Highlights of Minority Staff Examination of POW/MIA Policy
1. The conclusions of the 112-page Minority Staff report parallel the conclusions of Col. Millard A. Peck, former director of the Special office of POW/MIA Affaors, namely that the U.S. Government has manipulated the POW/MIA issue to avoid an effective search for missing military personnel.
2. The Minority Staff report states that the U.S. Government's stated intention of giving the search for POW/MIAs the "highest national priority" is subordinated to higher policy considerations. {Proloque to Part I, page i.}
3. The Report states that the U.S. Government's policy of deling with live-sighting reports is flawed, thereby ignoring reaasonable evidence which could lead to finding missing personnel. It cites 7 specific DIA procedures for discrediting reports to avoid a good-faith effort to find POW/MIAs.{page 6-1} It reproduces a censored CIA document from 1988 that summarizes three live-sighting reports of U.S. POW/MIAs in North Korea.{Prologue to part II}
4. The Report states that it was a matter of policy to issue falsified statements of KIA instead of MIA for U.S. personnel captured during covert operations.{page 7-1}
5. The Report states that the U.S. Government uses technical distinctions to avoid accounting for specific MIA cases. It cites an example from the Gulf War where the refusal to categorize two U.S. soldiers captured under fire as POW/MIA could have led to permanent captivity. (Prologue to part I, page ii)
6. The Report states that there is a historical pattern throughout this century of abandoning U.S. military personnel for the sake of diplomatic and other considerations.
7. POWs from the World War I American Expeditionary Force in Siberia 1918-1919 and other Americans were abandoned in the Soviet Union despite the granting of diplomatic recognition in 1933.
8. General Eisenhower told the Allied Command that "only small numbers remain" of U.S. soldiers captured by Nazi forces and taken over by Soviet authorities only two days after he was informed by his intelligence services that 20,000 U.S. personnel were still being held by the Red Army. (page 3-20)
9. General James Van Fleet stated that 8,000 MIAs were unaccounted for in 1953 when the major prisoner exchange took place. (page 4-1)
10. Assistant Secretary of the Army High Milton II received an internal memorandum in 1954 stating that 954 U.S. personnel were still being held in North Korea. (page 4-2)
11. The U.S. Department of State sought to mislead then-Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson about the 954 known POWs in Korea in official correspondence. (page 4-10-12)
12. State Department and Air Force Intelligence reports in 1954 detailed that "two trains" of seven cars each containing U.S. military personnel in uniform were observed crossing the Chinese/Soviet border into the Soviet Union. (page 4-6)
13. The CIA already had reported in 1952 from sources inside North Korea that North Korea had already established the policy that certain categories of U.S. personnel in North Korean prison camps would never be exchanged. (page 4-8)
14. Kissinger stated in 1982 that he knew during the 1973 negotiations that 80 U.S. military personnel known by name and known to have been captured alive did not return (page 5-1)
15. Kissinger hand-carried a secret letter to the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister promising $4 billion in reparations to the Commumunist regime. This commitment was concealed from key members of Congress for over five years, who finally found out from meetings with the North Vietnamese. (page 5-12)
16. U.S. authorities originally asked North Vietnamese authorities for the return of 5,000 U.S. military personnel, but settled for only 591. (page 5-8)
17. Although the Pathet Lao stated that they were holding U.S. military personnel in March, 1973--estimated at about 100--no prisoners held by the Pathet Lao ever returned or were accounted for. (page 5-3)