ACCOUNTING for POW/MIA's from the KOREAN WAR and the VIETNAM WAR
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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 Co r ^ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON : 1997 For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office. 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 For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office, 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 Staff Member Michael R. Higgins, Professional Staff Member Donna L. Hoffmeier, Professional Staff Member Diane W. Bowman, Staff Assistant (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., Defense Analyst and Author: Statement 13 Prepared statement 18 Sejna, Jan, Former Czech General Officer: Statement 51 Prepared statement 55 Veith, George J., POW/MIA Researcher and Analyst: 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 of House 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 of the 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 of the 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 of it, 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 of America'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 of this 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 of their 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 of his 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 of history, 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 of them high school dropouts, 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 to 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 of the cases of Ameri- 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 had enough World War I combat points 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 and 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 of the 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.