ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605070015
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ROBERT BURNS ASSOCIATED PRESS
SOME AMERICANS CAPTURED during the Korean War were sent to be trained to spy for Moscow, Yuri Rastvorov said in 1955.o
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 the war.
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.''
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 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 until he defected to the United States in January 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 said the defector told him several hundred American POWs had been sent to Siberia during the war. Corso has maintained that the Eisenhower administration chose not to force the issue with Moscow for fear that a confrontation might escalate into all-out war.
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