Status: assembled from declassified U.S. intelligence reporting and named firsthand accounts. Individual reports are unverified. No American prisoner in North Korea has been identified by name.
As set out elsewhere on this site, American prisoners known to be alive and in North Korean and Chinese hands at the end of the Korean War were not returned. Even more South Korean prisoners, America’s allies during the war, were imprisoned but not returned.
Over the past thirty years a number of South Korean prisoners, some long presumed dead, have escaped from North Korea. The South Korean government estimates that more remain alive under Pyongyang’s control — up to 500, according to its last estimate.
So could American prisoners also have been kept alive for years, or decades, after the war? Could some still be alive? Do their children, from marriages with North Korean wives, live in North Korea?
At one time the Pentagon denied having any intelligence on such survivors. The U.S. government has since declassified numerous intelligence documents reporting American prisoners alive in North Korea.
Other material remains classified. In 2017 the Defense Intelligence Agency informed PIP that it holds classified information on U.S. prisoners reported in North Korea. The National Security Agency also told us it holds classified information relating to prisoners from the Korean War. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency likewise lists still-classified reports on American survivors in the North; it is unclear whether these overlap.
On its classified reports of live sightings, DPAA states: “As a matter of policy, all firsthand live sightings are classified while they undergo the investigative process. Once the report is resolved, the documents are reviewed for declassification and released.” DPAA has been investigating — and keeping classified — such reports dating back to 1979.
A note on the defectors
Five Caucasian American servicemen defected to North Korea during the Cold War. One died shortly after his defection; one was released with his Japanese wife to live in Japan; the other three died after living for years in North Korea. PIP reviews every reported sighting in North Korea in an attempt to eliminate those that describe the defectors.
Where a report describes more men than there were defectors, or describes Black Americans, or explicitly distinguishes the man seen from a known defector, that is noted below.
The reports
A former North Korean policeman
“I asked: ‘Who are those people?’ I was told that they were American POWs. I was surprised that there were still American POWs alive,” former North Korean policeman and defector Oh Young Nam told us in an interview. Oh says he repeatedly saw 20 to 30 elderly Caucasian and Black men in the Pyongyang area between 1982 and 1993. His comrades told him the men were American prisoners. He shared a beer with them.
An intelligent, highly placed source with unusual access, once trusted by the North Korean regime, Oh gave a highly detailed account containing verifiable facts. He, and at least one other North Korean defector, said Americans from the Korean War were held at a location called Mandal-ri, in the Sungho-kuyok area outside Pyongyang. Mandal-ri, in Sungho County, is located at approximately 38.994443°, 126.022653°.
The men Oh described were not the defectors, based on their number and the fact that some were Black.
The Oh Young Nam sightings — the full account, the Pentagon file, the missing map and video →
A declassified intelligence report — which may relate to Oh’s testimony, though redactions make this unclear — states: “There are about 30 to 40 Americans living in Sungho District, P’Yongyang City. Out of these 30 to 40 Americans, there were about eight black Americans.” Other Americans lived in an “American Residence” in the Ch’ukchun Subward, near the Chongchun Restaurant, south of Kwangok-Kori.
An unknown number of foreigners believed to be Americans also lived near Pyongyang’s Yongkwang train station, according to declassified reports.
When Oh gave his report in 1996, Pentagon officials moved on it, according to declassified records, because “It is possible that the individuals Mr. O(h) heard about or shared a beer with could be Americans from the Korean War who were thought to have been captured but never accounted for.” Requests by Pentagon staff for a formal approach to Pyongyang, and for aggressive measures to establish the report’s accuracy and recover any American prisoners, were not adequately followed up, as far as we can tell.
A prisoner in a political camp
Kim Yong is a former North Korean security official who was imprisoned after Pyongyang claimed his father had assisted the CIA; he says his father and other family members were publicly executed. He told us he saw several Caucasians in one of North Korea’s most notorious prison camps in 1996. According to a fellow inmate who knew them, the prisoners were U.S. and British prisoners of war; the other inmate gave the specific location of their capture. Mr. Kim understood they were imprisoned because they had refused to accept communism.
The English professor who was not Dresnok
Choi Jung Hyun said that in April 2000, while a North Korean soldier, he visited Aplok River College and saw a Caucasian man wearing a North Korean uniform. “My first thought was that he may be Russian, as many Russian army personnel came through army bases. But, I was told that he was a US POW and that he was to be an English professor at the Aplok River College and that he was currently working as a specialist in US TV media research.”
