The Korean War's Missing Heroes

Posted August 14, 2008

During a recent trip to Asia, President Bush pressed North Korea to dismantle its nuclear armaments, limit its ballistic missile activity and improve its respect for human rights. But as the U.S. government marches toward improved relations with North Korea—including dropping Pyongyang as a sponsor of terrorism as early as this month—the Bush administration ignores one of its most important obligations: requiring North Korea to account for over 8,000 American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action from the Korean War (1950-1953.)

After the end of the war, the U.S. government demanded information on hundreds of Americans reported captured by the enemy but never returned or accounted for, plus thousands of missing men whose fates were a total mystery. Examples include: Gerald Glasser, a prisoner seen alive by 66 fellow prisoners before being taken away by communist guards near the end of the war and never returned; Sam Logan, an Air Force POW whose picture was published by a Soviet news agency; and Gilbert Ashley, who along with four fellow crew members, “were known to be alive in Communist hands as of the close of the Korean conflict, Jul 53,” according to a long-classified U.S. Air Intelligence Report from Oct. 19, 1955.

The North Koreans and their Chinese allies refused to provide any credible response to such cases and also denied numerous reports that Americans had been shipped from Korea to secret prisons in China and the Soviet Union. But with little leverage on China or North Korea, the U.S. government essentially dropped the issue, other than paying North Korea to allow searches for U.S. remains during the 1990s (the North is now believed to warehouse the remains of many Americans and many, many more are buried there).

Yet evidence continues to emerge that North Korea knows much more than it has admitted. In 1996 a researcher for our groups visited the “Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum” in Pyongyang, North Korea, where the North Koreans displayed the identification cards of Air Force officers Richard Rosenvall and Gerard Cyr, and Elmer V. Wing of the Army—men for whom the North has never accounted.

In recent years, senior Pyongyang officials have mentioned living “survivors” or “war criminals” from the conflict and escapees from North Korea have described seeing men they believe were U.S. POWs. For example, Oh Young Nam, a former North Korean secret police official who defected from the North, told us he repeatedly saw 20 to 30 elderly Caucasians and blacks in a highly-secure area north of Pyongyang from 1982 to 1993. Mr. Oh says he asked his comrades about the men. “I asked: ‘Who are those people?’ I was told that they were American POWs. I was surprised that there were still American POWs alive. They all seemed to have families and their wives were North Korean,” Mr. Oh stated.

Given that a number of South Korean POWs captured during the war have escaped alive from the North during the past decade, sightings from Mr. Oh and others like him of live American POWs need be taken seriously.

The U.S. must not drop North Korea as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” until it makes significant first steps in a detailed program of accounting for American POWs and MIAs, starting with those captured alive but not returned at the end of the war and the "survivors" and "war criminals" mentioned by the North as remaining alive after the war. Yet the Bush administration refuses to make such an accounting a requirement for improving relations with North Korea. President Bush himself recently called for the North to provide answers on Japanese citizens they reportedly kidnapped with nary a word about missing Americans. U.S. POW/MIA family groups support an accounting for Japanese abductees, but we call upon President Bush and the U.S. Congress at the same time to honor America's promise to our lost American heroes.

Irene Mandra is chairperson of the Korea-Cold War Families of the Missing. Dolores Alfond is chairperson of the National Alliance of POW/MIA Families. Ms. Mandra’s brother, Marine Sgt. Philip Mandra, is missing from the Korean War.