Frequently Asked Questions

Who says our POWs were kept?

The people who said it were in a position to know. They were the commanders, the diplomats, the intelligence units and, later, the Pentagon’s own investigators.

Gen. Mark Clark, commander of all U.S. and U.N. forces in Korea. The officer who signed the armistice wrote that the Chinese and the North Koreans, like the Soviets, “had refused to return all the prisoners they captured.” On why: “I think one reason was that they wanted to hold the prisoners as hostages for future bargaining with us.”

Far East Command, in a Top Secret message to the Department of the Army, August 1953. Three weeks after the armistice: “Considered probable here that some US and UN pris held by Chinese and North Korean Communist Forces will not repeat not be returned to friendly control and have been or will be trans to USSR or China.” The message asked Washington to approve covert operations to find and recover them. PIP photographed it at the National Archives in April 2026.

U.S. military intelligence, by radio to five airmen it knew were in enemy hands — and to their guards — August 1953. The day after the war ended, the officers running the partisan operation that had reached them signalled 1st Lt. Gilbert Ashley and four of his crew: “Request your captors to turn you into the nearest POW camp for exchange … Communists cannot plausibly deny you are alive and must arrange your exchange or be charged with violation of armistice.” The five were Capt. Gilbert Ashley, Capt. Harold Turner, 1st Lt. Arthur Olsen, 1st Lt. John Shaddick III and A2C Hidemaro Ishida. None came home. The Pentagon declared them dead and the file — the “Green Dragon” story of the guerrilla unit that reached them — was classified for decades. The full case.

The State Department, in a cable to American embassies worldwide, August 1953. “The US government believes that some American and other United Nations military personnel, held prisoner by the Chinese and North Korean Communist Forces in Korea, will not be returned to friendly control.” And: “UN prisoners retained by the Communists will not necessarily be held in Korea, Manchuria or Eastern Siberia, but may be retained elsewhere in the Soviet Orbit. The US Government is anxious to obtain any information concerning these captives.”

The secretary of state, to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Instructing the embassy on what to tell the Soviets: “We have reliable accounts of transfers of POWs [to Siberia].” The note delivered in May 1954 said the United States had “recently received reports which support earlier indications that American prisoners of war who had seen action in Korea have been transported to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and that they are now in Soviet custody,” and asked to “arrange their repatriation at the earliest possible time.” Two years later, in a 1956 message to Moscow, the department said it was “compelled to believe” there were survivors of two shot-down American aircraft in Soviet hands. Moscow produced nothing.

Gen. Nathan F. Twining, Air Force chief of staff, 1954. A year after the war, the officer who would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the Central Intelligence Agency to mount covert operations to recover an “apparently substantial number of U.S. military personnel captured in the course of the Korean War (who) are still being held prisoners by the Communist Forces.” The CIA declined, saying it lacked the capability and had not seen sufficient intelligence on the missing Americans.

The Air Force and Army intelligence, 1954. The Air Force opened the effort known as Project American on the “strong possibility” that “a large number of the personnel listed as missing in action may still be alive and interned in Communist prison camps.” An Army G-2 memorandum of 19 May 1954: “This office has on file seven reports which indicate that there still may be Americans in Communist custody.” Project American was still being carried by Air Force intelligence in Asia years later, its stated objective “to investigate the identification of as many of these men as possible … by the exploitation of all possible documentary and human sources.” It was carried as active until 1959.

CCRAK, the joint CIA and Army intelligence unit in Korea, 1955. “Continued and numerous fragmentary intelligence reports give credence to possible detention of a large number of American POW’s in China, Manchuria, USSR, and North Korea. US POW’s have been reportedly observed in labor groups, under detention, being moved from one locale to another.” The unit told its own people why it mattered: “In order for the US Government to negotiate for the safe release of these captives, all information possible concerning these individuals must be obtained.”

A Department of Defense memorandum, 1955. Reviewing the 1950, 1952 and later reconnaissance losses: “Air Force crews…are probably held by the Soviet Union. …The missions on which these aircraft were flying, while related to the Korean War, are highly classified…The US should not be surprised, particularly in light of Japanese and German experience with the Soviets in World War II, if a number of completely unrecorded Americans are ultimately found to be alive…”

Col. Nikolay Belyakov and Gen. Vasiliy Sidorenkov, Soviet fighter commanders. Belyakov told an American investigator that a U.S. F-86 pilot captured in May or June 1953 was interrogated by his own commander, Col. Ivan Kozhedub, and then sent to Moscow “because Stalin wanted to speak with him.” An American pilot believed to be the same man taught tactics at the Monino Air Force Academy outside Moscow from 1953 to 1958 under an assumed name, and helped the Soviets analyze a U.S. radar device. Shown a photograph of him, Gen. Sidorenkov said: “That’s our American.” Belyakov named an official who knew the prisoner’s real name. PIP has found no record that the Pentagon followed it up. The full lead.

Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Tighe served as an intelligence officer in the Korean War and later ran the agency that would spend the 1980s and 1990s denying the question. He said publicly: “Let me say that intelligence reports I received left no doubt at all to me that American POWs left North Korea to go the Soviet Union and China.”

James R. Schlesinger, director of Central Intelligence in 1973 and later secretary of defense. Asked by the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992 whether the United States left men behind in Southeast Asia, including Laos: “I think that, as of now, I can come to no other conclusion, Senator. That does not say that there are any alive today, mind you. But in 1973, some were left behind.”

InSung Lee, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA intelligence officer for North Korea, March 1996. Lee joined the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in 1994 and found there was no collection effort on Korea at all — “There was no collection effort, period.” His background paper of 26 March 1996, Accountability of Missing Americans From the Korean War — Live-sighting Reports, marked For Official Use Only, set out what the reporting showed: Americans under the control of the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, escorted and moved in vehicles with ministry plates, sighted in numbers that “generally ranged from 10-15, with a few recent citing as many as 40-50,” and one defector who said that since 1978 he had learned that more than 60 American POWs lived in Pyongyang proper. His conclusion: “There are too many live sighting reports, specifically observations of several Caucasians in a collective farm by Romanians and the North Korean defectors’ eyewitness of Americans in DPRK, to dismiss that there are no American POWs in North Korea.” The paper found two groups of Americans in the North, “a small group of defectors and a larger group of 10-15 possible POWs.” Lee knew what publishing it would cost him: “I knew if that article was leaked my career was over. I felt it was my job to stick my neck out and say what the analytical information revealed.” Called in by State Department officials who asked how he could say there were living POWs from the Korean War, he answered that it was what the intelligence showed. DPMO leadership did not support him. He left the office and retired from the Army.

The Joint Commission Support Directorate, the Pentagon’s investigative arm on the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs. Its Gulag Study, fifth revision, February 2005: “Americans, including American servicemen, were imprisoned in the former Soviet Union. The Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies even transferred some of these Americans from satellite states … to the Soviet Union, where they were detained.” Asked on CNN that month how many, the directorate’s head, Norman Kass, said: “I personally would be comfortable saying that the number is in the hundreds.”

The documents behind these statements, and the ones still being withheld, are set out on Classified! and in how we know the communists kept American prisoners.

Is there a cover-up?

A wide conspiracy is hard to maintain. A bureaucratic cover-up is easier, and that is what the record shows. Admitting that the communists kept American prisoners would have created a problem the government would have had to solve, so officials denied, delayed and reclassified instead. In 1989 the Defense Intelligence Agency said in writing that it “holds no records” on men missing or captured in Korea. In 1990 its deputy director told Congress there were “no intelligence indicators” that Korean War prisoners had been kept. In 1992 the CIA told the Senate it had found “no information” that American prisoners were transferred to the Soviet Union. Each statement was made while the government held documents saying otherwise. Two men who ran American military intelligence named the problem themselves: Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, a former director of the DIA, said the Pentagon had a “mindset to debunk the intelligence they receive on our POWs,” and Col. Millard Peck resigned from the DIA’s POW/MIA office in 1991 writing that the mindset to debunk was “alive and well.”

What does the Pentagon say?

That it is accounting for the missing, case by case, mainly through remains recovery and identification. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency still lists about 7,353 Americans unaccounted for from Korea, 1,565 from Vietnam and 126 from the Cold War (DPAA, as of Sept. 18, 2026). It does not concede that prisoners were held back after the wars ended, and it does not list the camps inside China to which wartime American intelligence tracked prisoners. In the summer of 2026 the agency told a family member in writing that it has no live-sighting reports under investigation at all — and that several of the reports it had withheld for decades on the ground that they were under investigation cannot now be found.

Why do we believe men were kept?

Because the United States government said so at the time, in its own classified reporting, and then stopped saying it. Because some men, like the Ashley 5, were known alive at the end of the Korean War and were never returned. Because none of the Americans reported in the “confirmed” secret camp system in China ever came back. Because multi-source intelligence from Vietnam, including multiple witnesses who passed polygraphs, indicates some Americans remained there after the war. And because the files that would settle it — in Washington, Moscow and Beijing — are still closed. PIP does not claim to know how many men were kept, or what became of each of them. We publish what the evidence supports, and we say plainly where the record runs out.

Yuri Rastvorov, the Soviet intelligence officer who defected in 1954. Debriefed at the White House in 1955, he confirmed that “the mechanism for POW control in Korea was headed by the Soviets,” and said of the American prisoners: “The [US] POW’s will be screened by the Soviets and trained to be illegal residents [spies] in US or other countries where they can live as Americans.” The memorandum of that meeting stayed secret into the 1990s, past the point at which it would have shaped the Senate’s POW investigation. The CIA still withholds its files on him.

What is the POW Investigative Project?

