On 11 November 1992, in Moscow, an American officer sat down for an hour with a foreign official who had spent years in the Soviet GRU. The man was not Russian. He asked not to be named, because being named would jeopardize his own position and his government’s relations with the Russian government of the day. He had served with the Soviet military in North Vietnam from 1968 to 1972.
He said that while preparing for that posting he had read a GRU book on the lessons of the Korean War. He said it was classified Top Secret, that it had been written from material the KGB supplied, and that it contained detail about American operations and capabilities which, in his professional judgment, could only have come from talking to American prisoners.
He offered to meet again and go further. So far as the released record shows, he never did.
What is known
The account is in an American diplomatic cable, MOSCOW 034695, sent on 13 November 1992 by the Task Force Russia team in Moscow, addressed to the State Department, Task Force Russia, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and signed by the team chief. Its subject line is “POW/MIA: Debrief of Source Knowledgeable of POW/MIA.”
The book
Source said he obtained the above information while doing research on how to prepare for his work in North Vietnam. He claimed to have read a GRU-produced book on “Lessons Learned from the American Experience During the Korean War.” According to source, the book was written based on information provided to the GRU by the KGB, was classified Top Secret, and contained details of U.S. operations and capabilities which he felt could only be obtainable through direct involvement with POW debriefs.
He read it while preparing for an assignment that began in 1968. That dates his reading to about 1967 or 1968, and puts the book’s compilation earlier still — within fifteen years of the events it described, while the men who had done the work were still serving.
What he said about Korea
He had no personal experience of the Korean War; he was not in the military at the time. What he had was what his GRU service had let him read.
He stated he was confident that several hundred (up to 1,000) U.S. POWs captured during the Korean War had been transferred to the FSU under KGB/MGB control specifically for intelligence purposes. According to source, POW transfers fell directly into the purview of the KGB/MGB. Normal military or GRU involvement was restricted to indirect assistance such as pilots or drivers who were probably unaware of the cargo they were carrying.
He added that only KGB archives and KGB personnel could produce the kind of information the U.S.–Russia Joint Commission was then seeking. The cable records, in the same paragraph, that he did not substantiate how he arrived at his figure, and did not address how the men were transported, where they were held, or what became of them.
What he said about Vietnam
Here his knowledge was first-hand. He said American prisoners were the North Vietnamese leadership’s number one politico-military priority, ranking even above military operations, and that they were treated as the “coin of the realm,” held back to win concessions in the negotiations. He said he had personally read classified Soviet intelligence reporting stating that in at least one instance the United States negotiated the exchange of one American officer for ten thousand North Vietnamese prisoners. And then:
He also asserted that, based on classified information available to him while serving in North Vietnam, there were at least 600 U.S. POWs in North Vietnam in 1973 (not counting any held in South Vietnam).
Five hundred and ninety-one Americans came home in Operation Homecoming, from the North, the South and Laos together. This man, reading classified Soviet reporting inside North Vietnam, put the North Vietnam figure alone at six hundred or more. The project does not say the difference were kept. What we say is narrower and harder: the number he was reading was larger than the number returned, and the object worth having is the reporting he was reading.
He also said that North Vietnamese control over American prisoners was so tight, and Soviet access so restricted, that he had to run special operations to solve the access problem — successfully enough that a two-year assignment was extended to a third year and then a fourth, with promotion in rank and responsibility each time. He gave no details, and said he was willing to go into them at a later meeting.
What the American team thought of him
The cable is unusually direct about its own source. The information was spontaneous; the only question the team chief put to him was a clarification of his service dates. The meeting ran under an hour because of his other commitments, and he was “clearly willing to provide additional, as yet undetermined, information.” When told that the Russian side of the Joint Commission had been unable or unwilling to produce a single Soviet officer who had served in North Vietnam for interview, he was incredulous. And the team recorded its own read of his motive plainly: it did not discount that he might provide information damaging to the Russian government, given his own government’s difficult relationship with the Russian leadership of the day.
The team said it was prepared to continue meeting him, and asked Washington for a detailed list of essential elements of information to put to him.
Why this matters
Most reporting on this question is recollection — a veteran remembering a camp, a face, a conversation thirty years on. This is not that. It is a described artefact: a printed study, produced by a named service, at a stated classification, from a stated source, read by a professional who was in a position to judge what he was reading and who drew the inference himself.
And a book is a far easier object than a debrief file. Studies are cataloged. They are printed in numbered copies, circulated to academies, and distributed to partner services. Interrogation files were held by one directorate and are still held by its successor. If the study exists, it is a finding aid to the material underneath it.
What remains unresolved
- The title is a translation. The words on the page are an American officer’s rendering of what a man said in 1992. The Russian original is unknown, and the work may be a monograph, a bound lecture series, an informatsionnyi sbornik, or a numbered study of the GRU’s information directorate. Searching for the English title will find nothing.
- The numbers have no stated basis, and the cable says so on its face. That is recorded here as the American team recorded it, not argued away.
