November 1998
Summary of news for the entire month.
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01 NOV 98: 2,078 Americans remain unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War: Vietnam - 1,551 (North, 563; South, 988); Laos - 446; Cambodia - 75; and the Peoples Republic of China territorial waters - 8. 139 Americans have been accounted-for during the present administration: Vietnam - 73; Laos - 62 and Cambodia - 4. 505 U.S. servicemen have been accounted-for through unilateral and joint efforts. Persian Gulf War - unsatisfactory accounting. Korean War - 8,139 remain unaccounted-for, 42 possible remains returned, 4 identifications. World War II - Over 78,000 remain unaccounted-for.
02 NOV 98: Representative Nita Lowery introduces a House Resolution which, for the first time, recognizes formally the 18,745 American civilians incarcerated by the Axis powers during World War II. Approximately 3,000 civilian internees remain alive today.
Iraq rebuffs Kuwait statement on war prisoners. Kuwait, backed by a United Nations resolution and Western allies, says Iraq is holding some 600 Kuwaiti POWs. The U.S. says accounting for missing Kuwaitis is one of the demands Iraq must meet to win a lifting of international sanctions imposed to punish it for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Remains believed to be those of several American soldiers killed during the Korean War will be returned by North Korea. The U.N. Military Command said today the remains will be turned over to it at the border village of Panmunjom inside the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. The skeletal remains were unearthed by a joint U.S.-North Korea recovery team. Twenty sets of remains have been unearthed and returned by North Korea since the North began allowing U.S. forensic experts to search in its territory in 1996. The recovery of American war dead is a key U.S. demand for improving relations with North Korea.
04 NOV 98: U.S. officials on Wednesday praised Vietnamese cooperation over the last decade in helping to account for American troops still missing from the Vietnam War. "We are very happy with the results we have achieved,'' said Bob Jones, deputy assistant secretary of defense for prisoners of war and missing personnel affairs. Jones will participate in a repatriation ceremony for three sets of remains that were found during the most recent round of digging. A team of 101 military specialists arrives at the same time for a 30-day operation that could excavate up to 10 sites. So far, more than 200 investigations into alleged sightings of live POWs have failed to yield any evidence that Vietnam still holds any Americans a quarter-century after the end of the war. Jones said Vietnamese cooperation on the sensitive subject "clearly demonstrates ... the willingness of the government to open doors to all areas." But he was not willing to rule out that a POW might emerge someday. "There is always hope that there is a live American somewhere," he said, pointing to recent cases in which an American veteran returned from North Korea after living there since the Korean War and Japanese POWs were freed from a Russian gulag. Officials say the cases of Last Known Alive -- when Americans were seen alive and in the proximity of North Vietnamese forces -- have shrunk from 196 to 43, with 35 sets of remains returned and enough information to determine that the others were dead.
Senior defense officials concluded a series of high-level talks reviewing progress on cooperation on the issue of the fullest possible accounting of Americans missing in action from the war in Southeast Asia. Jones noted the increasing levels of commitment to this mission by the Vietnamese populace. "Citizens have approached U.S. teams," Jones said, "with information about American losses or burial sites." He cited such positive actions as an indicator of the Vietnamese government's improvements in staffing, responsiveness and professionalism. "The U.S. government," Jones said, "has noted significant improvement in the quantity and quality of Vietnamese unilateral investigations over the past year." Vietnamese unilateral teams have discovered new crash sites and provided valuable information on American remains as yet unidentified at the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. In an effort to assist the Vietnamese in resolving some of their cases, Jones announced that U. S. archivists have located U.S. Army records relating to burial sites of Vietnamese military casualties. He offered access to these records in the National Archives, and assistance in indexing and copying the records for return to Vietnam.
05 NOV 98: Three sets of remains believed to be from American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War were repatriated to the United States today. On hand for the ceremony at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport were U.S. Ambassador Pete Peterson, a former prisoner of war here, and Bob Jones, deputy assistant secretary of defense for prisoners of war and missing persons.
Remains believed to be those of nine American Servicemen will be repatriated from North Korea across the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs Robert L. Jones will be present to witness the turnover. The remains were recovered by a joint U.S.-North Korean team operating near Kujong-do along the Chong Chon river, 100 miles north of Pyongyang, for the past 24 days. This is the fifth joint operation in North Korea during 1998, and the ninth overall since these recoveries began in 1996. This is the largest number of remains recovered from any single operation. Since July 1996, these joint teams have recovered what are believed to be the remains of 27 soldiers. One was identified as U.S. Army Corporal Lawrence LeBouef of Covington, La. Several other identifications are imminent.
