Re: MIAs

[<DGill11331@aol.com>]

Following is a July 1996 New York Times' Article that was sent to me by a 
friend whose brother is MIA (October 27, 1950).  He still has hopes that his 
brother is alive. He also said he has lots of this type of material.  D Gill





                                       By JAMES BROOKE
                                 July 19, 1996, The New York Times

Khabarovsk, Russia -- Time has stooped Vladimir Trotsenko's shoulders,
but his memories are as clear as his cobalt blue eyes:
the American flyer, his right arm in a new cast, in a Soviet military
hospital ward. The American, he recalled, would slowly re
peat, "America -- San Francisco, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago."

Curious, Trotsenko, a paratrooper recovering from a knee injury, would
hobble down the third-floor hospital corridor to gaze
at the four imprisoned Americans. The airman with the broken arm would
point to a crewman in a body cast and would make
cradling m otions with his arms, indicating that the man had left two
small children back home.

The year was 1951, and the place was Military Hospital 404 in
Novosysoyevka, 300 miles south of here. Stalin was in his last
years, the Korean War was raging, and the Cold War with the United
States was on.

"I did not talk about this for 43 years," Trotsenko, spry at 68, said as
his wife, Nina, served blini and borscht at their wooden
dacha outside this city, the largest industrial center of Russia's Far
East.

In 1994, he noticed a small advertisement in a local newspaper placed by
a new group, a Russian-American commission on
prisoners of war. Admitting that he was "tortured" about whether "to
call or not to call," he finally did.

As fears of official retribution ease, more and more Russians are
following Trotsenko's lead and are talking to American
government researchers seeking traces of Americans who vanished into the
gulag during seven decades of communism.
Responding to adver tisements for information, calls and letters trickle
in to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the new
consulate in Vladivostok.

A woman calls saying she knows the Russian widow, children, and
grandchildren of a former American prisoner of war. A
former camp guard recalls hearing about an American prisoner from the
Korean War held under maximum security in 1983. An
Estonian remembe rs meeting a black American pilot in a labor camp in
1955.

A retired military driver reports seeing an American prisoner -- "robust
and taller than average" -- in an Arctic camp in 1970. A
former inmate says that while working in a forced labor gold mine in
1979 he witnessed the death of P hilip V. Mandra, a U.S.
Marine sergeant from Queens County, N.Y., who was reported missing in
action in Korea in 1952.

Numbering in the thousands, the list of Americans sent to Soviet labor
camps is long and varied. They include left-wing
Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s only to be
arrested as spies during Stalin's xenophobic sweeps;
hundreds of du al nationals sent to Siberian labor camps after Stalin
annexed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1940; about 500
American military prisoners kept after World War II by Stalin as
bargaining chips; about 30 F-86 pilots and crewmen captured
during the Korean War and transferred to the Soviet Union in a secret
aircraft industry intelligence operation; and as many as
100 American airmen who survived downing of spy planes over Soviet
territory during the Cold War.

"Clearly, there were a lot of Americans washing around the gulag, but it
is unimaginable that any of the World War II prisoners
are still alive," said Paul M. Cole, who wrote a three-volume report for
the Rand Corp. in 1994 on American prisoners from
Worl d War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War who were held in the
Soviet Union.

Family members of Americans missing in Korea and in the Cold War downing
are increasingly demanding answers from the
bilateral research group, the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POW/MIAs.

"I definitely believe that some survived," said Patricia Lively
Dickinson, a Delaware resident, who believes that her brother,
Jack D. Lively, a Navy airman who was shot down in 1951, was one of the
four Americans that Trotsenko saw at the military
hospit al. "I feel that Jack's files are in the KGB files."

Bruce Sanderson, a North Dakota steelworker, also believes that his
father, Lt. Warren Sanderson, survived the shooting
down of his reconnaissance plane near Vladivostok in 1953.

"In 1955, a repatriated Japanese POW identified a picture of my dad,"
said Sanderson, who was born a few months after his
father was shot down. "He could still be alive. It was just in 1992 that
the Russians freed the last 80 Japanese POW's from
World War II."