He was shown a picture of James Dresnok, an extremely large and distinctive-looking American Army defector who was alive at the time of the sighting and who had taught English, probably at that facility. Mr. Choi stated that the man he saw was not Dresnok.
Ten men in western-style housing
Another source reported ten American and British prisoners. The following combines two intelligence reports, one from 1996 and one from 1999, that appear to come from the same person. It is unclear how well this source could distinguish prisoners from defectors — he reported that one role in a propaganda film was played by a “British POW,” when it was in fact an American defector. On the other hand, if there were ten Caucasians, they cannot all have been defectors.
“He indicated that there are ten US and United Kingdom ‘POW’s’ who chose to stay in North Korea at the time of the POW exchange after the Korean conflict. They were residing in single western-style housing units, two to four persons per unit,” located in Namgang-dong, Sungho-ryok, Pyongyang.
“They were spending their lives as foreign-language teachers and farmers,” and were allowed into Pyongyang for shopping and sightseeing on Sundays. “The ‘POW’s’ had been married to North Korean women; however, the women fled for unknown reasons, and the ‘POW’s’ were living single,” a DIA document reported. Another DIA report noted: “They complained about not being able to meet other women because of their controlled life style.”
This detail matters: the four U.S. defectors who survived long enough were all married.
“Yankee” in Kimch’aek
A Caucasian referred to by locals as “Yankee” or “Big Nose” lived in Kimch’aek, North Korea, during the early 1980s. Then about 60 years old, he had light-colored eyes and a great deal of body hair, especially on his arms, according to a DIA report.
“The POW reportedly was captured during the winter of 1950, after a small unit (platoon- or-company-size) in Hamgrong-Pukto…He escaped from a POW camp in Hwanghe-Namdo towards the end of the war when the camp guards began executing other prisoners. He suffered three bullet wounds either while being captured or during this escape from the POW camp. The wounds left a scar on his right leg and made him walk with a severe limp.”
“John Smith”
Kim Yong Hwa told the media he had spent 40 days with an American prisoner called “John Smith” at a North Korean airfield in 1971. Smith spent his time doing translations and menial labour, Mr. Kim said, and talked about wanting to marry, although he had given up hope of ever returning to the United States. We located Mr. Kim in South Korea; he affirmed his account.
Eleven English teachers at the Reconnaissance Bureau school
Another report, based on second-hand sources, claimed eleven “Korean War PW’s” were English teachers at the Foreign Language School, Reconnaissance Bureau, Ministry of People’s Armed Forces. The 1989 Pentagon report says their students were slated for international assignments as military attachés and clandestine operatives. The prisoners were said to have Korean wives and, in some cases, children. They were not allowed to travel freely, but were sometimes escorted to historic sites and tourist areas.
The school in this report is also known as the Amnok-Gang (Yalu River) College or University, and we believe it has also been called the Aplok River College, as in the sighting above. The defectors were known to teach there. The reference to eleven prisoners is notable, given there were only four surviving defectors.
An internal security report
A North Korean government internal security report titled “U.S. POW(s) Rape Incident” caught the attention of a future U.S. source in 1990. “When he questioned communications division personnel on the article (about the incident), they told him that there were approximately 10 US ‘POW’s’ including an unknown number of black men residing in the Sungho-Kurok,” stated a 1996 Defense Intelligence Agency report titled “Possible Sightings of American POW’s, MIA’s and Defectors Living in North Korea.” “Ten persons including black men resided in the mandal-ri Area of sungho-kuyok and were under the control of the Security Bureau (Powi-Bu), Ministry of People’s Armed Forces.”
An FBI report
“Rumors that American POWs from the American Korean War are still living in North” is the title of an FBI report distributed to other government agencies in 2004. “Source heard rumors that American POWs who were initially held as prisoners during the Korean American War were allowed to marry North Korean women and many of them lived happily in North Korea. Some of them are probably still alive,” said the source — some of whose reporting to date had been corroborated, according to the FBI. The source even named a bar the Americans were said to frequent.
A separate 2004 FBI report, from “a contact with excellent direct access,” described a white man working the fields in North Korean Prison Camp 15. The Caucasian “was working in the fields each time [source] saw him.” Information about the source and the period was censored, although it may have been in 2000.
