public quarrels
over the value of certain evidence and the
integrity of some of the witnesses.
But in every case, the context of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]