Table Of Content[H.N.S.C. No. 104-51]
ACCOUNTING FOR POW/MIA's FROM THE
KOREAN WAR AND THE VIETNAM WAR
Y 4.SE 2/1 A: 995-96/51
Accounting for PDU/HIA's fron the K.
BEFORE THE
MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FOURTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
SEPTEMBER 17, 1996
Cor ^
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON 1997
:
ForsalebytheU.S.GovernmentPrintingOffice
SuperintendentofDocuments,CongressionalSalesOffice.Washington.DC 20402
ISBN 0-16-054352-5
.
[H.N.S.C. No. 104-51]
0'
ACCOUNTING FOR POW/MIA's FROM THE
KOREAN WAR AND THE VIETNAM WAR
Y 4.SE 2/1 A: 995-96/51
Accounting for PDU/HIA's fron the K. .
BEFORE THE
MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FOURTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
SEPTEMBER 17, 1996
f-..-V
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON 1997
:
ForsalebytheU.S.GovernmentPrintingOffice
SuperintendentofDocuments,CongressionalSalesOffice,Washington,DC 20402
ISBN 0-16-054352-5
MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
ROBERT K. DORNAN, California, Chairman
STEVE BUYER, Indiana OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
RON LEWIS, Kentucky G.V. (SONNY) MONTGOMERY, Mississippi
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma IKE SKELTON, Missouri
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas JANE HARMAN, California
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia ROSA L. DkLAURO, Connecticut
TODD TIAHRT, Kansas MIKE WARD, Kentucky
RICHARD 'DOC HASTINGS, Washington PETE PETERSON, Florida
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
John D. Chapla, Professional StaffMember
Michael R. Higgins, Professional StaffMember
Donna L. Hoffmeier, Professional StaffMember
Diane W. Bowman, StaffAssistant
(II)
CONTENTS
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Page
Dornan, Hon. Robert K., a Representative from California, Chairman, Mili-
tary Personnel Subcommittee 1
Pickett, Hon. Owen, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking Minority Mem-
ber, Military Personnel Subcommittee 7
PRINCIPAL WITNESSES WHO APPEARED IN PERSON OR SUBMITTED
WRITTEN STATEMENTS
Bell, Gamett E., Former Special Assistant for Negotiations, Joint Task Force-
Full Accounting: Statement 83
Corso, Col. Phillip, U.S. Army, [Retired], Former Advisor to President Eisen-
hower:
Statement 8
Prepared statement 10
Douglass, Joseph D., Jr., DefenseAnalystandAuthor:
Statement 13
Prepared statement 18
Sejna, Jan, FormerCzechGeneral Officer:
Statement 51
Prepared statement 55
Veith, GeorgeJ., POW/MIA ResearcherandAnalyst:
Statement 87
Prepared statement 97
Liotta, Alan J., Deputy Director, Defense POW/MIA Oflice [DPMOI; Accom-
panied by Norm Kass, Director, Joint Commission Support Directorate;
Robert J. Destatte, Senior Analyst, Research and Analysis Directorate;
Comdr. William G. Beck, USNR, Special Research, Joint Commission Sup-
port Directorate; and Anthony Litvinas, Analyst, Research and Analysis
Directorate:
Statement 126
Prepared statement 157
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
Letter from Hon. Bob Stump, Chairman ofHouse Veterans' Affairs Commit-
tee 6
ACCOUNTING FOR POW/MIA's FROM THE KOREAN WAR
AND THE VIETNAM WAR
House of Representatives,
Committee on National Security,
Military Personnel Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, September 17, 1996.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:03 p.m., in room
2118, Raybum House Office Building, Hon. Robert K. Doman
(chairman ofthe subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT K. DORNAN, A REP-
RESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA CHAIRMAN, MILITARY
PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Dornan. The Subcommittee on Mihtary Personnel ofthe Na-
tional Security Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives
will come to order.
Obviously, there is much media attention to today's hearing. I've
lost track of how many hearings we've had in the last year and 10
months. But there should be media attention to this because, in the
Korean aspect ofit, there was precious little media attention or fol-
low-through on the hundreds of Americans that I'm convinced we
left behind at the end ofAmerica's first stalemated, no-win war.
During the past 20 months of the 104th Congress, I have con-
ducted a series of Military Personnel Subcommittee hearings in
order to provide effective congressional oversight of the process of
seeking the fullest possible accounting of American combatants
who remain missing in action. It has been my intention throughout
all ofthis to work in partnership with the Defense Department and
the State Department, to bring an honest closure for hundreds of
families who have not broken faith with their missing loved ones,
the heroes oftheir lives.
