Pows Sent To Siberia, Ex-Spy Says 1955 Memo Sheds Light On Fate Of Americans Captured In Korea
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 declassified 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 fully 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 1950-53 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 Rastvorov 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-MIA 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.”
He apparently knew plenty.
Donald Jameson, who was a branch chief in the Soviet division of the CIA’s Operations Directorate in the 1950s, recalled that Rastvorov told him, too, that a number of American POWs from the Korean War had been taken to the Soviet Union.
“My impression is that it was a few - 10 to 15; they were aviators mostly,” Jameson said in an interview. He said Rastvorov proved to be a reliable and valuable source and was one of the most important defectors during the Cold War. “He had a lot to say about relations between the Soviet Union and Korea.”
Rastvorov took a new name and identity provided by the CIA after his arrival in the United States. Efforts to contact him for this story were unsuccessful.
Rastvorov was at the Soviet mission in Japan from June 1950 - the same month the Korean War broke out - until he defected to the United States in January 1954.
He ostensibly was a Foreign Ministry official but actually was a spy, according to a biography released by the Justice Department in August 1954.
Rastvorov, described in the memo as a former officer of the Soviet internal security agency then known as the MVD, told the U.S. officials that POWs taken from Korea would be screened by the Soviets and trained to spy for Moscow in the United States or other countries.
Some would be used in “propaganda work”; others’ identities would be assumed by “new Soviet agents.”
No mention is made in the memo of whether Rastvorov said how many American or other U.N. prisoners were in Siberia.
Philip Corso, a former Army intelligence officer who was a National Security Council staff member in the mid-1950s, said it was he who arranged and conducted the interrogation of Rastvorov that is described in the 1955 memo.
Corso told a Senate investigations committee in 1992 that Rastvorov confirmed to him the transfer of POWs and told him they were used for intelligence purposes. But no records verifying Corso’s account had been made public until the release last month of the formerly secret Jan. 31, 1955, memo.
In telephone interviews in 1994 and 1995, Corso recalled in detail his encounter with Rastvorov and said the defector told him several hundred American POWs had been sent to Siberia in rail cars during the war.
Corso has maintained that the Eisenhower administration chose not to force the issue with Moscow out of concern that a confrontation might escalate into all-out war.
The memo is addressed to Elmer B. Staats, who was executive officer of the Operations Coordinating Board, a White House group charged with implementing national security policies, including some related to accounting for Korean War POWs.
In a telephone interview, Staats said he did not recall the memo or Rastvorov’s assertion that POWs were taken to Siberia.
The memo did not mention by name those who interrogated Rastvorov, but it said Gen. Dale O. Smith “was also present.” Smith, a National Security Council staff member at the time, said in an interview that he did not recall the incident or Rastvorov. He said he has forgotten much of what happened in that period.
xxxx THE SOURCE Defector Yuri A. Rastvorov is the first Soviet official to admit POW transfers in a document from the files of President Eisenhower.