A former North Korean policeman says that for years he saw 20 to 30 elderly American men held at a place called Mandal-ri, outside Pyongyang, and that North Koreans told him they were prisoners from the Korean War. He drew the Pentagon a map of it. The map is not in the file the Pentagon has released.
Who he is
Oh Young Nam was a police official in North Korea and, by his account and press reporting at the time, the son of a bodyguard to Kim Il Sung. He was 33 when he defected to China in October 1995 and went on to South Korea. His account reached an American newspaper within the year: The Baltimore Sun published it on Sept. 8, 1996 under the headline “Defector says he saw U.S. POWs in North Korea.” PIP has interviewed him.
What he says he saw
I asked: ‘Who are those people?’ I was told that they were American POWs. I was surprised that there were still American POWs alive.
Oh Young Nam, in an interview with PIP
He describes 20 to 30 elderly Caucasian and Black men, seen repeatedly at Mandal-ri in the Sungho-kuyok area outside Pyongyang, over a period he has put as long as 1982 to 1993. They were thin but not badly treated, he says, lived in a single-story compound with a tennis court nearby, spoke Korean by then, and had been given Korean wives.
He did not only see them. By his account he met them, and he shared a beer with them. He does not speak English, and it was the Koreans with him — colleagues and escorts — who told him who the men were.
The men he describes cannot be the five American servicemen who defected to North Korea during the Cold War. There are too many of them, and some of them were Black. All five defectors were white. PIP screens every intelligence report of American prisoners in North Korea against those five men, by name, number and race, and sets aside any report that describes them.
What the Pentagon wrote down
Defense Department records list him as source GKOR 95-27, the subject of intelligence report IIR 7 312 0451 96. A Defense POW/MIA Office trip report on a visit to Korea in March 1996 records that he reported between 10 and 15 Americans living in Pyongyang said to be Korean War prisoners, and that he put it on paper.
He drew a map detailing the area where the American POWs live … The American POWs live in a place called ‘Mahn Dal Li,’ which is east of Pyongyang near the Mahn Dal Mountain — vicinity of YD 5821. He has had this knowledge since 1978.
Defense POW/MIA Office trip report, March 1996
He gave the license plate numbers of the vehicles the Americans were driven in. He said he had asked a driver who the foreigner was, and was told: “It’s an American POW from the Liberation War.” Mandal-ri sits at roughly 38.994443, 126.022653.
Who else described the same place
- A 1988 defector. A former North Korean translator in Portuguese and Spanish, posted at one point to Mozambique, described a 1980 encounter at a collective farm about two kilometers west of Mandal Mountain. He asked a tall, round-faced Caucasian man who appeared to be over 60 whether he spoke Spanish. The man answered, “No, I’m American.” A Korean woman at the farm told him the man was an American prisoner from the Korean War.
- A second defector source, recorded as GKOR 89-07 in intelligence report IIR 7 312 0453 96, reported the same kind of exchange.
- The Pentagon’s own follow-up. A classified message of December 1996 asked for any long-term residents of Songho District who could corroborate GKOR 95-27’s assertion that Americans were living in the area. Songho, or Sungho, is the district that contains Mandal-ri.
- A declassified intelligence report, which may or may not relate to Oh’s testimony, states that there were about 30 to 40 Americans living in Sungho District, of whom about eight were Black.
What the Pentagon urged, and what it said later
Investigators at the Defense POW/MIA Office were persuaded enough to write it down. In a then-classified memorandum written after they had months to assess his account, the office recorded that it carried 235 Korean War personnel as possibly held and not returned, and that Oh’s men could be among them.
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.
Defense POW/MIA Office memorandum, written October 1996 or later, in PIP’s files
The same memorandum proposed “a demarche or similar diplomatic inquiry to North Korea,” asked for collection help in a passage that is censored in the released copy, and recommended that confirmation of the information be urgently pursued. That is the Pentagon’s own investigators, more than 40 years after the armistice, saying Americans might still be held in Pyongyang and asking for a major effort to find out.
What happened next is still classified. What can be seen of the record suggests the answer is: not much. Publicly, the same office later discounted Oh, telling PIP his account was second-hand and could not be corroborated — second-hand because the men he met did not tell him themselves that they were prisoners. Oh does not speak English. The identification came from the Koreans around him.
Watch
What is unresolved, and what is missing
- The map is gone. Neither Oh’s hand-drawn map nor the Pyongyang city map he was asked to annotate on Oct. 2, 1996 appears in the released file, although the collection requirement in that same file directs that originals or legible photocopies of all sketches be mailed to the POW/MIA office.
- The direction does not match. The Baltimore Sun placed the site just north of Pyongyang. The Pentagon file places it east, at Mandal-ri, grid YD 5821. PIP treats the grid as controlling and keeps the discrepancy on the record.
- The numbers do not match either. The Pentagon report has him saying 10 to 15 Americans. His press account and his account to PIP describe 20 to 30 at a time, and he believed the total was higher.
- He is one man, and secondhand on the central point. He saw the men. He did not establish who they were himself — North Koreans told him they were American prisoners.
- The starting date moves. The Pentagon file says he had this knowledge from 1978. His press account describes visits from 1982 to 1993.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Accounts from anyone who saw or knew of the foreigners held at Mandal-ri, in Sungho (Songho) District outside Pyongyang, or on the collective farms west of Mandal Mountain, from the 1970s to the 1990s: who they were, what they looked like, what language they spoke.
- Former North Korean police, security or transport personnel who guarded or drove these men (a vehicle number, a unit, a work-site name).
- The names of any of these men, or what became of them after 1993.
The Pentagon’s own investigators wrote in 1996 that the men Oh saw could be among the 235 Korean War personnel the office carried as possibly held and not returned, and urged that the report be run down. Were they American prisoners kept since the war? Were they other foreigners whom North Koreans described as prisoners? Or some of both?
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We work in any language, Korean included, and we protect sources.
Related on this site
- Americans in North Korea — the full set of defector and intelligence reports
- Leads and clues: North Korea
- Americans abducted during the Cold War
- U.S. POWs taken from Korea to the Soviet Union