Esquire - May 1953
Vol. XXXIX No.5, Whole No. 234

An expert on Russian affairs claims that our G.I.'s listed as missing, must choose between propaganda and slavery in Siberia.
by Sygmunt Nagorski, Jr.

UNREPORTED G.I.'S IN SIBERIA

This is a shocking story, and those who wish not to believe it may rest their hopes on the fact we do not have proof of it. Reporting news events that occur in the Soviet Union is an art rather than a science; there are no official sources that can be trusted, eyewitnesses are oftern murdered of silenced by threats, all the electronic and mechanical means of communication are censored by the government. Information does get out, through refugees or smugglers and secret agents, and a great deal of this information comes to me because I am general manager of the Fpreign News Service, and organization that specializes in gathering news from behind the Iron Curtain. But we have no proof; and we always may be wrong.

Our information, gathered over the last year, tells us that American soldiers captured by Communist forces in the Korean conflict have been shipped to the Soviet Union to work in slave-labor camps or to train as Communist propaganda agents. This article presents the details of the story as I know them, the proof available in my hand, and as much information about my sources as I am at liberty to reveal.

We have almost forgotten about it by now, but a totally unexpected shock hit this nation on November 15, 1951. Morning newspaper headlines screamed the delayed news of a mass killing os American P.O.W.'s by the Chinese and Korean Communists. The report was by Colonel James E. Hanley, Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army. It accused the enemy of slaughtering more than 2500 captured American soldiers, and it gave details: names, places, dates.

general Ridgway, then our Commander in Korea, was surprised to learn that Colonel Hanley's report had roused a fury of publc opinion at home. To him it was an old story. In December, 1950, he had sent to Washington a film which showed the recovered bodies of American peionsers shot in the back of the skull and buried with their hands still tied behind theri backs. This murder of prisoners was not even a new Communist tactic; near the beginning of World War II several thousand Polish officers had been killed by the Russians in Katyn Forest, and their bodies thrown into a mass grave. They, too, had been killed by bullets fired from behind; their hands, too, had been tied behind their backs.

In fact, by the time Colonel Hanley's report was issued the Communists had changed their tactics. Up to April, 1951, I received many reports indirectly from Korean and Chinese natives who had witnessed mass shootings of captured U.N. troops. Up to that time the Chinese and North Korean forces were harsh and brutal in their treatment of P.O.W.'s. Then the orders -- from Peiping or from Moscow -- changed. From that time onward G.I.'s were treated as usable human material.

This technique, too, was an old one. During the last war the Red Army captured and imprisoned not only our former enemies -- the Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians and Austrians -- but also some of our allies, notably the Poles. Some of these P.O.W.'s returned home, but many -- perhaps most -- are still missing; Japan gives a figure of one hundred thousand, Italy of 63,000. To all these claims the Soviet leaders clamly answer that all but war criminals have been repatriated. Despite the calm answer, Russia sent West Germany 650 of her missing prisoners between January and August, 1952.

According to offical statistics, the number of American soldiers missinh in action in Korea was 13,012 in Dece,mber, 1952. We do not know how many of these men are still alive, how many are prisoners in Korea, how many are in China or Russia. But our best information is that large numbers of Americans are now living in camps scattered in the various Republics of Russia.

The co-ordinating center for these camps seems to be the city of Molotov. Northwest of Molotov, in the area commonly known as Northwestern Siberia, Americans have been seen in at least six camps, and other American P.O.W.'s have been reported from camps situated on the Pacific Coast of Siberia, in Khaborovsk and in the towns of Chita and Omsk, both on the Trans-Siberian railroad.

Molotov, formerly known as Perm, has a population of 225,000 and lies west of the Ural Mountains. It has been an industrial center since the early eighteenth century, when copper smelting plants were established, and today it produces agricultural machinery, lumber and leather goods, and, of course, refined copper. In Molotov the Headquarters of the Soviet political police is a large building also used as a prison, and American P.O.W.'s have been kept there for periods of screening and interrogation.

The Communists use two procedures -- one for South Koreans, the other for all other U.N. personnel -- in dealing with prisoners of war. South Koreans are sent to near-by camps and interrogated; officers, technicians and cases of special interest are then seperated and sent to the nearest outpost of the Soviet Military Mission in China.

It is widely rumored in China that a scret agreement has been concluded bewteen Peiping and Moscow regarding these prisoners. According to that pact certain cases are automatically transferred by the Chinese to the Soviet authorities. Such cases include all high-ranking South Korean officers who can be accused of deliberate and active co-operation witht he enemy. They are considered war criminals and treated accordingly. Active anticommunists, men unwilling to talk, and other minor cases are also turned over to the Russians.