My 31 years of direct involvement with these missing heroes
began on May 18, 1965, when my best friend in the Air Force, and
husband of my wife's best friend in the Air Force, David Hrdlicka,
was shot down over Laos, while piloting an F—105 Thunderchief,
the world's largest fighter at the time.
Although he was photographed as a prisoner, and interviewed in
captivity by Soviet journalists, he remains unaccounted for and his
ultimate fate is still unknown, as is that ofhis fellow captive in the
caves near San Neua, Laos, Charlie Shelton, who was shot down
on his 33d birthday on April 29, 1965.
I came to know his wife well, and his five children, particularly
his oldest son, who is a Franciscan Catholic priest, and Marion
Shelton, tragically, took her own life after 25 years of not giving
up on finding out the fate of her Charlie. If he was not there to
(1)
greet her, then what a situation of her in Heaven looking down at
him still a slave in some filthy cave, if he could possibly survive
all these years. And people have, throughout all ofhistory, in every
part of the world, survived over 40 years of captivity, sometimes
longer.
My general study of this issue began 43 years ago when, in Air
Force flight training, my precadet class was briefed by an Army
psychiatrist during a seminar on the brainwashing experienced by
American POWs in Korea. At that time, 21 young enlisted men, all
ofthem high school dropout—s, the Koreans skillfully took advantage
of their lack of education they were all in China at that time.
They had been sent from North Korea to China.
These studies that—they were exposing us t—o as young men on the
way to pilot training I was 20 at the time it brought about the
creation of the U.S. Military Code of Conduct. This was called
cadet memory. This code we were ordered to memorize as aviation
cadets. And I still have it memorized.
I have since come to the conclusion that the term "mindset to de-
bunk," which was used to describe the performance of Defense De-
partment analysts over the last decade and a half, is too cryptic,
almost too flippant. It was coined in 1980 by my friend and college
mate, Lt. Gen. Eugene Tie, the former Director of the Defense In-
telligence Agency, and was repeated by the internal DIA investiga-
tions in 1986 and 1987, and then it was used again in this commit-
tee room in 1990 by Col. Michael Peck, an Army Special Forces
hero, who resigned in protest and disgust as Director of the De-
fense POW/MIA Office.
This term, "mindset to debunk" is too imprecise to describe what
I have come to believe is a lack of competence by an entrenched
bureaucracy. There has been a shameful institutional performance
that I think is best described as an unrelenting, predisposition to
discredit and dismiss out of hand all information and reports that
have merit and might lead to resolving some ofthe cases ofAmeri-
cans known to have been alive in Communist captivity and, frank-
ly, may still be in some seemingly Godforsaken situations. I say
seemingly because I don't think God forsakes anybody. He just
gives some people amazing crosses to bear. I can't think of a worse
cross than a patriotic, gung-ho soldier, naval aviator. Air Force
pilot or crewman, or a marine pilot of crewman, loving his country
and feeling that his country has deserted him for 10, 20, 30, 40 or
more years.
This habit of writing off captured American fighting men, after
no-win stalemate wars with the evil empire of communism, began
in 1919 following the archangel expedition involving 15 allied na-
tions sent against the Bolshevik forces in northern Russia. My own
father, U.S. Army Capt. Harry Doman, an artillery officer, was
nearly sent north. He was begged to volunteer, but he h—ad enough
World War I combat po—ints and three wound chevrons what we
now call Purple Hearts that enabled him to avoid that ill-fated
operation.
Remember, that's when Churchill said "Let's strangle the baby in
the crib," the baby being communism, which is not through killing
people around the world. Consider Castro, where he first-degree
murdered four American citizens in international waters, when
MIG's shot down Cessna hght aircraft some weeks ago.
At the end of World War II, after Stalin's forces overran Nazi-
controlled POW camps in Eastern Europe, several hundred Ameri-
cans and allied prisoners disappeared into Soviet gulags, those
with Slavic, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish surnames. —
During the cold war, U.S. Air Force a—nd U.S. Navy not to say
those are the only ones that disappeared throughout the cold war,
U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy pilots and crews, on so-called ferret
missions, spy flights, around the periphery ofthe Soviet Union, and
Central Intelligence Agency missions using U-2's and converted
bombers, sometimes old C-47 "gooney birds", flew over or near
Russia and over or near China and the Korean peninsula. Many of
these flights involved shootdowns, and the crews, in most cases,
disappeared without a public paper trail, in some cases maybe
without an official paper trail. Only U.S. News & World Report has
carefully logged the shootdowns and periodically does a reflective
story on whatever happened to these ferret mission crews.
