February 26, 2000
U.S. Obtains Russia Emigre's Memoir
By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - Pentagon investigators have obtained the
memoir of a
Russian
emigre who claims to have learned while in internal exile in the
former
Soviet
Union that dozens of American servicemen from World War II and
the
Korean
War
were detained in Siberian labor camps.
The assertions, while not confirmed, appear to support, and in
some
important
respects strengthen, a case the Pentagon has been building for
several
years
:
U.S. servicemen in the 1940s and 1950s were silently swallowed
up in the
U.S.S.R.'s brutal Gulag system of forced labor, never to be
heard from
again
.
``There has to be something to this,'' said Norman Kass, who
helped
translate
the unpublished personal memoir from Russian and interviewed the
author
on
behalf of the Pentagon agency in charge of prisoner of war and
missing
personnel
affairs.
Kass said in an interview that the information fits a pattern of
anecdotal
reports received during the 1990s that American servicemen were
seen in
remote
labor camps.
He is executive secretary of a U.S.-Russian commission that has
pursued
the
matter since former President Boris Yeltsin disclosed in 1992
that
Soviet
forces
had taken a dozen U.S. airmen captive in the 1950s after
shooting down
their
planes. The commission meets periodically, and its staff has
done
extensive
research and interviewed Russian veterans.
The Kremlin has backtracked on Yeltsin's statement and
challenged U.S.
officials
to find proof. Armed with the Russian emigre's memoir, the
Pentagon
hopes
to
pursuade the Russians to provide access to archives at numerous
former
Siberian
labor camps where U.S. servicemen were said to have been held.
``We're not expecting an easy time,'' Kass said.
When Kass disclosed the memoir's existence at a meeting of the
U.S.-Russian
commission last November, the Russians were skeptical but agreed
to
study it
, a
U.S. summary of the proceedings said.
The memoir is exceptional because it provides names of
individual
servicemen
.
For example, it identifies by name 22 men said to have been held
in late
1951 at
the Kirovskij mining camp near the Kamenka River in the
sub-Arctic pine
forests
of the Krasnoyarsk region. The memoir's author cites secondhand
accounts of
area
residents seeing the prisoners, ``wearing bare threads and
half-frozen,''
being
led from the Kirovskij camp along a road to an undetermined
destination
-
``a
dead-end.''
A witness described as the daughter of the manager of a nearby
town told
the
author that on Christmas Day 1951 she saw ``frostbitten
prisoners being
led
and
driven like cattle by the NKVD,'' the former Soviet internal
security
agency.
``They did not speak Russian. They only said `American,
American,' and
`eat
,
eat.' They wanted food,'' the author quoted the woman as
recounting to
him.
Kass said that although the events described by the author have
not been
independently verified, he believes the man is credible. Kass
said the
man's
identity and his present country of residence are being kept
secret for
his
protection, but there is no question that he spent many years in
the
Gulag
network of forced labor camps. The man, now in his late 70s, was
exiled
to
Siberia and worked as a permafrost engineer in the early 1950s
near the
Kirovskij mining camp where the 22 Americans were said to have
been
held.
The 22 names were provided by a woman who the author said worked
in the
Kirovskij camp during the winter of 1951-52. The author said she
had the
men
write their names on scraps of newspaper with pieces of a pencil
she
sneaked
into the camp's toilets, then put the paper in a jar and buried
it.
In the translation from Russian, only one of the 22 names can be
matched
with a
missing American servicemen. He is listed in Army casualty
records as
Chan
Jay
Park Kim, a Hawaiian of Korean descent.
Kim was a private first class in the 24th Infantry Division's
34th
Infantry
Regiment, captured by North Korean forces on July 8, 1950. On
that day,
the
34th
Infantry collapsed in its defense of the town of Ch'onan south
of Seoul,
giving
the advancing North Korean army entry to most of the rest of
southern
Korea
.
According to Pentagon records, fellow members of the 34th
Infantry who
survived
captivity in Korea told Army debriefers that once he became a
POW, Kim
tried to
mask his ethnic background by using the name George Leon. It is
that
name
which
appears among the 22 on the list from the Soviet labor camp.
Army casualty records list Kim as having died in Korea in
January 1951,
but
his
body was not recovered.
The author of the memoir says that he saw only one American in
the
Gulag.
That
was in January 1953 at a camp called Rybak far above the Arctic
Circle,
and
a
prisoner described as a demolition expert appeared at a mining
operation
where
the author was dispatched to handle a technical problem.
``He also openly identified himself as a citizen of the United
States of
America, Allied Officer Dale,'' the author wrote. He said he was
not
allowed
to
talk to the man.
Another section of the memoir describes the fate of 10 members
of a
12-man
crew
of a U.S. Air Force B-29 reconnaissance plane, which was shot
down by
Soviet
forces over the Sea of Japan on June 13, 1952.
American search and rescue teams recovered no remains from the
plane,
and in
July 1956 the U.S. government appealed to Moscow for information
about
the
crew.
The State Department note said an officer believed to have been
a
member of
the
crew was seen in October 1953 in a Soviet hospital north of the
Siberian
port of
Magadan. The Soviets replied that no American servicemen were
on Soviet
territory.
The Russian emigre said that in the 1980s he was told by an
associate
with
extensive experience in the far eastern reaches of Siberia that
he had
learned
the names of two of the captured B-29 fliers: ``Bush and
Moore.''
The B-29's commander was Maj. Samuel Busch. A crew member was
Master
Sgt.
David
L. Moore.
The memoir indicates that Busch and Moore were killed - possibly
beaten
to
death
- in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, apparently a short time
after
their
capture. Eight surviving crew members were put in solitary
confinement
in a
prison in Svobodnyi, a city northwest of Khabarovsk near the
Chinese
border
, it
said.
Charlotte Busch Mitnik, a sister of Samuel Busch, said in an
interview
that
the
memoir ``reinforces what I believe'' happened to him and jibes
with
unconfirmed
rumors her family heard shortly after her brother's capture.
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