On this page
What is still classified, which agency is withholding it, and what the record showed at the time.
- A report withdrawn from a 1951 file
- What the agencies said, and what they were holding
- Then and now
- The government has memory-holed its own wartime intelligence
- The Pentagon cannot keep track of its own classified files
- A Top Secret warning three weeks after the armistice
- What the National Archives admits it cannot count
- The file China says it has, and will not hand over
- The lawsuits
- One order would settle most of it
A report written on Nov. 1, 1951, while the Korean War was still being fought, went from the Air Force to Army intelligence in the file series reserved for prisoners of war. Nearly 75 years later it has still not been released. It is not an isolated case. The National Archives, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency all acknowledge withholding POW records, and the Archives says it has no way to count how many it holds.
Executive Order 14176, signed Jan. 23, 2025, directed plans for the full release of the government’s remaining files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the ground that continued withholding of decades-old records is “not consistent with the public interest.” The same reasoning applies here, with at least as much force, and to records that are older.
Sydney H. Schanberg, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times’s coverage of Cambodia and wrote the foreword to American Trophies, put the charge plainly.
“For nearly a century now, our government has told us that when wars come to an end the return of American prisoners held by our adversaries becomes a matter of ‘the highest national priority.’ But in the last two major conflicts, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, large numbers of American prisoners – in the hundreds – were not returned.”
“Though the evidence of these crimes is monumental, our government has never told this to the American public. Instead, Washington has simply covered it up and the timid mainstream press has done the same.”
Sydney H. Schanberg, foreword to American Trophies, New Paltz, New York, 4 July 2013
A report withdrawn from a 1951 file
This is what the withholding looks like at the file level. A researcher opens a box at College Park and finds, in place of the document, a printed slip saying it has been removed. The slip is itself old: the withdrawal authority is dated 1991. The report it stands for was written while the war was still being fought, and it traveled from the Air Force to Army intelligence in the record series reserved for prisoners of war.
What the agencies said, and what they were holding
The denials are on the record, in writing, from three agencies.
Central Intelligence Agency
In a letter of 21 January 1992 to the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the Agency wrote: “We have reviewed our files and found no information which would indicate that American POWs from either the Korean or Vietnam wars were transferred to the Soviet Union.” Ten months later it gave the same answer across a table. An EA/ICOG spot report of 4 November 1992, recording a meeting with a US Army POW/MIA official, reads: “The general asked if we had any information supporting the sometimes heard allegations that American POWs were moved to the Soviet Union during the Korean War. We said we do not.”
Both statements were made while the Agency held numerous files on shipments of U.S. POWs from Korea to the Soviet Union, including one report that a named Soviet officer ran the entire POW system in the war, including secret camps from which no Americans would be returned. The Agency also held files on Yuri Rastvorov, the Soviet intelligence officer who defected in 1954, worked for the United States government for years afterward and briefed the White House in 1955 on the Soviet retention of American prisoners from Korea. What is withheld is more information on Rastvorov. PIP believes he did more than know about these shipments and actually took part in the process, which could be the embarrassing reason the CIA has protected him and his records for decades. In a final response of Nov. 24, 2021, to a request filed on Feb. 25, 2017, the CIA released two documents in part and denied the rest in its entirety. Rastvorov died in 2004.
Defense Intelligence Agency
In 1989 the agency stated in writing that it “holds no records on those missing or captured during the Korean conflict.” In 1990 its deputy director, Rear Adm. Ronald F. Marryott, told Congress there were “no intelligence indicators that US personnel from the Korean conflict were not returned to US control at the end of the war,” and that scrutiny of the Soviet Union and China “would have likewise revealed at least a hint of American prisoners held in either country had they been taken there.” The Pentagon was holding hundreds of pages saying otherwise, from White House files to Army intelligence files. They were released years later.
What is withheld now is the reporting itself. Asked in 2014 for records on Americans captured during the Korean War and alive in North Korea, China and the Soviet bloc after 24 December 1953, DIA located eight documents, 46 pages. It released portions of two. The remaining five documents, 33 pages, were withheld in full.
National Security Agency
The signals intelligence holdings are the least examined of the three. The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs recorded that NSA could not locate the wartime files of the analysts who had tracked prisoners, and that hundreds of thousands of documents, and possibly tapes, had never been reviewed. What has been released carries its own gaps. The agency’s 429-page SIGINT correlation study, released on 28 July 2014, covers 1,345 case entries and is missing the single page its own first page promises: the key to its abbreviations and status codes. A released listing of roughly a thousand reports from 1982 to 1984 in TRIFORIUM, the channel NSA made mandatory for all signals intelligence on Southeast Asian POW/MIAs, has fifteen pages withheld. PIP has open requests for both.