- The ten-thousand-for-one exchange has no counterpart in the public record of the Paris negotiations. Either he was reading Soviet reporting that was wrong, or he was reading something the American record does not contain. Both possibilities are worth resolving; neither is assumed.
- His identity is withheld under (b)(1) 1.6(d) and (b)(6), and so is the whole of paragraph 11. The cable runs 1 to 10, then 12. Paragraph 11 sits between the action request and the signature block — exactly where a source-handling recommendation would go. It is a one-paragraph declassification ask against a thirty-four-year-old cable.
- No follow-up product is visible. He proposed several more meetings. The team said it was prepared to hold them and asked for a question list. Nothing in the released record shows a second meeting ever took place, or that the question list was ever sent.
- An identity question the project records rather than answers. A GRU officer with the Soviet military in North Vietnam from 1968 to 1972, running operations to get access to American prisoners, is the same profile and the same tour window as Col. Vitaliy Mikhailovich Zakharchenko, Soviet military attaché in Hanoi from fall 1968 to summer 1972, whom the Joint Commission Support Directorate interviewed on 3 December 1996 and assessed as a highly credible and knowledgeable witness. Against the identification: this cable calls its source non-Russian, and describes him worrying about his government’s relations with Moscow, which points to an official of another state. The two may be colleagues of the same Hanoi Spetzgruppa rather than one man. The project does not claim to know.
Where a copy would be
In Russia. The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense at Podolsk, and the holdings of the GRU’s successor. Neither is open to outside researchers.
In a military academy library. A study of this kind was written to be read by officers in training. The Military-Diplomatic Academy, which trained GRU officers, is the obvious reading room, and academy catalogs and accession registers are a separate record from the study itself.
And — the route nobody has worked — in a partner service’s archive. The source was not Russian, and he read the book while preparing for his posting. That means a copy sat where he was preparing: in his own service’s holdings, not Moscow’s. Soviet-bloc intelligence and general staff records in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states and Ukraine are open by law and are administered by institutions that answer written requests from foreign researchers. Russia’s are not. If this book was distributed at all, the reachable copy is far likelier to be in Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn or Kyiv than in Podolsk.
Evidence and sources
- MOSCOW 034695, P 132208Z NOV 92, section 01 of 02, “POW/MIA: Debrief of Source Knowledgeable of POW/MIA,” from the U.S. Embassy Moscow POW/MIA team to the State Department, Task Force Russia, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. Declassified with redactions over the source identification in paragraph 3 and over paragraph 11 in full.
- UNCLAS MOSCOW 033784, the interview of Col. Vitaliy Mikhailovich Zakharchenko of 3 December 1996, held at the Library of Congress in the Vietnam-era POW/MIA database — the comparison document for the identity question above.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- The GRU study of the lessons of the Korean War, or anyone who read it, and what it says about American prisoners.
- Accounts from Soviet-bloc officers or officials of American prisoners from Korea or Vietnam transferred to the Soviet Union for intelligence purposes.
- The Soviet reporting on American prisoner numbers in North Vietnam that the source described reading from 1968 to 1972.
The source said several hundred, and up to 1,000, Americans captured in Korea were transferred to the Soviet Union under KGB control, and that at least 600 U.S. prisoners were in North Vietnam in 1973. Five hundred ninety-one came home from all of Southeast Asia. Was he repeating inflated Soviet reporting? Was he reading something the American record does not contain? Or was the book written from interrogations of men who never came back?
If you are the source, or you know who he is: we are not asking you to go public. The condition the American team accepted in 1992 is one we will keep. We do not publish the names of sources without permission.
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.
Русский
Книга ГРУ об уроках Корейской войны — обращение
11 ноября 1992 года в Москве иностранный (не российский) офицер, много лет прослуживший в советском ГРУ и находившийся при советских военных в Северном Вьетнаме с 1968 по 1972 год, рассказал американскому офицеру, что, готовясь к командировке во Вьетнам, читал закрытую книгу ГРУ об уроках Корейской войны. По его словам, книга имела гриф «совершенно секретно», была составлена на основе материалов, переданных ГРУ Комитетом государственной безопасности, и содержала такие подробности об американских операциях, которые, по его профессиональной оценке, могли быть получены только при непосредственном участии в допросах военнопленных.
Он также заявил, что несколько сотен — возможно, до тысячи — американских военнопленных, захваченных в Корее, были вывезены в Советский Союз под контролем КГБ и МГБ именно в разведывательных целях. В той же телеграмме отмечено, что он не объяснил, на чём основана эта цифра. Он предложил встретиться ещё раз. Судя по рассекреченным документам, второй встречи не было.
Нам помогут воспоминания офицеров армий стран Варшавского договора, которые в 1960-е годы при подготовке к работе во Вьетнаме читали учебные материалы о Корейской войне, и тех, кто служил в советских и союзных представительствах в Ханое в 1968–1972 годах, а также упоминания такого издания в открытых библиотечных каталогах. Пожалуйста, не присылайте засекреченных документов. Вы можете написать анонимно.
Мы не публикуем имена источников без разрешения. Мы ищем документ, а не признание.
Напишите нам: contact@powinvestigativeproject.org