Kin of Cold War POW/MIAs demand U.S. action.
By PIP/Mark Sauter · Memorial Day weekend, 2016
Editor’s note, 25 August 2026. This article was first published in 2016 and has not been updated. Its account of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s leadership, of the status of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs, and of the ages and circumstances of the family members quoted, is current as of that date and has not been updated. Several of those quoted have since died. The documentary record it describes has not changed.
The families of U.S. aviators lost during reconnaissance flights near the Soviet Union, China and North Korea have fought for sixty years to learn the fate of their loved ones — some captured alive, according to intelligence reports. Now time is running out for the aging wives and sisters of the missing, and they have grown tired of what they call indifference, stonewalling and secrecy from the U.S. government.
“The U.S. government has approached the investigation of its missing cases in a most ineffective way,” says Dr. Beverly Deane Shaver, 83. She learned decades after the 1956 loss of her husband Jim Deane that classified intelligence reports indicated he and a fellow crewman had been captured alive and tracked in Chinese captivity for at least two years after their plane was downed.
A blunter appraisal comes from Charlotte Busch Mitnik, whose brother Sam was part of a crew shot down by the Soviets in 1952; she had earlier lost a brother in the Second World War. The State Department informed Moscow that America was “compelled to believe” some of Sam’s crew had survived and been imprisoned in Siberia — a Russian later reported Sam and another crewman by name as captives. Sam’s wife Ruth died last week at the age of 92 without learning the truth about his fate, which Mitnik blames in large part on a lackadaisical U.S. government. “There has been nothing new for years (from the Pentagon),” she says. “Every year the same b.s.”
The agency
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is the newest incarnation of the often scandal-plagued Pentagon POW/MIA bureaucracy, and is now led by retired general Michael Linnington.
Family members and long-time observers of the issue uniformly praise the work of Pentagon field investigators, who sacrifice their comfort — and sometimes risk their safety — in the painstaking process of recovering remains and interviewing potential sources abroad. They also appreciate the efforts of certain staffers and members of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs, including Cold War expert Dr. James Connell and Rep. Sam Johnson, a Korean and Vietnam War aviator and a hero for his conduct as a prisoner in Hanoi.
There is much less goodwill for the rotating heads of the POW office and their policy staff, who often lack historical knowledge of a complex issue and the time or inclination to acquire it. Linnington assumed command after congressional and media pressure to streamline and accelerate the process of accounting for America’s missing, including 126 aviators lost during Cold War reconnaissance flights. Progress remains elusive.
DPAA appears far from achieving the capability to account for 200 missing Americans annually, which Congress mandated several years ago. Many family members remain convinced they will be long dead before DPAA accounts for their missing loved ones — including the almost 8,000 POW/MIA from the Korean War.
Linnington has recently been forced to admit that the Pentagon’s much-publicized agreement to pay China for research in Beijing’s archives has failed to resolve the case of even a single one of the many missing Americans last known or suspected to have been in Chinese hands during the Korean and Cold Wars. Beijing in effect pulled a bait-and-switch, admitting years after signing the archives agreement that it considered files on Americans in its prisons “classified” and not part of the deal.
Meanwhile the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission has essentially ground to a halt, owing to the tense relationship between Washington and Moscow and a lack of focus by the Pentagon and White House. Former insiders say Moscow has played a shell game with U.S. investigators, providing access to some — often very useful — documents and sources that yield important clues, while denying access to KGB and GRU files that could quickly resolve the fate of many Americans.
A Russian team from the Commission has been visiting Washington in recent days in an attempt to regain momentum. But the Pentagon did not give advance notification, or offer meetings with the Russians, to POW/MIA families then at an annual convention near Washington, miles from Russian officials who might be able to account for their loved ones. “It’s just another way they (Pentagon POW/MIA officials) do things, not including family members,” says Janella Rose, sister of a Vietnam War POW/MIA and chairperson of the National Alliance for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen. “It’s a pretty sad situation that the government keeps stonewalling families.”