Then in the early 1950's, some of the best Americans of our
World War II generation were called back again to the Reserves
and Guard. The older edge of my generation was called up, and
they were lost in Korea. Then some ofthe middle ofmy generation
ended up suffering a similar fate in Vietnam. Of course, the "black
hole" of Laos, where over 300 airmen, pilots, and aircrews, were
lost, and not a single one returned since Theodore Dengler escaped,
a Navy lieutenant, in 1964, or after the cease-fire in Vietnam, 27
January 1973. There was one man lost in Laos and, through the
intercession ofsome U.S. Senators, he was brought out. But nobody
in between.
Now, what ties together all of these tragic chapters in U.S. mili-
tary history is the evil nature of communism, with its total, total
disregard for human life and no military code of ethics, no officers'
code, that caused an explosion at the Nuremberg trials, between
General Lehausen and Herman Goering, because Goering had per-
sonally signed the execution order of50 ofthe recaptured 76th that
had escaped out of one of the gulags in what came to be called the
Great Escape. As an officer, a World War I decorated quadruple
ace, he had signed a death order to execute 50 young American pi-
lots and crew who had known freedom for a few short days. That
code of ethics is what finally broke down Herman Goering, where
Lehausen yelled back in his face, "You coward. As an officer, you
signed a death order of other men." And Goering, after that, knew
he was going to have to pop out that cyanide pill with his tooth
and kill himself.
These Communist governments, I repeat, with no military code,
if they had one, they could have been dissuaded from withholding
American or allied fighting men. In fact, there was a continuous
strategic objective in the Communist's worldwide struggle against
the allies of the free world. It was to squeeze every ounce of intel-
ligence information out of some unlucky captured Americans, espe-
cially those with technical knowledge, highly trained pilots and
electronic ferret mission technicians. The Communists, in fact,
were preparing for future heightened conflict while fighting all
these lesser bloody struggles that we came to describe with the
overarching misnomer, the cold war.
Despite the pleading of the patriotic families of the missing, and
the numerous attempts by the U.S. Congress, during both Demo-
cratic and Republican administrations, to reestablish accountability
in our Federal Government, we have been stymied by bureaucratic
inertia and a lack ofproperly trained and motivated experts in geo-
politics and in simple intelligence, strategic intelligence, an over-
view ofthe enemy intelligence.
By the way, I wrote this entire statement myself, if anybody is
wondering how much staffinput is in there. I am the expert on this
issue in the U. S. Congress.
There has never been a systematic methodology, as I begged for
20 years, since I first came to the Hill in 1977 and met with CIA
Director Stansfield Turner, there has never been a methodology led
by fearless Sherlock Holmes-t3^e investigators to build upon the
successes and the mistakes of our historical record in these areas.
Instead, we continue to see the corporate board approach ofthe De-
fense Department's Office for POW/MIA's, where cynics are able to
rein supreme with a simple line: "That's hearsay. Get it out of my
face. It's rumor and hearsay."
The so-called analysts now lurch into the future without ever
taking into account the strategic goals and the intelligence lust of
the evil empire and their surrogates throughout this century. They
lusted to get information on how our F-86 pilots, our Sabrejet pi-
lots, were shooting down their MIG pilots at a rate of 8 to 1. The
early reports were 13 to 1. Any Communist atheist government
would be intensely lusting to find out what we were doing in the
air, how our pilots were trained, since now we know by released
documents and the testimony of Soviet retired general officers on
film, that the Russians led the major air engagements against our
men in the skies above the Yalu River. Russians battled them, just
as Russians battled the Israelis over the Sinai in 1970, when Rus-
sians' voices could be heard speaking over the air in panic right be-
fore the Israelis had four Russian parachutes coming down at one
time, fortunately on the Egyptian side of the conflict, to be taken
back by their own side.
There has always been with communism a calculated and sys-
tematic exploitation of prisoners, up to the point of beating some
to death, and not quickly, in a few hours, but extended beatings
over a year or so. Identical to the way the Gestapo slowly beat and
tortured until his spirit gave up. The French Resistance, Makee
hero Jean Moulin. Glen Cobeil in Vietnam, Jean Moulin in occu-
pied France, exactly the same type ofhero. Beaten for months. The
Gestapo traded Moulin from Gestapo headquarters so they all
could have a piece of torturing him, starting in the Maurice Hotel
in Paris. An unbelievable story, totally unknown to American youth
today, not taught in our colleges, certainly not taught by tenured
Marxist professors.
Even today, despotic regimes continue the cruel exploitation of
prisoners. An example. The Serbian heirs of Marshal Tito tortured
and then exploited for propaganda, by claiming they were missing
in action, not captured, the two French pilots from the same Mi-
rage who were shot down over Bosnia near the Bosnian Serb cap-
