Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Expert: Few GIs held by N. Korea Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 14:23:38 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION \HD Expert: Few GIs held by N. Korea \BY Carleton R. Bryant \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES Fewer than 100 of the 8,177 U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the Korean War had any chance of surviving the war, an archival researcher told a Senate panel yesterday. The others undoubtedly were killed in combat or killed by their North Korean captors en route to prison camps, Paul Cole told the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs. But according to a chronology of the war prepared by Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican and committee vice chairman, Pentagon officials believed at the time that far more men had survived. On Aug. 7, 1953, Gen. James A. Van Fleet, commander of the U.S. 8th Army in Korea, said, "A large percentage of the 8,000 American soldiers listed as missing in action in Korea are still alive," according to Mr. Smith's chronology. The senator described his chronology as "the most comprehensive compilation of U.S. government policy and intelligence information" on the Korean War and the fate of many of its missing men. Mr. Cole, a researcher with the Rand Corp., stuck by his conclusions, which he said were based on his Pentagon-sponsored one-year study of U.S. archives and interviews with former Korean War prisoners. "American prisoners were transferred to China to be interrogated by the Soviets and the Chinese. Most were then returned to the prison camps" in North Korea, he said. "A few were repatriated in the 1950s." Mr. Cole estimated that "less than 100" Americans may have been kept behind by communist officials, who have repeatedly denied holding any U.S. servicemen from the war. In August 1953, North Korea returned 3,597 American soldiers in Operation Big Switch. A year later, North Korea turned over 1,869 sets of remains supposedly of U.S. servicemen. Nearly 900 sets of those remains have yet to be identified. In a statement before yesterday's hearing, Mr. Smith said some Americans missing from the Korean War could be alive in Russia, and he charged Russian officials with hamstringing the search for the men. To show that U.S. prisoners might be alive, Mr. Smith said the committee's investigator in Moscow had heard that a Korea-era Air Force pilot named David Marken had been seen in a Russian labor camp in the 1980s. The Pentagon has done nothing with the information because it lists no one by that name missing from the war, Mr. Smith said. But committee staffers Monday night contacted a woman who was engaged to an Air Force pilot named David Markham who was shot down over Korea in 1952, he said, adding that her description of the pilot matched that of Russian sources. "In view of this information, I want to state very clearly that I hold the Russian government and all its factions responsible for finding David Markham and returning him . . . safely to the United States," the senator said. He lashed out at U.S. officials for covering up information about Korean War MIAs "through a pattern of denial, misleading statements and, in some cases, lies." Alan Ptak, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs, told the senators that the Pentagon is still analyzing data about Korean War soldiers. "We don't rule out the possibility" that some may have been shipped to the Soviet Union, Mr. Ptak said. "It would be premature to make a definitive statement." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM