
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 27, 1993                   TAG: 9309270043
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. SAYS SOVIETS HELD POWS

The U.S. government has confronted Moscow for the first time with evidence that hundreds of U.S. Korean War prisoners were secretly moved to the Soviet Union, imprisoned and never returned.

The allegation, supported by new information from a variety of American and Russian sources, was made in a detailed presentation by a State Department official at a meeting with Russian officials in Moscow this month.

The evidence is spelled out in a government report the Clinton administration has refused to release. A copy was obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Soviets transferred several hundred U.S. Korean War POWs to the U.S.S.R. and did not repatriate them," the report says. "This transfer was mainly politically motivated with the intent of holding them as political hostages, subjects for intelligence exploitation and skilled labor within the camp system."

It asserts that the evidence gave a "consistent and mutually reinforcing description" of Soviet intelligence services forcibly moving U.S. POWs to the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviet military, including anti-aircraft units, was active in North Korea.

It does not assess how long the American servicemen - mostly Air Force aviators - may have lived, or whether any might still be alive in the chaotic former Soviet Union.

Just last year, the U.S. government said it had no evidence of such transfers. Washington has known, though, since the end of the war that some evidence existed that U.S. POWs had been taken to the Soviet Union. It asked Moscow for information on this in May 1954 and July 1956. Both times the Soviet government denied any knowledge of U.S. POWs on its soil.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin said last year that Soviet records showed 59 captured U.S. servicemen in Korea were interrogated by Soviet officials, and that 12 crew members of U.S. aircraft shot down in reconnaissance missions unrelated to the Korean War were transferred to Soviet territory. But the Yeltsin government has yet to concede that Americans were taken from Korea.

by CNB