“Soviet revisionist history”
“It’s scandalous,” asserts Norm Kass, the former executive director of the U.S. side of the Commission, who notes that the Pentagon has removed from its website large volumes of information he and his investigators obtained in the former Soviet Union. Kass, a Russian linguist and Vietnam veteran, compares the removal of that information, and the Pentagon’s failure to follow up on its leads, to “Soviet revisionist history.” He attributes the situation to persistent bureaucratic infighting at the Pentagon.
Kass is more alarmed still by Linnington’s statement that: “We have no conclusive proof that remains of POWs from the above wars were imprisoned in those countries. It follows that no cases of Americans held in the Soviet Union, FSU (former Soviet Union), or Warsaw Pact have been resolved by the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission.” The statement came in a response to questions posed by the National Alliance of Families, obtained with the assistance of Rep. Chris Van Hollen and his staffer Lillian Cruz.
The assertion amazes and infuriates Kass, who cites multiple cases in which the Commission helped lead to the recovery of U.S. remains in the former Soviet Union and even Vietnam — including the recovery of the remains of Capt. John Dunham, a downed Cold War aviator secretly buried on Soviet territory in 1952, and of six members of a U.S. reconnaissance plane downed over then-Soviet Armenia in 1958.
Linnington’s comment also implies that DPAA believes no American POW/MIAs were ever in the Soviet Union, so the Joint Commission should not expect to find any of the missing or their remains — a position that contradicts available intelligence and numerous previous Pentagon and Commission statements. It also signals to Moscow that America’s top POW/MIA official may not demand tangible results. Kass suspects the Pentagon may even be conducting an “intentional campaign” to downplay the Commission.
Perhaps most infuriating to many family members is the continued classification of America’s own POW/MIA-related information, much of it dating to the 1950s, and the failure of Pentagon leaders to locate and act on intelligence obtained at the time the aviators were lost.
Lloyd Smith
“I cannot fathom why this is still happening, other than there is still so much we are not being told,” says Terri Mumley, whose grandfather Lloyd Smith was reportedly captured by the Chinese in early 1953 after he and fellow crewman William McClure were seen on a raft drifting to shore near Shantou, China, following a chaotic effort by U.S. forces to rescue the crew of their downed plane.
The Associated Press soon reported a Chinese manhunt for the survivors, and U.S. intelligence received multiple reports that they had survived and been captured, including one from a foreign missionary. Within a month, Hong Kong newspapers reported that American prisoners had been marched through the streets of Swatow — now spelled Shantou — “as an object of public ridicule,” summarized a previously secret Navy file. The Americans had tried to persuade three local fishermen to take them to Hong Kong, the reports said, but one turned them in. According to those reports, the fishermen were executed and the Americans imprisoned, then taken into the interior of China. Sources disagreed on whether the men were ultimately sent for long-term imprisonment or simply killed.
A classified Navy report concluded: “It is the opinion of this command that Smith and his companion survived the ditching without injury and were probably taken prisoner by the Chinese Communists.”
Smith — remembered by his family as a loving father and an ardent baseball player — and McClure were declared dead anyway. “Why did they ever consider him dead?” asks Mumley.
Smith had sent his family a photograph the month before he went missing. On the back he had written: “I am looking for my family. Guess they are too far away.”
Joe Danens
The risk of Cold War aviators falling into enemy hands became real for the Pentagon in April 1950, when a Navy PB4Y “Privateer” was shot down by Soviet fighters over the Baltic Sea. In the following years, reports of surviving crewmen began to emerge from the Soviet Union.
One of the aviators aboard was Joe Danens, who had married a couple of years earlier. “Can you imagine? It’s 1948 and the Jewish girl Ruth Feinberg from Passaic, NJ, and Joe Danens part Native American (Blackfoot) from Cutbank, MT, got married,” recalls Ruth’s daughter Gail Miney. “Not all that common in those days.”
U.S. investigators from the Joint Commission uncovered reports that the aircraft had been salvaged, but that Stalin himself ordered the fact kept secret from the United States. These were supported by previously classified U.S. Navy intelligence files concluding that the Soviet Navy was operating captured American electronic equipment similar to that carried on the Privateer. “In view of the successful salvaging and operation of the electronic equipment, there exists the possibility that some or all of the crew were taken into custody and are being held by the Soviets,” the Navy concluded.
“There exist a number of reports from released Gulag inmates indicating that there were indeed survivors from this flight who were imprisoned in the Gulag. There are enough of these reports over the years to suggest that they cannot be ignored,” U.S. investigators concluded in the 1990s.
After Joe was declared dead, Ruth married Robert Miney, a Navy flyer. Several years later Miney’s plane disappeared during a routine flight over the Atlantic; no survivors were found.
“Once again, no bodies, no plane recovery, no explanation of what happened,” recalls Gail. The 92-year-old continues to ask for straight answers from the government for which she and her two lost husbands sacrificed so much.
Jack Lively and Hospital 404
On 6 November 1951, Soviet fighters downed a Navy P2V surveillance plane over the Sea of Japan, off the Soviet Pacific coast, leaving ten men missing.
U.S. analysts believed the aircraft was attacked to send a Soviet message about reconnaissance flights along its borders. Because the mission was linked to UN operations, the State Department decided to play the case down, upsetting at least one Pentagon official who recommended “something be done to show the Soviets they cannot get away with it.”
Little was done. The crew were soon declared dead.
There the case remained until more than forty years later, when a former Soviet soldier named Vladimir Trotsenko contacted U.S. investigators in Russia. Sent to Hospital 404 in Novosysoyevka with an injured leg in November 1951, he was given a corridor bed near a guarded room — and, when the guard needed the lavatory, was asked “to keep an eye on the Americans.”
Inside were four American patients. Trotsenko described them in detail, and described a Soviet colonel who came in and lifted a round medallion from around the neck of each man in turn, looked at it, and put it back.
U.S. investigators initially doubted this detail: every American veteran knew dog tags were rectangular. Then they consulted a U.S. Navy artifacts historian, who confirmed that between 1940 and about 1956, Navy dog tags were round.
The Joint Commission arranged for Trotsenko to revisit the hospital. His descriptions proved stunningly accurate. Even Russian members of the Commission, who often disputed information the Americans found convincing, concluded he was telling the truth.
There the investigation ended, because Moscow still refuses to release sensitive files on foreign prisoners held by its intelligence service.
Sam Busch
A few months after Trotsenko left the hospital, another American reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over the Sea of Japan, on 13 June 1952 — an Air Force RB-29 on a classified mission to gather intelligence on Soviet shipping between the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands. Twelve men were left missing, including mission commander Maj. Sam Busch, Charlotte Mitnik’s older brother. He had been studying to become a pharmacist, but was recalled to service for the Korean War.
On 18 June the United States sent a message to the Soviets reporting floating debris associated with the loss. “The presence of such items would indicate that there were survivors who may have been picked up by Soviet ships,” the State Department said, asking for Soviet help. The Kremlin claimed to know nothing about the crew.
A returned Japanese prisoner from POW Camp 21 in Khabarovsk would have disagreed. He said twelve or thirteen U.S. airmen were in the prison as of the spring of 1953, and that guards told him they were the crew of an American plane shot down by the Soviets.
Among the U.S. airmen searching for the missing RB-29 was Air Force Sgt. William Koski. The next month he was himself shot down over Korea and sent to a special POW camp in China, where he was interrogated about Busch. “If he were dead at the bottom of the Sea of Japan, why all the interest?” he recalled, adding: “I am as convinced today as I was then that they had Busch . . . and maybe a few others of his crew.”