Formed in 1992, the POW commission has little to show for the millions
of dollars spent, family members and former
researchers assert. It has yet to find any missing American, dead or
alive, in the former Soviet Union. On both sides, ingrained
traditions of secrecy seem to block progress.

"Even as government 'insiders' with security clearances, we had great
difficulty in locating documents" from U.S. government
agencies, Col. Stuart A. Herrington of the Army, the task force's
American deputy director, wrote in an appraisal in 1994.
"Once l ocated, documents are frequently classified -- often
mindlessly."

Irene Mandra, of Farmingdale, N.Y., is offering a $5,000 reward to any
Russian or American who provides conclusive
information about her brother, the Marine sergeant.

"It's still the old cover-up," she said in a telephone interview from
Long Island. "As documents are being declassified, more and
more evidence shows that these men were sent to the Soviet Union. But,
after 42 years, the CIA still keeps a lot of documents
classified."

Peter Johnson, a major in the Army Reserve, who worked on the project in
1993, complained: "From the American
standpoint, we ran into almost as much institutional resistance as from
the Soviet side. The CIA did not want to talk to us."

>From the Russian side, closed doors have met American requests to search
Soviet-era archives of military units serving in
Korea, of the Border Guards and of the KGB.

"Despite Yeltsin's claims to openness, the Russians have consistently
denied the American side access to archives," Cole said.
"If given proper access, competent archivists -- and there are a lot in
Moscow -- could wrap this up in two months. But the
Russians are not being open."

With impatience growing, a hearing was held on June 20 by the House
National Security subcommittee on Military Personnel.
"The Russians are holding back a lot of information," said Al Santoli,
human rights aide for Rep. Robert K. Dornan, the
California R epublican who heads the panel. "A lot of Americans ended up
in the deepest recesses of the gulag, as well as in the
mental asylums."

In late July, the Russian-American commission plans to issue a 500-page
report on its work. A summary, provided by the
Americans, notes that the Russians have provided more than 12,000 pages
of documents, and have allowed American
investigators to travel throughout Russia, visiting psychiatric
hospitals, prisons, and prison camps.

Russian officials, including President Boris Yeltsin, have said that
this research shows that no Americans are being held against
their will in Russia. In one sign of future cooperation, the Russian
navy may take part next year in an American project to
recover from Pacific waters near Vladivostok the remains of two American
spy planes shot down during the Cold War. Over
all, about 30 American spy planes were shot down near the Soviet Union's
borders from 1950 to 1970. About half of the 252
crew members are unaccounted for.

The report notes that American requests to study military and border
guard files remain "open." The task of searching prison
and psychiatric records has been complicated by a Soviet practice of
disguising the presence of foreign prisoners by giving
them S lavic names.

"The security services have been less than cooperative," Jim MacDougall,
the senior analyst for the American side,
acknowledged in a recent interview. The other day, at his dacha in the
Red River district of Khabarovsk, Trotsenko sat at his
dining room table and sketched a map of the hospital corridor that he
said he shared for two weeks with the four Americans.
By drilling holes in the floor and ceiling, workers had installed bars
to block off the end of the hall, improvising a detention
ward.

Often asked to "keep an eye on the Americans" by the Soviet army guard,
Trotsenko said, he saw four men in five beds. A fifth
American apparently died of ejection injuries a few days before
Trotsenko was admitted. One American was so badly burned
he could take sustenance only intravenously. Two others, who seemed to
have reasonable chances of survival, were spoon-fed
by a nurse. The fourth, with the broken arm, fed himself with his good
arm. At the time of Trotsenko's release, in
mid-November 1951, the A mericans were still in the hospital, he said.

Last March, following Trotsenko's directions, an American military
forensic team from Hawaii visited the hospital cemetery and
exhumed three bodies. None of the remains proved to be those of an
American. So far, the four Americans remain unidentified.
T rotsenko says that as normal relations grow between both nations,
Russian memories will sharpen.

"People used to say: 'I don't know anything, I don't want to know
anything," ' he said, recalling the Stalinist fear still etched in
the thinking of much of Russia's older generation. "Yeltsin gave us
freedom. The time will come when people will talk."

                             Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company