06 NOV 98: U.S. and Vietnamese representatives met in Da Lat, Vietnam, to assess the past 10 years of U.S.-Vietnamese joint activity. Leading that delegation was Brig. Gen. Terry L. Tucker, commander of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, headquartered at Camp Smith, Hawaii. Tucker joined Jones in Hanoi this week for the policy-level discussions with the Vietnamese ministers. At the Da Lat meeting, both sides focused on improving the effectiveness of joint investigations and recoveries that began in 1988. U.S. teams were first granted access to Vietnam that year and returned with remains of Americans missing in action from the war. Over the last 10 years, U.S.-Vietnamese teams have conducted 2,000 case investigations, nearly 5,000 individual interviews and 300 site excavations in almost 1,000 cities and villages. They also examined more than 28,000 records and documents. With the identification of the remains of a U.S. Air Force officer last week, 505 Americans have been recovered and identified since 1973 from Indochina, with 2,078 still unaccounted-for of whom 1,551 are thought to be in Vietnam.
08 NOV 98: Moscow is refusing to turn over a secret KGB document suggesting captured Americans were taken to the Soviet Union in the late 1960s for "intelligence-gathering purposes," The Washington Times has learned. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright earlier this year appealed to Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a former KGB chairman, to release the document that the Pentagon discovered in January and has been trying to obtain since then, said Clinton administration and congressional officials familiar with the matter. The Russian government has told U.S. officials the plan was never carried out, and Moscow recently turned down U.S. government requests to study the intelligence document, saying it is classified and will not be released, the officials said. Discovery of the KGB document has raised hopes among Pentagon POW investigators that information is in the KGB archives about the fate of some 8,000 Americans still missing from the Korean War, Vietnam War and other Cold War conflicts.
10 NOV 98: The following is a partial translation from Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov's recently published memoir which suggests captured Americans were taken to the Soviet Union in the 1960s for "intelligence-gathering purposes": " However, one document, probably sensational, is still in storage. I have a copy of it. It's content is as follows: at the end of the 1960's the KGB (external foreign intelligence) was given the task of "delivering informed Americans to the USSR for intelligence gathering purposes."
11 NOV 98: Russian officials helping the U.S. government investigate the fate of missing American servicemen from four wars yesterday turned over 5,000 pages of documents and some film footage pertaining to U.S. aircraft shot down by Soviet fighter planes during the Korean War. Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), a member of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIA Affairs, called release of the documents a "dramatic breakthrough" and said in a telephone interview from Moscow that the information should help determine what happened to some of the 8,100 U.S. service members still listed as missing in action in Korea. Smith said the documents would take weeks to examine and are thought to contain detailed information about the date and place of shoot-downs, the kinds of aircraft involved, their wing numbers and any indication of whether pilots ejected or were captured.
Soviet officials were not allowed to directly interrogate Americans held prisoner in Hanoi during the Vietnam War but were able to submit questions to them through the North Vietnamese and received written interrogation reports, Smith said. Those reports, Smith said, should contain the names of prisoners and the dates they were captured. Smith said he and Toon were told yesterday by Vladimir Semichastny, KGB chief from 1961 to 1967, that the Soviets did have a plan during the Vietnam War to bring American prisoners to the Soviet Union. But Semichastny, Smith said, would go no further than confirming the plan's existence, leaving open the question of whether it was implemented.
North Korea warned the United States Monday that further repatriation of the remains of US soldiers believed killed in the 1950-53 Korean War would depend on Washington's attitude. The warning came several days after a US official told reporters here that the United States would help South Korea search for its prisoners of war following reports that many were still captive in Stalinist North Korea. "In the long run, whether the joint exhumation can continue and more remains can be unearthed depends upon the attitude of the US side," said Pyongyang official's.
12 NOV 98: Former British prisoners of war are to fly to Tokyo for a court decision on their long-running claim for compensation. "It has been a long hard struggle to reach this point," Arthur Titherington of the Japanese Labor Camp Survivors' Association (JLCSA) said. For many of the internees, time is running out. Seven plaintiffs from Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand are representing 20,000 people who were either prisoners of war or civilian internees. The claim was launched in 1995. The prisoners are claiming $22,000 each. A successful judgement would cost the Japanese government an estimated $440 million.
14 NOV 98: The Air Force is hoping flight simulations can help solve the disappearance 30 years ago of a rescue helicopter in Vietnam. The project may lead to similar efforts to find other aircraft that vanished during the Vietnam War. Baldwin is part of a team of veterans teaming up with the Air Force to find an HH-3E Jolly Green Giant and its four-man crew. The helicopter named Jolly Green 23 vanished June 9, 1968, while searching for a downed attack pilot, who also remains unaccounted for. Baldwin was part of the wartime effort to find the helicopter. Thirty years later, he's helping with a new search despite being thousands of miles away from the scene. Black and white aerial photos taken in the late 1960s were converted into digital photos and matched with current maps to recreate the wartime landscape near the Vietnam-Laos border. The simulations at the Hurlburt base in the Florida Panhandle allowed Baldwin and another former pilot to pick out three spots where the helicopter may have crashed.