Years later, a Russian émigré who had lived for years in and around the Soviet prison system said he had learned that “Bush and Moore” — Master Sgt. David Moore, aboard Busch’s plane — from a U.S. spy plane downed in the summer of 1952 “will forever remain in the soil of the Khabarovsk Region.” He was told eight other survivors of the shoot-down were put in solitary confinement in a prison in Svobodnyy, outside Khabarovsk near the Chinese border. Requests by a senior U.S. official from the Joint Commission to investigate the émigré’s information were turned down by the Pentagon.
The document behind that conclusion is now declassified. On 16 September 1955, Gen. G. B. Erskine, USMC (Ret.), the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, wrote to Walter Robertson at the State Department on the subject of the Geneva negotiations on prisoners of war. Paragraph 7 records “evidence based upon radar plots and intercepted voice messages, as well as upon the recovery of casualties, that a small number of Air Force crews whose missions involved flights over the Sea of Japan during the Korean War were shot down by aircraft based in the Soviet Far East, some of whom are probably held by the Soviet Union. These cases (some 33)… The missions on which these aircraft were flying, while related to the Korean War, are highly classified and the names of these individuals have never been included on any list for which we have demanded an accounting from the Chinese Communists.”
Paragraph 11: “The U.S. 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 or to have been alive and in Communist hands.”
And then paragraph 12, which is the sentence the families have never forgotten: “Your attention is again invited to the undesirability of providing any information through any source which might lead the next of kin of these armed forces personnel discussed herein to assume or believe that these personnel might still be alive and held unless the Communists are prepared at some point to document such information.”
The classified memorandum went on to warn the State Department of the “undesirability of providing any information” to the families concerning the possible survival of their loved ones.
The State Department apparently had its own ideas. The next year it issued an official demand to the Soviet Union to account for at least ten aviators from the Busch and Danens crews reported in specific Soviet prisons, saying the United States was “compelled to believe” they had survived their downings and been captured.
Jim Deane
A month after that demand, Lt. j.g. Jim Deane took off on a classified surveillance flight from his base in Japan, leaving behind Beverly, his new wife and fellow Cornell graduate. Navy Plane No. 124363, a P4M “Mercator,” was flying off the Chinese coast on the moonlit night of 22 August 1956 when it was attacked by Chinese MiGs. It managed to issue a distress signal before disappearing. American search and rescue efforts, under fighter cover, recovered the remains of two crewmen off Shanghai, along with at least two life rafts. Two more of the dead were returned shortly afterward by the Chinese. That left twelve men missing. The Navy soon declared that no one could have survived, and declared the men dead as the incident faded from the headlines.
Then, in the early 1990s, Dr. Beverly Deane Shaver — remarried in 1960 — came across declassified intelligence reports on the incident, along with the revelation that America had not asked China to return survivors from the shoot-down.
The reports — not shared after the incident with Dr. Shaver, or with any other family as far as we know — began arriving weeks after the downing and continued for around two years. They described how three Americans from the downed plane had been captured by a Chinese patrol boat. One died within hours; the other two were taken to the Baoding Army Hospital in Shanghai, where they recovered. By November 1956 the prisoners had been moved to the residence of one “Tsai Mao,” Chief of Public Information, Ministry of Social Welfare. The reports included physical descriptions which, according to Navy analysts, appeared to fit James Deane and either AO2 Warren Caron or AT2 Leonard Strykowsky.
Dr. Shaver was struck by one odd descriptor: the man who seemed to fit Deane’s description was, the source said, “not hairy.” Neither was her former husband.
Intelligence reports continued to follow the men’s fate. They reported the captive Americans would face a hearing in April 1957; according to normal Chinese practice, the men would likely have to confess to their “crimes” and apologize. One of the aviators, apparently under pressure from his captors, was said to have promised “he will reside permanently in Communist China if given livelihood guarantees.”
