BY: Bill Gertz
July 26, 2013 4:08 pm

U.S. prisoners of war were left behind in North Korea, China, and Russia after the Korean War and the Pentagon failed to win their release or a full accounting of their fate, according to research contained in a new book that is highly critical of U.S. POW recovery efforts.

“The Obama White House and Pentagon show not a trace of urgency in recovering our Korean War POW/MIAs, perished or alive,” said Mark Sauter, the book’s co-author who has spent more than two decades investigating missing soldiers.

“Time is running out for many of their family members, not to mention American POWs reported in North Korea long after the war, if any still survive,” he told the Washington Free Beacon. “Contrast this with South Korea, which has recovered dozens of its POWs alive in recent years. Some family members believe the U.S. government is simply waiting for the problem to go away.”

The book, American Trophies: How American POWs Were Surrendered to North Korea, China, and Russia by Washington’s ‘Cynical Attitude,’ includes numerous cases of missing Americans from the Korean War, along with several from the Cold War and Vietnam War. It is based on years of research, interviews, and documents by the authors, Sauter and John Zimmerlee.

Declassified intelligence reports obtained by the authors reveal that Americans were being held captive in China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union at least through the 1990s.

Publication of the book follows the recent disclosure of a Pentagon report highly critical of Defense Department POW search efforts. “The Pentagon’s effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from ‘dysfunction to total failure,’” said an internal Pentagon study suppressed by military officials but first reported by the Associated Press July 8.

The book cites the same report and others, saying they “cast grave doubt about government goals for finding and identifying the missing from Korea and other wars.” The study said the cost of recovering a single missing soldier can reach between $2.1 million and $5.7 million.

“The Obama administration has failed to manage these POW programs effectively or press other countries for answers,” the book says. “It has even sidelined the long-running Presidential US-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs, now stuck in White House bureaucracy.”

The House Armed Services Committee will conduct a hearing Aug. 1 when senior Pentagon POW officials are expected to face tough questioning on the matter.

The book documents several cases of missing Americans who were reported alive but never returned after the conflict. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953 and involved a coalition of U.N. states led by the United States fighting a Soviet-backed North Korea and later China.

The cases include the fate of Harry Moreland, who the Chinese say escaped from an enemy prison despite having both legs amputated. In another case, Air Force Capt. Sam Logan went missing after his aircraft went down near Pyongyang in late 1950. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Richard Desautels was captured by the Chinese in 1950 and taken to Manchuria where he was kept prisoner and was never returned after Beijing released other prisoners.

Gilbert Ashley and four other B-29 crewmen parachuted safely after their plane went down in North Korea, but they were never returned after the conflict.

“The U.S. military radioed a demand to return them: Communists cannot plausibly deny you are alive and must arrange your exchange. They never came home,” the authors said of Ashley and his crew.

One former Soviet colonel told the authors that an U.S. F-86 pilot captured by the Russians was sent to Moscow because Soviet leader Josef Stalin wanted to speak to him. And a North Korean source revealed that the North Korean communist government kept American prisoners for the same reason serial killers keeps mementos of victims.

“Pyongyang, Beijing, and Moscow kept our prisoners for several strategic and tactical reasons,” the book states. “American captives were also sometimes a sort of ‘trophy.’”

China conducted show trials of U.S. POWs captured in Korea and traded them for scientists held by the United States. The book says evidence reveals the Chinese were holding other American prisoners who were never released.

“We expect mendacity and indifference from North Korea, China, and Russia, and it is they who kept American captives and frustrate attempts to account for them,” the authors said. “But we hold the US government to a higher standard, which it has failed to meet.”

The authors’ investigation of missing POWs found that the Pentagon had “substantial evidence” American POWs remained in enemy hands after the end of the Korean War but declared all of them dead—even those that were thought to be alive.

At one point after the war, the Air Force’s most senior general, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining, asked the CIA to conduct a covert action program in 1954 to recover what the general said was “apparently substantial number of U. S. military personnel captured in the course of the Korean War (who) are still being held prisoners by the Communist Forces,” according to one document.

The CIA rejected the request claiming it did not believe reports of secretly held POWs.

Russia initially agreed to cooperate in the late 1990s with the Pentagon on accounting for missing servicemen but continues to “stonewall” access to KGB files that could shed light on the missing Americans, including those Moscow admitted were sent to Russia, the book says.

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