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thedrifter
11-30-02, 09:54 AM
Less than two years after the Korean War, a high-level Soviet defector told White House officials that American prisoners of war in North Korea had been taken secretly to Siberia to be exploited for Soviet intelligence purposes, according to a newly decla ssified U.S. government document.
The document, dated Jan. 31, 1955, and stamped "secret," is not proof that smuggling of POWs -- long denied by the Soviets and now by the Russian government -- actually happened. But it adds weight to claims that it did.

It is the first document to surface from the White House files of President Dwight D. Eisenhower that names a Soviet official as a source of U.S. suspicions about POW transfers to the former Soviet Union. To this day the government says Moscow has not ful ly answered questions about POW disappearances during a war in which Soviet intelligence was active in North Korea.

Yuri A. Rastvorov, who defected to the United States in 1954 from his post at the Soviet mission in Tokyo, told Eisenhower administration officials in a private Jan. 28, 1955, meeting that "U.S. and other U.N. POWs were being held in Siberia" during the 1 950-53 Korean War, according to the newly released memo, which is a one-page summary of what Rastvorov said in the encounter.

The document is on file at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan.; requests for its declassification were denied in 1991, but last month, in response to renewed requests by The Associated Press and others, it was released. The memo said Rastvo rov claimed to have learned of the POW movements from "recent arrivals -- 1950-1953 -- from the Soviet Union to the USSR's Tokyo mission." This apparently was a reference to Soviet mission staff. There was no indication that Rastvorov participated in any POW transfers.

The Pentagon, which has been investigating Soviet involvement with Korean War prisoners, has been aware of the Rastvorov memo since 1993 and considers it credible, said Norman Kass, who directs POW work with the Russians at the Defense Department's POW-MI A Office. "This represents one more piece" of evidence "from someone we assume to be reliable and certainly knowledgeable" on the issue, Kass said in an interview.

Kass said he wants to verify directly with Rastvorov that the statements attributed to him in the memo are accurate. "We are interested in knowing exactly what he did know."

http://www.kimsoft.com./korea/mia-us1.htm


Sempers,

Roger