The story ended with the man alleged to be Deane living outside Beijing under the control of Ch’en Lung, assistant chief of the Public Security Department in Beijing — later confirmed to be a real person — and the other American working at the “Sheng-Lung Corporation” in Shanghai.
Shaver wonders what reports came in next, and suspects more documents on the case remain classified. Did Deane and his fellow crewman actually survive? Or were the reports simply false? According to a Pentagon report produced after she revived the case, “the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) concluded that these live sightings were inconclusive due to the lack of additional reports to establish their validity.” Given the danger of intelligence collection in China, it is remarkable that agents there obtained even the information they provided.
Responding to pressure from Shaver, the United States asked China to investigate, but in 1992 Beijing announced it could find “no information to support” the reports. She pressed on. In 1995 an American official suggested Chinese records on the case might have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. That did not dissuade her. She received assistance from two-time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a friend of Deane’s from flight school, and from members of his network including President Ford and Henry Kissinger.
Dr. Shaver traveled to Beijing herself several times, first in 2000, and what she found there only deepened the mystery. A senior official with ties to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told her Beijing still considered records on Deane “highly classified” — which made no sense if he had really been killed in the crash. A former senior Chinese air defense officer admitted that “two pilots” had been captured from the incident, she learned, but claimed a poor memory when questioned later.
The Chinese ultimately claimed they had no records that the men had been captured, and were joined by some former U.S. officials in claiming the crash could not have been survived — although many U.S. prisoners have returned alive from incidents where survival was discounted. A document Beijing handed over in 2006 did nothing to resolve the fate of the missing men.
Some of the facts above are drawn from an article by Beverly’s daughter Katie, a Washington Post reporter.
Beverly says she has obtained credible eyewitness reports of both Deane’s capture and his imprisonment in China. But without focus and support from the U.S. government, progress appears impossible.
“‘Missing’ is very different from ‘Killed in Action,'” she says. “The twisted hope, the pain, the guilt feelings of not having done enough to get answers follow the families forever.”
She is frustrated with the Pentagon’s efforts, calling much of it “public relations.” Along with a real push by the United States to get answers from China, she demands a major initiative to declassify decades-old U.S. intelligence files that may contain more information on Deane’s fate, along with many other Cold War and Korean War POW/MIAs.
“Every one of the documents dealing with the missing should be declassified immediately. The families have waited long enough.”
“My grandfather’s legacy and what he gave for his country is why I wear a uniform, and why four of my sons wear a uniform,” says Terri Mumley, a full-time non-commissioned officer with the National Guard.
“We have all answered the call just as my grandfather did and by answering that call we expect that our country will not leave us behind in a foreign land to suffer. It is time we demand accounting for those that were left behind. This government owes that to them!”
About the author. PIP/Mark Sauter has been investigating the fate of Cold War and Korean War POW/MIAs since 1989, from Moscow to Pyongyang and through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and extensive research at the National Archives. His research has been cited by major media outlets from the New York Times and ABC News to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal. Sauter served as commander of a U.S. Army guard post in the Korean DMZ during the 1980s and went on to become an investigative correspondent for print and television news outlets. He serves as a volunteer researcher for POW/MIA family groups. His book on the topic, co-authored with Korean War POW/MIA case expert John Zimmerlee, is PIP’s research with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Source documents. The original publication of this article carried an appendix of source documents, including the statement from DPAA Director Michael Linnington of 24 May 2016, the 1955 Department of Defense memorandum, the declassified files on the reported capture of Jim Deane, the CIA report on Lloyd Smith, and photographs of the missing men and their families. Those files are held in the project’s archive and are being re-uploaded to this site.
Related pages on this site: Maj. Sam Busch · Lt. j.g. James Deane · Petty Officer 3rd Class Jack Lively · Americans hunted in Shantou · U.S. aviators reported at Hospital 404 · U.S. aircrews secretly imprisoned in the Soviet Union