The 6th Prison
In April 1971, according to a second-hand report from 2001, four U.S. prisoners captured in June 1950 were held in North Korea’s 6th Prison, a political prisoners’ jail operated by the 7th Bureau, Ministry of Public Security, at Hwach’on Dong, Sungho-Kuyok, near Pyongyang. They lived in a “special control area” that most prison employees were not permitted to enter. Unlike ordinary political prisoners, the Americans could exercise at will and move about within the area. They prepared their own Western-style meals from food supplied by a government department, and gave lectures at Pyongyang University.
The defectors were all alive at this time. We note the specific reference to the men as prisoners captured in June 1950. Based on the Pentagon’s debriefing of Charles Jenkins, the defector who returned to Japan, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office should be able to determine whether this report describes the defectors or someone else.
The hot spring
In late 1975 a source observed a blue-eyed, blond white man who appeared to be about 35 visiting the Chuur hot spring. He was wearing a grey suit and necktie and carrying a fishing rod. “When source asked the escort who the Caucasian was, the escort answered that he was an American who was being cared for by a widow,” a 1980 report said. The American was visiting the springs for his bad back.
The Romanian engineer
Serban Oprica is an immigrant American haunted by something he says he saw long ago and far away.
In 1979 Oprica, then a Romanian engineer, had recently arrived in North Korea to work on the country’s first television factory. On Sundays the North Koreans took the foreign workers on trips to parks, war memorials and the beach. One Sunday in early October 1979 the group set off by minibus for the International Friendship Exhibition Hall, often called the Kim Il Sung Museum, a few hours outside Pyongyang.
It was a crisp, beautiful day, but about three hours into the journey the North Korean driver and the two guides apparently took a wrong turn. As the bus traveled at about thirty miles an hour along a winding two-lane asphalt road, a village of small single-story houses with a large rice field came into view.
Oprica, seated by a window on the left, says he realized something was strange about the fifty or so people working in the field. One of them approached the road, and Oprica saw he was clearly taller than most Koreans. Then, he says, he saw the man was white. Other passengers began to notice. As the bus came closer the man approached to within ten feet of the road and locked gazes with Oprica, who saw that he had light-colored eyes, perhaps grey or blue. He appeared to be about 50. Eight or ten other men in the field also looked up with curiosity; they too appeared to be white, and of around the same height and age. All wore the dark two-piece outfits common to North Korean farm workers.
The Romanian passengers stared at the man by the road, and he at them, until the bus was out of sight.
“Several who had been in Korea longer behaved as if such a sighting were neither strange nor uncommon. They said that they knew about the ‘existence of American prisoners of war in Korea and that it was normal in a Communist country,'” Oprica later said. At one point during his stay, according to U.S. Senate investigators who interviewed him, Oprica witnessed an angry argument between a North Korean and a Romanian who was upset that North Korea was holding American prisoners.
Friday labour, 1976
In the summer of 1976, three years before Oprica’s bus ride, a North Korean was sent to a cooperative farm in the Sungho district outside Pyongyang for “Friday Labour,” when office workers were required to work in the fields. There he spoke to a Caucasian with a “big body.” The Korean “asked him in English, ‘Can you speak English?’ The American responded, ‘Yes,'” according to a March 1996 DIA report. The white man said he was an American. The source asked a woman who had been speaking with him who he was, and she said “the American was an American POW during the Korean Liberation War.”
What North Korean officials have said
It is not only defectors who have said American prisoners were alive in that country.
In June 1992, Ambassador Ho Jong, then North Korea’s representative to the United Nations, said he could not rule out the possibility that current or former U.S. “war criminals” could be alive in his country. He asserted that America had never asked for such men — raising again the communist use of terms other than “prisoner of war” to justify retaining U.S. prisoners. The phrase “Americans left over from the Korean War era” appears in one partially declassified document; we wonder whether it is a similar formulation.
The issue of “other Americans” was apparently raised again with U.S. officials afterwards.
Prisoners moved from Vietnam
A North Korean agent who surrendered to South Korea in March 1980 said he had seen American prisoners in August 1968, during the first phase of his agent training at the Maram safe house complex outside Pyongyang. He observed “two Americans dressed in the KN (North Korea) Worker’s and Peasant’s Red Guard uniforms walking” near a restricted area where he was doing live-ammunition training. He challenged the unarmed men, who spoke little Korean, and learned they had become lost on their way to a nearby airfield.
