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[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 debunk," 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 committee 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. military 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 pilots 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 intelligence 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 pilots, 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 before 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 systematic 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-