15 Americans who disappeared in Russia
"From: Beck Chip
BRAVO ZULU TO AP
I read the original AP article on Stalin's arrests and executions of Americans in the late 1930s when it came out last week. As I recall, nearly 200 American citizens - men, women, dependents - were arrested, harassed, executed or affected by the Stalinist purges that enveloped the foreigners.
Two important factors are demonstrated by the AP research, which amazingly gained direct access to documents of the type that Ambassador Toon of the Joint Commission should have pressed for long ago.
The first is the extreme lengths to which Stalin was willing to go to protect his Empire and to defeat the West. He had no fear of retaliation from the West, and carried out his lethal program against Americans with impunity. This is what he did with American GI POWs at the end of World War Two and the Korean War.
The 1930s program was not an anomaly. It was a precedent, practice, and policy that stretched from 1918 until 1975, and which continues to be plausibly denied to this day.
Second, the original AP article points out the lack of compassion that the U.S. State Department, and such men as George Kennon, had for the American citizens who were arrested and executed. Although they were still American citizens, for the most part, and entitled to the protection of our government despite their political views, they were dismissed as "lefties" who got what they deserved.
Kennon was one of the Russian specialists who failed to effectively assist the 6000-7000 U.S. POWs who were transferred from the German Stalags to the Soviet Gulag in 1945. These men were not "lefties," but American servicemen and heroes. The "hands-off" policy, however, was the same.
Among those 200 academicians, engineers, socialists, and American communists who were arrested, were quiet possibly one or more Americans who were in fact inserted into the Soviet capital to provide insights for Washington's meager intelligence apparatus. One of these men in fact escaped in one of the more incredible sagas of the era, but how many of his compatriots were not so fortunate?
AP is to be congratulated for his research and success in uncovering details of this atrocity. It is unfortunate that the managers of DPMO sought to thwart similar investigations into the fate of the POWs in 1996. Perhaps the families might have gained additional information to supplement that of a few good journalists.
CDR Chip Beck, USNR (ret)"