That evening he asked a maid about them. She said “they were US military pilots who had been captured in Vietnam and brought to KN (North Korea) at an unspecified time.” She said about ten such pilots lived in three houses within the complex, undergoing training whose contents and purpose were unknown, and that they received special treatment and lived in the largest and best facility in the complex, according to a 1980 U.S. report.
Other intelligence indicates Americans captured in Southeast Asia may have been sent to North Korea. A facility at Ipsong-Ni, Pyongyang, was “suspected of housing US prisoners of war from the Korean War and the Vietnam War,” according to a 2001 DIA report: “(Censored) between 1986 and 1994 (censored) learned from a female student (name unrecalled) of the international relations university that during the Vietnam War, an unknown number of US POWs, including pilots, were brought from Vietnam to North Korea.”
There is reason to think such transfers are plausible. Though it was generally kept quiet at the time, North Korea sent pilots and ground operatives to support Hanoi during the war, and increased attacks on U.S. troops in South Korea to create a “second front.” Pyongyang was responding to the dispatch of large numbers of South Korean troops to fight alongside America and South Vietnam.
North Korean pilots fought American aviators over North Vietnam. A North Korean-piloted MiG-21 downed an American F-105 in 1968, according to a U.S. military record, and several other American aircraft were reportedly shot down by North Koreans. U.S. intelligence received a report that one North Korean pilot who ejected was killed by North Vietnamese who mistook him for an American.
Advisors from North Korea were also reported on the ground in Vietnam. In 1968 a South Korean general said his men had killed eight North Koreans from a psychological operations team. A U.S. intelligence report, based on second-hand information, described four North Korean advisors and “two (2) US personnel,” possibly also advisors, accompanying a communist signal unit in South Vietnam during 1971.
At least two South Korean soldiers captured in South Vietnam were sent to North Korea. Sgt. Park Seong-ryeol was suspected of being a defector after he appeared in North Korean radio propaganda broadcasts, but Seoul eventually determined he had been a prisoner taken against his will to the North.
Senior communist defectors indicate it was not only South Korean prisoners who were sent from Vietnam. Jan Sejna, the high-ranking Czech defector, claimed Pyongyang received prisoners from Hanoi, and said he learned this during a 1962 meeting in Moscow with the North Korean Chief of Staff and Soviet General A. I. Antonov. Dr. Dang Tan, a North Vietnamese communist official with high connections who defected in 1969 and was described by U.S. officials as “reliable” and “knowledgeable of North Vietnamese policies with respect to the handling of US prisoners of war,” suggested U.S. prisoners may have been sent from North Vietnam to North Korea.
The letter
In early September 1997, an American captive in North Korea told a Korean acquaintance that “all he wanted to do is return to the US or have his children take his bones to the US when he died,” a U.S. intelligence report stated.
When the American’s friend said he planned to escape from North Korea, the American gave him a letter to take with him, according to a 2000 DIA report. The censored text records that the source “was told by the serviceman to deliver the letter only to the (censored). Further, that the letter contained the serviceman’s own complete story as to how it came to pass that he remained in North Korea and his desire to return to the U.S.”
The DIA’s source said he had seen the American on several occasions and noted that he was always watched by North Korean security officials. He was a white U.S. Army officer, about 5′ 7″, with dark hair and eyes, and about 73 at the time. Well built but undernourished, he was married with two married sons. He lived with his family in “Xin Do City in the county of Han Kyongnam Do” — a garbled transliteration in the DIA document; we think it may refer to the fishing town of Sinpo, South Hamgyong province.
During the Korean War, the report says, he had been riding in a jeep in the mountains of Buk Chon county when ambushed by North Koreans. The jeep rolled down the mountain, killing the other occupants and knocking him unconscious. A civilian found him and took him home. By the time he recovered, the U.S. Army had pulled back. He was never placed in a POW camp, but was required to write and sign confession papers.
He became well respected among local people after the war for his ability to fix engines, and eventually became the chief engineer on a fishing boat. Things changed after the 1968 Pueblo incident, when North Korea seized an American Navy ship. “As a result, the US serviceman was stripped of all responsibilities and working on the fishing vessel, and relegated to hard, menial labor jobs at the nearby shipyard.”