Then and now
There are “no intelligence indicators that US personnel from the Korean conflict were not returned to US control at the end of the war,” the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rear Adm. Ronald F. Marryott, told Congress in 1990. The Soviet Union and China had been focuses of U.S. intelligence, he wrote, and that scrutiny “would have likewise revealed at least a hint of American prisoners held in either country had they been taken there.”
The government was then holding wartime intelligence saying the opposite, and much of it was still classified. No agency has published a count. A February 1953 report by CCRAK, the joint CIA and Army intelligence unit in Korea, said: “This office has received periodic reports of POWs being moved to the USSR since the very inception of the hostilities in Korea. These reports came in great volume through the earlier months of the war.” In March 1954 a former Soviet railway worker described several trainloads of U.S. prisoners transferred from Chinese to Soviet custody at Manchouli, on the Soviet border, in 1951 and 1952. That May the State Department told Moscow it had “recently received reports which support earlier indications” that American prisoners from Korea had been taken to the Soviet Union. Three years after the 1990 testimony, the Pentagon’s own study of Aug. 26, 1993 concluded: “U.S. Korean War POWs were transferred to the Soviet Union and never repatriated.”
“Americans, including American servicemen, were imprisoned in the former Soviet Union,” the Pentagon’s own Joint Commission Support Directorate reported in its Gulag Study of February 2005. Asked on CNN how many, the directorate’s head, Norman Kass, said he would be comfortable saying the number was in the hundreds.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency does not list those camps, or concede their existence, in its accounting for Korean War prisoners.
A joint CIA and military intelligence unit tracked American prisoners to camps inside China during the war. In 1955 that unit, CCRAK, reported that “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.” No American returned from those camps.
Air Force intelligence kept trying to identify those men for years. Its effort, Project American, was opened in 1954 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.” Its stated objective was “to investigate the identification of as many of these men as possible … by the exploitation of all possible documentary and human sources.” Air Force intelligence carried it as active until 1959.
“We have no indications at this time that there are any Americans alive in Indochina,” the Pentagon official in charge of POW/MIA affairs, Roger Shields, said in April 1973, weeks after the last prisoners came home.
Asked by the Senate Select Committee in 1992 whether men had been left behind, James R. Schlesinger, director of Central Intelligence in 1973 and later secretary of defense, answered that he could come to no other conclusion: in 1973, some were left behind. The Pathet Lao named nine American prisoners; the United States told Hanoi in writing that the list was “clearly incomplete.”
The government has memory-holed its own wartime intelligence
This is why the closed files matter. During the Korean War a joint CIA and military intelligence unit tracked American prisoners to camps inside China — camps the communists never admitted to, and from which no American returned. During and immediately after the war, senior American military and civilian officials demanded that China account for those men. The intelligence behind those demands was buried. Today the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency does not list those camps, or concede their existence, in its accounting for Korean War prisoners. The record of what the United States knew at the time has been removed from the United States government’s own account of the war.
The Pentagon cannot keep track of its own classified files
For more than twenty years the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has listed reports of Americans seen alive in enemy hands that it says cannot be released because they are still under investigation. The oldest was received in November 1979. The Vietnam list of nineteen reports gives the same reason against every one of them — Ongoing — on a page headed LAST UPDATED: DECEMBER 2004. On the Korean list, seven of the eight reports are withheld instead as Foreign Govt Info, and the declassification review the page describes began in June 2008 and is still unfinished.
In the summer of 2026, after Sue Milliner of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen asked at a family meeting why reports going back to 1979 were still under investigation, the agency answered in writing. A Memorandum for Record of 27 July 2026, signed by Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, chief of the agency’s Research Division, Indo-Pacific Directorate, states: “DPAA has no live sighting reports that are currently under investigation,” and “DPAA has no active investigations regarding live sightings of specific POW/MIAs.” Two sentences undid the reason given for withholding the reports for two decades.
The appendix to that memorandum gave the status of each report. Against three of them — including the 1979 report on Americans in North Vietnam — the entry is “Unable to locate.” A report that cannot be located cannot be under investigation. The agency’s own lists, and the status it gave each report in July 2026, are reproduced here: the generic live-sighting files.
PIP has also been waiting since November 2016 for a response to a Freedom of Information Act request for information on a Vietnamese defector from one of Hanoi’s POW units who reported the retention of American prisoners. Ten years, no answer. An earlier PIP request, filed in April 2012, was answered in February 2020 — nearly eight years later. The documents it produced made clear that the United States government knows Moscow holds information on American POW/MIAs and is not releasing it.
A Top Secret warning three weeks after the armistice
Among the files opened to PIP at the National Archives in April 2026 was a Top Secret message of 6–7 August 1953 from Far East Command in Tokyo to the Department of the Army, sent three weeks after the Korean War armistice was signed. Its opening line states the question in a sentence: “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 asks Washington to concur in a course of action: that the armistice commission demand the immediate return of the prisoners believed to remain in Communist custody; that, if the Communists deny holding them, the Command present a list by name; and, third, the “immediate commencement of required clandestine and covert activities to locate and recover, if possible, those retained indiv.” Recovering even one man, it adds, “would be of inestimable value.”
