House Subcommittee on Military Personnel
Requested by Congressmen Pickett and Dornan
17 September 1996
Testimony by
Commander William (Chip) Beck, USNR
Special Research and Investigations Assistant to
Director, Joint Commission Support Directorate
Defense POW/MIA Office
Covert Operations Against American POWs
In WWII, the COLD WAR, KOREA, and VIETNAM
The testimony of LTC Philip Corso, Czech General Jan Sejna, and strategic intelligence expert, Mr. Joe Douglass on 17 September was compelling and long overdue in a public forum. If it results in a sea change in the way the POW/MIA issues are viewed, and addressed, it will constitute a valuable service. In support of their long struggle over the years, and their courageous testimony today, I wish to add the following.
Although I am an official of the Defense POW/MIA Office {DPMO},(From May 31, 1995 to 30 September 1996) I offer this statement as my own analysis and viewpoint.
As a retired member of the Clandestine Service, and a Special Operations officer with more than 33 years experience, I have participated in many of the Cold War's "shadow conflict" around the world, in Indochina, Asia, Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, and on the frontiers of the old Soviet Union. I have witnessed many things that supposedly "never happened."
My experience and training in covert operations, over a lifetime, provided skills and insights upon which to investigate the POW/MIA issues. Upon that experience and available information I base the following conclusions.
For hald a century, the Soviet Union masterminded an elaborate exploitation of foreign prisoners of war. Into the Gulag Archipelago that contained 30 million Soviet nationals, were sent hundreds of thousands of non-Soviets, including nearly a half million Germans, Austrians, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Japanese.
The pool of foreign prisoners of war included hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans over these past 50 years. What happened to these American GIs is a chapter in our nation's history that has, for too long, gone unwritten.
The transfer of Americans into the Gulag was intentional. If it were a "mistake," the Soviets would have corrected it through diplomatic channels decades ago. The very nature of clandestine operations menas they are not accidents. Nor are they acknowledged or willingly revealed. The greater magnitude of the covert operation, the great is the secrecy that surrounds it.The transfer of American POWs to the USSR is one big secret.
What the Soviet Union started in 1945, Russia, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, China, the Khmer Rouge, and even Cuba and certain Eastern European countries, still guard today. Secrecy is still vital to these govenrments, regardless of shifts in world politics since 1990.
Why? First, the sensitivity of the Soviet-orchestrated operations to exploit foreign POWs ranks as high as its nuclear secrets, perhaps higher.
Second, communist is not "dead." As its doctrine decrees, it is only underground. Of vital importance to the POW/MIA questions, there were no purges in the communist intelligence services in the former Soviet Union {FSU}. Documents and records, as General Sejna points out, were transferred from Eastern Europe to Moscow. Those who ran the KGB still run the SVT, and a dozen other services in Russia and the FSU.
Third, it is difficult, but not impossible, for communist veterans who participated in these covert programs, and who may know the fate of our POWs, to come forward. Their lives, families, and well-being, are still at risk. As one former KGB officer told me, "journalists and businessmen are being killed in Moscow and St. Petersburg for trying to break secrets far less sensitive than the POWs. [sic]"
DPMO, and America, needs to take a new approach toward solving the key POW mystery. Traditionally, we have concentrated efforts on "individual loss cases," essentially neglecting the "strategic" aspects of the communist operations and policies toward foreign POWs as assets. Such and understanding is fundamental to finding out what happened to unrepatriated POWs who were transferred to the USSR.
Since Vietnam, U.S. POW investigators have focused sizable efforts on investigating crash sites, perhaps to the detriment of larger, more difficult issues. The balance of investigative resources needs to be adjusted, not for show, but for effect. I wish to go on record as saying the U.S. has a chance of solving this issue, but only if it employs, and applies, the proper resources and most dedicated people it can muster.
Investigators must understand that, in terms of POWs, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, and Vietnam, were linked. Soviet policy perspectives, intelligence requirements, and covert operational needs were coordinated with their allies. Just as Soviet political doctrine was taught to emerging communist states, so were more practical issues, which included the handling and exploitation of foreign POWs. Americans must understand the connection between those conflicts before it can solve the mystery of unrepatriated prisoners.
Likewise, the methods and goals of Soviet/bloc operations were not random, unplanned, or untested actions that occured spontaneously in those conflicts. They were carefully and methodically connected. To expose the consequences of those operations, we need to probe the strategic importance that the Soviets placed on U.S. and other foreign POWs.
To accomplish this, we need fewer, or at least no more, "traditional analysts." What is required are more "investigators," men and women who can exhaust promising new leads that are available, and solve mysteries. In this vein, we need to shift the fields of inquiries from the old battlefields of Asia, and seek the answers inthe more important capitals of Europe, from where the operations were directed. The answers are out there, and can be obtained, if we send our best people. It is the effort, the commitment, and the way we apply resources that will count.