The letter was destroyed when Chinese security personnel captured the source and his family crossing the river from North Korea. The family got out on a second attempt, and the source approached the U.S. government. He said that because of “his own experiences of being away from his family and country, he realizes how much the US serviceman must miss his home, and that he wants to do what is honorable and uphold his obligation to the US serviceman.”
The source said he knew the American’s name, date of birth and other details, but would not release them until he was sure that certain people — censored in the report — were “safe,” apparently meaning settled in South Korea or America. North Korean refugees often hide in China before reaching safety; if caught, they can be returned to North Korea and imprisoned.
Once he believed those people were safe, he said, he would release the information through the media. The world should know about the prisoner, he said. But there was a risk: if the North Korean government saw the information, it might blame the prisoner and kill him.
“At this point (censored) knew no further information of value would be forthcoming and asked (censored) if there would be a way (censored) could be contacted in the future.”
With that, the trail of the letter ends. Did the American government follow up? We have not seen the information if it did. Again, it may still be classified, along with the other records described above.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Accounts from anyone who lived in or near Sungho-kuyok, Mandal-ri, Namgang-dong or Ipsong-Ni and saw foreign residents.
- Recollections from former staff of the Foreign Language School of the Reconnaissance Bureau, the Aplok River/Amnok-Gang College or Pyongyang University, or from former personnel of the 6th Prison at Hwach’on Dong or Camp 15.
- The source who carried the 1997 letter, or anyone who knows of it.
- Contact with the North Korean-born children of American prisoners.
We do not publish the names of sources without permission.
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.
한국어
북한 내 미군 포로에 관한 제보 요청
6·25전쟁(한국전쟁)이 끝났을 때 북한과 중국 측에 억류된 채 생존이 확인되었던 미군 포로 가운데 일부는 송환되지 않았습니다. 송환되지 않은 국군포로는 그보다 더 많았습니다.
지난 30여 년 동안, 오래전에 사망한 것으로 여겨졌던 국군포로 여러 명이 북한을 탈출했습니다. 한국 정부는 최대 500명이 아직 북한에 생존해 있는 것으로 추정한 바 있습니다.
그렇다면 미군 포로도 같은 방식으로 억류되었을까요?
기밀 해제된 미국 정보 보고서와 탈북민들의 증언에는, 전쟁이 끝나고 수십 년이 지난 뒤에도 북한에 살던 백인과 흑인 남성들이 미군 포로로 지목된 사례가 여러 건 기록되어 있습니다. 거론된 지역은 평양시 승호구역 만달리와 남강동, 흑촌 지역, 립석리(입석리), 김책시 등입니다. 압록강대학에서 영어를 가르쳤다는 보고도 있습니다.
저희가 찾는 것:
- 승호구역 만달리·남강동이나 립석리 일대에 살았고, 지금은 북한을 떠나 계신 분 가운데 그곳에서 외국인 거주자를 본 적이 있는 분
- 압록강대학이나 김일성종합대학 등에서 외국인 교원을 본 적이 있는 분(북한을 떠나 계신 분)
- 승호리 교화소나 요덕 제15호 관리소에서 외국인 수감자를 보거나 들은 적이 있는 분
- 1997년 미군 포로가 써서 맡겼다는 편지를 전달했거나 그 사연을 아는 분
- 미군 포로의 가족이나 자녀에 대해 아는 분
안전 안내: 북한 안에 계신 분은 연락하지 마시고 자신과 가족의 안전을 먼저 지키십시오. 북한을 떠나 안전한 곳에 계신 분의 연락을 기다립니다.
저희는 미국 언론인과 전문가들이 참여하는 조사 프로젝트입니다. 목적은 이들의 운명을 밝히는 것이지, 오래전에 끝난 전쟁의 책임을 누구에게 묻는 것이 아닙니다. 제보자의 동의 없이 이름이나 신원을 알 수 있는 정보를 공개하지 않으며, 익명을 원하시면 익명으로 처리합니다.
연락처: contact@powinvestigativeproject.org
On what is still withheld: POW records going back to 1951 remain classified, and the National Archives says it cannot count how many it holds. What each agency is withholding, and what the record showed at the time, is set out on Classified!