The companion document the message points to — “Post Armistice Planning for Covert, Clandestine and Related Activities in Korea,” 10 August 1953 — has not been produced to PIP. We have not been able to establish whether it remains classified or is simply unlocated. The same is true of the Air Force effort known as Project American, which PIP’s research indicates was still gathering intelligence on the missing at the end of the 1950s. The Army wrote this in August 1953. Seventy-three years later, the families of the men it describes still cannot read the plan it refers to.
What the National Archives admits it cannot count
After nearly six years of litigation by POW/MIA families, former prisoners, veterans and researchers, settled on 14 May 2026, the National Archives produced partial lists of some of the documents it is still withholding and suggested the families ask for them one at a time through Mandatory Declassification Review or the Freedom of Information Act. As for the rest, NARA acknowledges that it holds many other classified POW documents and says it has no way to know how many there are. A family cannot request a document whose existence nobody will enumerate.
In April 2026 PIP reviewed the first files produced under the suit. Almost all of them had been released before, some of them read by PIP’s founder during archival research going back to 1989. Of the first 106 titles PIP asked to see, more than fifteen are still classified or restricted. And the files that were open still contained withdrawal notices, some standing in for documents from the 1950s. The slips are in the boxes. The documents are not. The Archives told PIP it has no way to list all the still-secret records represented by withdrawal sheets, let alone process the entire group for declassification.
The file China says it has, and will not hand over
Sgt. Richard G. Desautels was captured in North Korea on 1 December 1950 and taken across the Yalu into China. He was not returned in 1953. In March 2003, in Beijing, a representative of the People’s Liberation Army raised his name himself and told the American delegation what his government was holding.
“The People’s Liberation Army representative stated that he had found a complete record of 9-10 pages on this case in the Chinese archives, which are still classified.”
“Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) requested a copy of the documents relating to this case. The Chinese have not yet passed those documents to DPMO.”
Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, “March 2003 China Trip Case Queries And Responses,” attachment to memorandum I-03/005850, 5 May 2003
The covering memorandum added: “This information has not been prepared for public release.” It reached the public five years later. Ten years after the admission, a member of Congress asked the Pentagon whether the file had ever arrived.
“The Chinese have not provided any files on Army Sergeant Richard Desautels. My staff has asked the Chinese for information related to Sergeant Desautels during several meetings since 2008 with archivists from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). We most recently asked for information from the PLA archivists on May 24, 2013.”
W. Montague Winfield, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs, letter to Rep. Chris Van Hollen, 14 June 2013
The lawsuits
None of this record came open on its own. PIP has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and mandatory declassification reviews over the years, and dozens are active now. Litigation follows when the requests do not produce the records. The government has said as much in its own files: on 12 October 1993 the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s FOIA staff explained to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs why the agency’s queue had grown to 350 cases.
“The explanations for the backlog are varied. First, this Agency received 117 requests from Mark Sauter on the Vietnam and Korean War era POW/MIA issue. These requests were complicated and voluminous.”
Robert P. Richardson, chief, Freedom of Information Act staff, Defense Intelligence Agency, memorandum for the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), subject “Freedom of Information Backlogs,” 12 October 1993
PIP has been a plaintiff in three Freedom of Information Act suits. Two — one against the Central Intelligence Agency, one against the National Archives and Records Administration — were brought with the family of Capt. Harry C. Moore, USAF, a Korean War aviator reported captured by Soviet forces, by the Washington attorney John Clarke. Both were before Judge Royce C. Lamberth and both are closed: the CIA case was dismissed on 24 April 2023, and the National Archives case was dismissed by agreement after the settlement of 14 May 2026. The third, Driggs v. Central Intelligence Agency, was decided for the agency, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed on 4 August 2026.
- The FOIA lawsuits — what is being sought, who the plaintiffs are, and where the cases stand.
- Families sue the National Archives for POW/MIA records — the suit filed on the seventieth anniversary of the Korean War.
- Cover-ups, corrections and criticism — the longer record of what was withheld and what happened when it came out.
One order would settle most of it
There has never been a declassification program built for POW/MIA records outside Southeast Asia. After the Senate Select Committee sat, from August 1991 to January 1993, three instruments followed: Section 1082 of the FY1992–93 National Defense Authorization Act, the McCain Act, signed 5 December 1991; Executive Order 12812, signed 22 July 1992, ordering agencies to review their POW/MIA holdings for declassification; and Presidential Decision Directive NSC-8, signed 10 June 1993, setting a deadline of Veterans Day that year. About 1.7 million pages were reviewed.