What is needed is a renewed commitment, more creative efforts, and fresh people, to aggressively pursue the twin issues of unrepatriated POWs {since WWII}, and the transfer of American POWs to the USSR. The recovery of remains, alone, is only part of the mission, and could truthfully be accomplished with fewer, or smaller, bureaucratic institutions, if that is all we intended to really accomplish. The heart of the mission should be to find out what happened to those who were purposefully hidden from us.
Even if every one of the POWs and MIAs who were left behind, are now deceased, America still owes them a debt of honor, {which we also owe LTC Corso, and General Sejna}. The full measure of their sacrifices can only be known by exposing what really happened to these exploited and abandoned POWs. The facts may turn out to be ugly, but they must be revealed.
What to do with the facts when they become known is also a major consideration. Mr. Douglass brought up the specter of war crimes. Since America's record on prosecuting war crimes, after Nuremberg, is virtually zero, the question of amnesty may have to be considered as an option for the truth to be revealed. Resettlement for those who come forth with the facts may also be in order. I know from my own investigations that other Western nations, who had POWs transferred ot the USSR in WWII and Korea, faced these same issues, and enacted their own solutions. The British response in Korea was mentioned by LTC Corso in his testimony. What was missed in the hustle of the hearings was that the British got their POWs back from the Soviets, not the Koreans.
Why was it in the national interest of the Soviet Union to acquire, transfer, and exploit Americans, and other foreign POWs? Some of my colleagues and I in the Joint Commission Support Directorate {JCSD}, under Mr. Norm Kass, have identified many reasons that motivated the Soviets. Without lsiting all of them, the following are offered as partial examples:
In WWII, perhaps 6000-7000 American POWs, "liberated" from Nazi POW camps, went to the Gulag. This was partially because the Western Allies would not forcibly return Russian POWs who had fought for Germany against Stalin. Stalin could not exact vengeance on those he considered traitors, so he took a measure of revenge against the soldiers of countries {U.S., Britain, Canada, etc.} who denied him his will. American POWs of the Nazis, became "hostages" of the Communists.
In Korea, American POWs were sent to Siberia, as LTC Corso points out so emphatically, while others were sent to Moscow for atomic radiation experiments, drug experiments, and medical testing. General Sejna, who saw men firsthand, and read the subsequent laboratory reports, called them "guinea pig." Additonally, they were exploited for intelligence, the use of their identities, espionage support, technical information, avionics, skilled labor, propaganda insights, and forced labor.
In the Cold War, the U.S. did not admit to violations of Soviet air space, so the Soviets conveniently did not have to acknowledge the presence of live airmen it may have captured in this clandestine war.
The Vietnam Was not isolated from the rest of the communist world, or its collective experiences and support. Too many credible people have stepped forward, in private situations, to say otherwise. Generals Sejna's testimony that transfers took place, not only in Korea, but Vietnam, has been suported in conversations I have had with other reliable defectors.
Having served nearly five years on the ground in Vietnam, I know that we lost the war, in large part, because of our national arrogance as to the capacities of the Vietnamese to deceive or defeat us. We cannot afford to continue to be arrogant, as frankly some still are, and think we have answered all the questions concerning the POWs, in Indochina or elsewhere.
Let's be realistic. The communist strategists who brought the West such surprises as Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh, Tet, Hue, the Ho Chi Minh trail, vast tunnel systems, and who infiltrated nearly every U. S. and South Vietnamese miltary, intelligence, and political network, are very capable of planning, executing, and covering up an elaborate, secret, second-tier, POW system.
These programs were guided and supported by the Soviets, who are masters of "maskirova," or deception. They've been experts at it for a thousand years. The Soviets never expected to lose the Cold War, or to answer for human rights abuses of its own people, or foreigners. So they acted with impunity. They still are.
I agree with Congressman Dornan's concluding statement. If DPMO believes, institutionally, that all the major questions have been answered, then we need only to assign some caretakers to the files, and let CILHI and JTF-FA hunt for remains in the field.
If we determine, as some of us in JCSD have, that the really hard questions have not been effectively addressed, much less answered, then new methods, new approaches, and fresh minds, need to be applied toward the lingering POW/MIA mystery.
CDR beck has an MA in political science from George Washington University. He speaks three foreign languages and began his active Navy career in1968 as a frogman, and served as a Forward Observer with 3RD MARDIV units in Vietnam in 1969. He later switched to Naval Intelligence, and is a credentialed NCIS Reserve Agent. He was recalled to active duty in Desert Storm as the Navy's Combat Artist. From 1970-1993, he served in the clandestine service of the CIA, as a special operations expert, retiring in an overt status in 1993. He was again recalled to asctive duty for most of the 1993-1996 period, serving with DPMO since May 1995. He is a combat veteran who has served in military, intelligence, and diplomatic assignments in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Western Sahara, Sudan, El Salvador, Panama {Just Cause}, Honduras, Beirut, Colombia, and the Gulf War.