A 501(c)(3) private foundation, PIP is an investigative reporting and global crowdsourcing platform designed to help resolve one of the most controversial and enduring mysteries in American history: what happened to U.S. prisoners of war and missing-in-action servicemen who were last reported in communist captivity but never returned after the Korean, Cold and Vietnam Wars. The POW Investigative Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation.

Doesn’t the Pentagon solve these cases?

After years of controversy involving the Pentagon POW/MIA office — now renamed the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA — Congress demanded the organization dramatically increase the number of POW/MIA remains it identifies each year. The office now largely focuses on identifying remains stored in its labs for years, from sources such as Pearl Harbor ships and remains provided by the North Koreans many years ago. PIP believes identifying those remains is a crucial, high-priority task, as is recovering the remains of as many other missing Americans as is feasible. The vast majority of POW/MIAs died on the battlefield, and their remains are now in U.S. government labs, lost or unreachable at sea or on land, or held back by the North Korean, Vietnamese and other governments.

The focus of this project is different. PIP is designed to investigate reports of Americans secretly imprisoned or held back by communist forces. In many cases contradicting declassified military and CIA intelligence reports, DPAA now asserts such reports are supported by “no substantiated evidence.” While the Pentagon in theory still investigates some such cases, many outside observers — including former government officials and a number of POW/MIA family members — believe the U.S. government has essentially set aside, if not given up, actively researching most of them.

DPAA’s own generic case files include live sightings of alleged American POWs in Southeast Asia that DPAA for years kept classified on the ground that they were under investigation, although some date to 1979. Those files are listed at dpaa.mil. In a memorandum of July 27, 2026, DPAA told a family member it had no live-sighting reports under investigation, and it said it could not locate three of them. See Classified!

U.S. officials and former officials have said Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, Vientiane and Pyongyang hold records they have not provided that could resolve the fates of many missing Americans.

Who runs and staffs PIP?

The project includes award-winning investigative reporters, former government experts on POW/MIA and human rights issues, and freelance reporters and researchers. Most importantly, PIP relies on international online contributors to send information and help resolve leads and clues. Our president and our former-government experts are volunteers. See About the POW Investigative Project.

How does PIP work?

We identify promising leads and clues — including those found by forcing the declassification of U.S. intelligence records — and publish the profiles of missing Americans for whom information is being sought. We believe answers to the fates of many missing Americans exist in the records of foreign countries and in evidence collected or known to former officials and ordinary citizens in nations where U.S. POWs were held. We use multilingual crowdsourcing to try to reach those people and get information back. We also draw on investigative reporters and freelancers for targeted research on specific leads.

Why does PIP exist?

Beyond representing an enduring and controversial unsolved chapter of American history, the POW/MIA issue affects families across the nation. More than 9,000 U.S. servicemembers remain unaccounted for from the Korean, Cold and Vietnam Wars, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (about 7,353 from Korea, 1,565 from Vietnam and 126 from the Cold War, as of Sept. 18, 2026), and many of their families are still seeking answers about their fates.

Could any of these POWs remain alive?

We don’t know. The Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have the most current information on this question, and keep critical parts of it classified. We believe the vast majority are dead, but that some U.S. POWs from the Vietnam War could be alive in Vietnam, North Korea or the former Soviet Union. Based on intelligence reporting, we also believe there are living children of American servicemen who were later allowed to start families.

As set out in the leads and case profiles on this site, there is substantial evidence that some Americans were captured and secretly held after the Korean, Cold and Vietnam Wars. A year after the Korean War ended, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff requested covert CIA action to recover an “apparently substantial number of U.S. military personnel captured in the course of the Korean War (who) are still being held prisoners by the Communist Forces.” The State Department informed Moscow during the Cold War that the United States was “compelled to believe” some American aviators were secretly imprisoned by the USSR.

In 1993 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs concluded there was no proof U.S. POWs remained alive in Southeast Asia. It also noted: “We acknowledge that there is no proof that U.S. POWs survived, but neither is there proof that all of those who did not return had died. There is evidence, moreover, that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number, after Operation Homecoming.” A number of senators and committee investigators concluded that Hanoi had retained some U.S. prisoners after the war.

There are reports, including some released after the Senate investigation, of Americans reported alive years and even decades after they were supposed to have come home. Korean War prisoners would now be in their 90s; Vietnam War prisoners would be in their 70s or 80s. Defectors and declassified documents report U.S. prisoners still alive in North Korea into the 1990s. Some 500 South Korean POWs, captured at the same time as American POW/MIAs in the Korean War, were believed still alive by the South Korean government in its last report on the topic; some escaped North Korea in the 1990s and, reportedly, later. If South Korean prisoners survived, could Americans?

Reports also indicate American prisoners, especially in North Korea and Vietnam, may have had families. PIP is interested in learning whether these reports are true and, if so, in making contact with the children of American POW/MIAs, even if the Americans are now deceased.

PIP does not assume that any POW/MIAs remain alive, or that all have perished. Either way, the answers we seek matter to the families of the missing and to resolving key questions about the POW/MIA record. Please contact us with any questions or suggestions.