One product has held up: the Library of Congress opened its Vietnam-Era POW/MIA Database on 6 September 1993, and it remains the most useful public archive of its kind, 163,649 records at its last published count. The rest fell short. Schanberg wrote that the McCain Act “created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge.” And every one of those instruments was written for Southeast Asia; the executive order and the presidential directive both say so on their face. No comparable order, deadline or database was ever created for Korea or the Cold War, which is why the files described on this page are still closed.
The pending Bring Our Heroes Home Act, S. 3226 and H.R. 6723, is the first measure that would cover all of them. It would consolidate missing-personnel records at the National Archives, require agencies to identify and transmit them, and establish an independent review board empowered to review decisions to postpone declassification, for World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War and the Gulf wars. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced it unanimously on 6 August 2026. Versions have been introduced in every Congress since 2019 without becoming law. DPAA’s director, Kelly McKeague, has said the agency has no objection to it.
One step would do more than all of it: an order that any classified POW/MIA record more than fifty years old be declassified immediately — not referred for further review — unless an agency head personally certifies a current, identifiable national-security harm in releasing it. There is a precedent. Executive Order 14176, signed 23 January 2025, directed the full release of the records on the Kennedy, King and Kennedy assassinations on the finding that continued withholding was not consistent with the public interest. It required no new legislation.
Sources
Every document shown on this page was obtained by PIP/Mark Sauter, except the DPAA case-file page, which was captured from the agency’s own website on the date given.
- National Archives and Records Administration withdrawal notice, NA Form 14000, file 383.6 Korea, 25 May – 31 December 1951; withdrawn item dated 1 November 1951, USAF to ACSI. Photographed at NARA, April 2026.
- Far East Command message to Department of the Army, Top Secret, 6–7 August 1953; DA 945519, journal number 1161; declassified authority NND 877205. Photographed at the National Archives, April 2026.
- Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Vietnam War generic case file, dpaa.mil, captured 15 July 2026.
- Central Intelligence Agency, final response to Mandatory Declassification Review request EOM-2017-00465, 24 November 2021.
- Central Intelligence Agency, letter to the Chairman, US Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 21 January 1992. CIA document C00492268.
- Central Intelligence Agency, “EA/ICOG Spot Report — 4 November 1992,” reporting a meeting with a US Army POW/MIA official. CIA document C06010860.
- Defense Intelligence Agency, FOIA response, 22 July 2014.
- Rear Adm. Ronald F. Marryott, deputy director, Defense Intelligence Agency — congressional testimony on POW/MIAs in Indochina and Korea. Congressional Information Service index CIS 91-H381-42.
- PIP/Mark Sauter, Breaking the POW/MIA Classification Logjam: Extending the President’s Declassification Initiative to America’s Missing Heroes, 15 July 2026.
- PIP research files — for the 1989–91 denials, the Marryott testimony, the Corso and Rastvorov material, and the Swatow and Mercator cases.
- Section 1082, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993, Public Law 102-190, signed 5 December 1991: Disclosure of Information Concerning United States Personnel Classified as Prisoner of War or Missing in Action During the Vietnam Conflict.
- Executive Order 12812, Declassification and Release of Materials Pertaining to Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, signed 22 July 1992.
- Presidential Decision Directive NSC-8, Declassification of POW/MIA Records, signed 10 June 1993.
- Library of Congress, Vietnam-Era Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Database, opened 6 September 1993; record count from the collection description.
- Sydney H. Schanberg, “Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?”, The Nation, 18 September 2008.
- Bring Our Heroes Home Act, S. 3226 and H.R. 6723, 119th Congress; Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee action, 6 August 2026.
- Richard Sisk, “Anthony Tata assumes oversight of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency,” Military Times, 29 June 2026.
- Office of Sen. Mike Crapo, release on Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Director Kelly McKeague and the Bring Our Heroes Home Act, 21 August 2026.
- Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency video of the 2026 Vietnam War Annual Government Briefing, Arlington, Virginia, 25 June 2026, posted on DVIDS.
- Executive Order 14176, Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., signed 23 January 2025.
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Memorandum for Record, Salesforce Tasker #00043021, signed by Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, chief, Research Division, Indo-Pacific Directorate, 27 July 2026, with appendix, “Status of Generic Sightings.” National Security Agency, SIGINT correlation study, 429 pages, released 28 July 2014; and the released TRIFORIUM reports listing, 1982–84. Held by PIP. Report of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 13 January 1993, for the National Security Agency’s unreviewed holdings and unlocated wartime analyst files. Combined Command Reconnaissance Activities Korea (CCRAK), 1955, on continued and numerous fragmentary intelligence reports of American prisoners detained in China, Manchuria, the USSR and North Korea. In PIP’s holdings. If you hold documents, or know of records that were withdrawn, withheld or never produced, write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org.