The men must all pass Soviet Military Mission screening. Those who fail to pass are sent to isolated camps in the Yakutsk Autonomous Soviet Republic, the largest in area of the Russian republics (1,169,000 square miles) but one of the smallest in population (only 420,000 inhabitants). The region has no railroads, and highways are the sole means of transportation. In the Ministry of State Security Building at teh town of Yakutsk, the capital of the Republic, is the Central Commission for Korean P.O.W.'s.

Colonel Ivan Achasgnyrov, a police officer who heads the Cebntral Commission, recently sentenced a number of South Korean officers up to 15 to 25 years in labor camps. Although Russia officially is not at war with the United Nations forces defending Korea, these men are still accused of co-operating with the enemy.

Only Asians are sent to Yakutsk. All other U.N. prisoners are sent to camps located on the Yalu River where they are interrogated by Chinese and Russian officers who speak perfect English. These officers conduct the first screening. American Air Force officers, artillerymen, tank specialists and other technicians are seperated from the rest and sent to special camps. (Some of these specialists, considered particularly valuable, are flown directly to Russia. Their first stop is Poset, a naval station at Poset Bay on the Chinese-Soviet frontier.)

These special camps are scattered along the Chinese side of the Yalu river. In June, 1952, I heard descriptions, without names or locations, of two of the camps. At that time about nine hundred non-Korean P.O.W.'s, mostly Americans and some British and Turks, were housed in the two camps. Each camp had about 450 men divided into units of fifty or sixty. The Communists were trying their best to make their captives feel at ease. Food was decent, the daily routine was light and there was plenty of recreation. Books and magazines were available in English, French, Russian and German. Battle films -- usually featuring villages and cities bombed by U.N. planes -- were shown every night. Instruction in the Russian language was available to anyone who wanted it, and short discussion sessions with camp political officers were held three or four times a day.

Various delegations visited the camps and tried to influence the opinions of the captives. The delegations included various peace committees, local school children, women's societies, and so forth. The children were particularly vocal in describing tot he prisoners the barbarities committed against their homes and their parents by U.N. fliers. A W3lfare Committee for Prisoners of War, including many prominent citizens, administered the camps.

The Yalu camps, however, play host to the G.I.'s for only a few weeks. Then the Communists are ready for further screening and for work on their victims.

The political officers, who formerly led discussions on world events, now begin conducting daily interrogations. Within a day or two they know which prisoners they want. Most of the men are settled in ordinary P.O.W. camps in North korea nad China; but those suspected of active anticommunism, and those in whose remarks the officers see possibilities of conversion to the Communist "faith", are turned over to the Russians. They are marked as dead on the official P.O.W. lists.

The first screenings are of a general character, so a substantial number of Americans who do not fit into the Communist plans are included on the trip to Russia. Our information indicates that the overwhelming majority of the transferred prisoners refuse to be used for propaganda work.

The second lap of the journey takes the selected P.O.W.'s to transit camps directly north of Korea at Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk. The men are transported by rail in trains heavily guarded by M.V.D. men accompanied by dogs. At the transit camps there are more interrogations, and then selected P.O.W.'s are sent to Chita, located east of Lake Baikal and near the Chinese frontier. The town, one of the largest on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, has an impressive M.V.D. prison.

Here the Communists start talking force. The prisoners know that their fate is entirely in the hands of the Soviet police; they are told that the North Koreans have declared them dead.

At this point, the prisoner is given the choice of co-operating with his captors, and going to a rest camp at Shivanda, or refusing co-operation and winding up at one of the stricter camps in the Komi-Permiak District. Even after he has been sent to Komi-Permiak, however, the prisoner can still change his mind - the Russians are trying to dupe and utilize as many men as they can.

The Komi-Permiak National District lies northwest of Molotov. One camp for Americans, located in the district capital Kudymkar, and others are in the towns of Chermoz and Gubakhis. There are four separate camps in Chermoz, three of them labor camps and the fourth a disciplinary prison camp.

In their outward appearance these camps do not differ from the main similar slave-labor camps in Russia.

The day starts in the over-crowded barracks at five in the morning. We know that last June, in the "Gajsk Camp" near Chermoz, about two hundred Americans were used as forced labor, and we may take their daily routine as typical. After a breakfast consisting of a cup of tea and one slice of dark bread, the men - a number of them engineers assigned to the workshops - were marched to wherethey were working on the local railroad. Lunch was brought out to them. Judging by the Russian standard, they did not eat badly. But, they were all accustomed to a far better diet and they were suffering considerably.

These camps are under dual control. Political control is exercised by a special delegate from the Central Committee of its Komi-Permiak National District of the Communist Party. His name is Comrade Edovin, Military control is in the hands of a man called Kalypin who was detailed to the job from Moscow in the middle of February, 1952.