16 NOV 98: At the height of the Korean War, the communist world exploded with charges that U.S. warplanes were dropping germ-carrying insects over the battlefields. North Koreans facing execution were infected with plague to make the case and 25 American POWs were induced to sign "confessions." Now Cold War historians have pieced together the story of how the claim, instigated by Chinese battlefield advisers at a time when many North Koreans were dying of cholera, was repeated even after the Kremlin informed a nervous Mao Tse-tung that it had been "based on false information." Following Stalin's death in 1953 and with a Korean armistice a few months away, the Soviets decided in secret councils that pressing the charge was undercutting Soviet credibility. They resolved to quit making the claim but never owned up to its falsity. On May 2, 1953, the documents show, the presidium of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. adopted a blunt resolution that said: "The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious."
The federal government plans to fight efforts to extend veterans status to some 200 Vietnamese commandos who were captured and tortured by communists while running U.S. intelligence missions, the commandos' lawyer said Monday. During the Vietnam War, the commandos infiltrated North Vietnam as part of covert intelligence missions run at first by the CIA and then by the U.S. Joint Military Organization. But they were captured by the North Vietnamese, who had been tipped off to their mission. Declared dead by the U.S. government, they struggled for years to win compensation. In 1996, Congress earmarked $20 million, enough to pay each commando or their survivors $40,000. That came out to $2,000 for each year, on average, the men spent in captivity. Those imprisoned for more than 20 years could receive up to $50,000 in compensation.
17 NOV 98: Responding to a U.S. plea, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov pledged Tuesday to revive a probe into whether Soviet spy agencies plotted to seize U.S. prisoners from the Vietnam War. A U.S.-Russian commission on POWs has looked into similar suspicions that the Soviets detained U.S. servicemen from the earlier Korean War. The panel said in 1997 that it could not confirm that had happened in Korea, despite a five-year investigation. Suspicions that Americans captured in Vietnam may have been taken to the Soviet Union arose after the recent release of the memoirs of a late Russian military historian said he had heard of such a plan. Vice President Al Gore asked Primakov for help Tuesday during a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Malaysia. Gore gave Primakov a letter asking him to open Russian records so investigators can search for any evidence concerning the missing men's fates.
18 NOV 98: The fate of some 600 Kuwaitis and others taken prisoner by Iraq during its 1990 invasion of the emirate will be an important part of a promised Security Council review of Baghdad's compliance with U.N. resolutions, American U.N. envoy Peter Burleigh said on Tuesday. ``We have taken the position that this is an extremely important issue to be resolved and that Iraq has legal obligations under resolutions to cooperate fully with regard to this issue. He said 550 of the 605 missing people were Kuwaitis and the rest were of various nationalities. Although 191 of the Kuwaitis were soldiers, they were not taken prisoner in combat.
22 NOV 98: North Korea is still holding some 136 Korean prisoners of war, a South Korean defense ministry official said on Monday. An Byong-kil, vice minister of the defense ministry, told a National Assembly session that the government estimated some 136 POWs were still alive in the North. The defense ministry had previously said some 20,000 South Korean soldiers went missing during the 1950-53 Korean War and estimated that there should be some 80 survivors. But a ministry official said eyewitness evidence from 16 former South Korean POWs who had escaped North Korea had caused them to revise the total to 136. He said the government was trying to introduce a new law that would allow compensation and support for POWs who settle in the South. A ministry spokesman said the government was considering exchanging the 136 POWs with northern war veterans who have been in the South since the Korean War.
27 NOV 98: A New Hampshire man has been designated as a co-chair of the United States-Russian Joint Commission on prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. Major General Roland Lajoie of Wilton currently is a special consultant to the deputy secretary of defense. During his 35-year military career, Lajoie has held a variety of national security positions, and has been honored many times for his work.
Judge Shigeki Inoue of Tokyo District Court ruled at the end of a case lasting nearly four years, that under international law individuals could not make claims for compensation against Japan. Thus rejecting a demand for compensation by thousands of Allied prisoners of war for suffering endured at the hands of Japanese troops in World War II. About 20,000 British, American, Australian and New Zealand veterans and civilian internees demanded compensation amounting to more than US$440 million in the first such case filed against Japan.
30 NOV 98: Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright waited months before asking the Russian government about a KGB document suggesting captured Americans were taken to the Soviet Union for intelligence purposes during the late 1960s, according to Clinton administration officials. A document mentioning the KGB program was discovered by the Pentagon in January among the papers of a retired Russian general. President Clinton was notified in March about what investigators viewed as a major discovery that could shed light on the fate of nearly 2,000 missing Americans from the Vietnam War. A month later, the State Department was informed, Mrs. Albright, however, did not act until Oct. 29 in writing to the new Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, seeking information about the plan. Delays in the case have upset a number of officials familiar with internal discussions on the issue. State Department officials "have been dragging their feet on this since the start," complained one. A letter drafted in June from Mrs. Albright to Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, a former intelligence chief with direct knowledge about the KGB program, was never sent because of State Department concerns it would upset Moscow during its financial and political crisis in August, the officials said.
POW-MIA Issue Update December 1998