Every day a few men from each camp are taken to Molotov, where the Russians make further attempts to get them to co-operate. They never return to the camps they have left; but some probably wind up in Shivanda. Shivanda is a small place near Chita. The camp caters to a very few men who strike the Communists as deserving special treatment. It is a luxurious undertaking with good food, clean accommodations and general conditions far above anything known by the average Russian. The selected few stay at the camp for a period of four to five weeks. At the end of that period, they either graduate and receive an assignment, or fail and return to the labor camps.

We have not been able to find out the number of G.I.'s sent to Shivanda or the number sent out on assignments. The political department of the East Siberian Railroads issued at the beginning of 1952, a classified circular to all its personnel, requesting complete silence on the journeys of American P.O.W.'s. The penalty for breaking this order was 25 years in prison, or death.

From Shivanda the road is wide open to Moscow. Most of the few who take that road start their work by giving lectures on new American weapons, strategy, political trends and psychological warfare to selected groups of Red Army officers.The others are used in various propaganda drives. Three American officers captured in Korea have made good-will visits to Warsaw, Sofia and Bucharest, bringing greetings to the peoples of Poland, Bulgaria and rumania, from the American prisoners-of-war Peace Committee. No doubt they also assured these people of the peaceful intentions of Russia and the warmongering of the United States.

The story comes to me from a unique informant, a short, husky little man who I met in Berlin in the early part of 1952. He was then fresh from a trip to Poland. He was not a Pole, but he was interested in any and all of the countries which had fallen victim to Communist aggression. He had live under Communism and decided to devote his life to fighting it. He wanted to get as much news as possible out of the Red orbit. "The West must know," he said. "Otherwise it will perish."

By the time I was boarding my plane back home, we had agreed upon a trial period of co-operation. He was to furnish the Foreign News Service with any material he might lay his hands on, but he was never to divulge his sources to me or to anyone else. "You may take it or leave it," he said. "You are not to write to me unless I tell you so."

His dispatches started arriving soon thereafter. At first they looked so sensational that I was afraid to use them. Then I was able to verify one or two through other channels. From then on, my Berlin friend became a regular contributer to our organization.

I have never been able to check directly the reliability of his stories. I cannot go to Russia, nor can I send anyone there. This way of reporting has been forced on us by the men in the Kremlin, and my friend looks as though he were one of the few masters of the new technique. His methods are a combination of interviewing refugees, reading the Soviet press and establishing contact with people inside the Soviet world.

The only way I could possibly gain confidence in him was to receive confirmation of his major stories from some other sources. I waited several months, and then the confirmations came. One of his stories arrived in May. It described how a group of young boys, all members of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), in Chapaev, Western Kazakhstan, listened regularly to the Voice of America. They listened in Russian and in Turkestani, using a radio set in the local post office. They had an organized group with a different boy listening every night and reporting to the others.

The group was betrayed by its own device. A teacher in the boys' school found a couple of notes inside a textbook about the previous night's broadcast of the Voice. The police came and one of the boys stabbed an officer to death, then hanged himself. Two others were killed while trying to escape. Four went to jail.

The story was interesting and I released it. It went, of course, to the Voice of America people. A couple of months later I was informed that the Government had confirmed its accuracy.

Shortly after that first indirect confirmation he sent me another interesting story: A purge is going on in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. It is hitting party officials and many heads will soon be rolling. Georgia is Stalin's native land and he takes special care of it. Lavrenti Beria himself has made a trip to Georgia. He quoted from Beria's speech allegedly delivered at the Congress of the Georgian Communist Party.

My first reaction was that this time it was a little too farfetched. I kept the story for two days, then decided to let it go. My release was July 22, 1952.

I received a confirmation on September 23, 1952, when a special dispatch from Moscow to the New York Times announced the purge and Beria's visit. The dispatch must have passed through Soviet censorship. In other words, the confirmation came from official Soviet sources.

This account of American P.O.W.'s in Russia, every detail in it, was received from the same man. I do not know his sources or his contacts; asking him would mean losing him. All I can do is to wait again for confirmation. The story itself, loaded with factual details, is convincing as far as I am concerned.

But what does it mean? To me it means that the Soviet Union is still applying, though it is now supposedly a nonbelligerent, the ruthless techniques it used in the last war. A captured man is merely a useful object to the Soviet Government; useful as a teacher or a propagandist if he is co-operative, as a slave is he is not. The Communists see to it that a prisoner's family rarely if ever hears from him; they do not allow him to write letters and they refuse to permit the International Red Cross to visit the camps. Their tight censorship guarantees that the full story will never become public - unless they split with China and the two Communist states start blaming each other for atrocities.

To Americans generally this story should be another reminder of the nature of the force they are fighting, another proof of the need for cool heads, cool judgement and resolution in dealing with the Communists. Eventually these qualities may bring back from their Russian slavery , the men missing in Korea.

END