This page sets out what PIP and/or its founder Mark Sauter believe happened, what they have found and where their earlier work has been wrong.
Note: PIP does not have official positions on some of the issues discussed here. Some of the views on this page may be the personal opinions of PIP President Mark Sauter.
Status: Analysis and argument, including PIP’s public corrections to its earlier reporting.
Is there a POW/MIA conspiracy or cover-up?
PIP — meaning its former government experts, researchers and family members — does not believe there is a “conspiracy,” meaning a group of government officials who know the whole truth about the POWs but keep it hidden.
The evidence shows a “cover-up” of certain information: continued efforts to withhold information that contradicts long-stated official positions, and the use of inaccurate and sometimes dishonest statements to support the “status quo” or “official line.” A combination of intentional secrecy and bureaucratic inertia has kept important information — including material that contradicts the official line — classified for decades. Repeated government and media investigations have pointed to serious shortcomings, a lack of candor, and a “mindset to debunk” among American POW/MIA officials and organizations.
Especially with regard to U.S. POWs not returned from the Korean and Cold Wars, and those reportedly shipped to third countries during the Vietnam War, PIP believes the government downplayed the evidence to avoid — as bureaucracies tend to do — creating a new problem it could not solve, one that interfered with its then-current priority of accounting for those lost in Vietnam.
There is no doubt the government has kept critical information classified — some POW/MIA documents are still secret after more than 70 years — and has “quibbled” or passed on unresearched and erroneous assertions about the facts.
In 1989, the official who was then in effect the U.S. government’s top expert and spokesman on POW/MIAs told a U.S. senator: “There is no evidence that any U.S. personnel were not released from captivity in Korea.” That official was Col. Joseph Schlatter, Chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action.
At the time Col. Schlatter was publicly denying the existence of any evidence, significant evidence was still being kept classified in Pentagon and other government files — including on the case of the “Ashley Five,” U.S. Air Force POWs who spoke over the radio with U.S. officials confirming their captivity at the “end of hostilities,” and whose captivity was confirmed by their communist captors, but who were never returned.
As PIP and others began revealing such evidence, the Pentagon put forward a higher-ranking spokesman. In 1990 the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), then the lead agency on POW/MIA efforts, was asked by Congress to respond to reports by PIP and others. Rear Admiral Ronald Marryott testified: “[T]here are no intelligence indicators that US personnel from the Korean conflict were not returned to US control at the end of the war.” He added: “Likewise, the Soviet Union has been the central focus of US and Allied intelligence activities for most of this century, and China has been watched for almost 50 years. I believe this scrutiny would have likewise revealed at least a hint of American prisoners held in either country had they been taken there. Again, no such evidence has ever surfaced.”
Admiral Marryott’s testimony to Congress was false, and provably so at the time he gave it. The U.S. general in command at the end of the Korean War had already admitted as much: “I was in a quandary. The question to me was, ‘How do you get these people back without pointing a gun at the communists?’ When you have no gun threatening the Reds, there is no way to demand and enforce compliance from them,” said General Mark Clark, Commander-in-Chief of UN and U.S. forces. The State Department had officially — and unsuccessfully — asked Moscow to return U.S. POWs taken from Korea and during the Cold War.
Since Marryott’s 1990 testimony, more — and more detailed — information has been made public showing there was indeed a “hint” that U.S. POWs were kept by the enemy. One example, released decades later: a then-secret 1954 request by the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff to the CIA to recover an “apparently substantial number of U.S. military personnel captured in the course of the Korean War [who] are still being held prisoners by the Communist Forces.”
“Mark Sauter…has found letters and memos in public records that show repeated efforts to limit or block the circulation of information on United States servicemen or women taken into custody and thought to be in Soviet hands after several wars,” the New York Times reported in 1992.
“The Pentagon’s effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from ‘dysfunction to total failure,’ according to an internal study suppressed by military officials,” the Associated Press reported in 2013, noting that the Pentagon’s top POW/MIA official was again claiming there was “no evidence” U.S. POWs had been taken to the Soviet Union — despite numerous reports of exactly that from Pentagon investigators who had worked in the former Soviet Union.
In recent years, POW/MIA family members have complained that a “revolving door” of top Pentagon POW/MIA officials, combined with repeated reorganizations of their offices, has produced a pattern of “on-the-job” training: officials arrive with little knowledge of the issue and leave before they become expert in it.
Corrections: mistakes made, critics answered
Has PIP made mistakes? Does it have critics? Yes to both.
After more than 35 years investigating this subject, PIP says it has made errors and vexed some people. The information on this site reflects updated analysis of the issues under investigation. When the research began in 1989, much of what appears on these pages was still classified — and in some cases denied outright by senior officials. It had to be forced out of the government through the Freedom of Information Act. U.S. investigators had not yet begun searching for POW/MIA information in the former Soviet Union and publishing it online. The findings of the Senate Select Committee had not been released. And there was no Google, which made finding and double-checking information far harder than it is today.
Over the years PIP has updated its analysis, including work done on deadline in the early 1990s, and this has included removing information that turned out to be incorrect. Early in the work, two men were quoted who claimed to have first-hand information on certain POW issues; PIP later learned both men had lied, and one had forged his military records. The information those two men provided was not central to the analysis and did not change it — an analysis that was, and remains, backed by declassified records and other sources, and has since been supported by the testimony of former Soviet military officers and many other sources. But the sources were bad, and PIP adjusted accordingly. Any errors, PIP states, are its responsibility alone.
That experience, and the emergence of the internet, encouraged PIP’s practice of posting evidence online for everyone to examine. PIP also says it seeks verification from the government wherever possible on information from individuals, especially where it is not corroborated by third-party records, and tries to be transparent about how sources are vetted. It reviews critiques of its findings and solicits feedback from experts — one of the U.S. government’s former top experts on North Vietnam provides feedback by email on specific issues and sources; he has asked not to be named, but PIP says his insights have led it to view certain information in new ways and have had a significant impact on its analysis of some issues.
One critic who has attacked the work publicly, without contacting PIP directly, is retired U.S. Army Col. Joseph Schlatter, who spent much of his career in senior positions in the Pentagon’s POW/MIA establishment. PIP credits Schlatter for continuing to defend the Pentagon’s long-held positions, many of which he helped formulate, at a time when most former officials from those organizations drop out of the discussion once they leave their posts, and acknowledges that some of his analysis is accurate and that he is right to flag questionable information. PIP says it is less impressed by what it describes as the Colonel’s “sometimes vicious ad hominem attacks” on people who disagree with Pentagon positions, including PIP and others such as Sydney Schanberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose reporting often contradicted the positions of Schlatter and the Pentagon. Schanberg, who has since died, wrote the foreword to American Trophies (2013). PIP says it will not attack Schlatter’s motives as he attacks others’, but notes that he does not deal with many of the facts on this site. It also notes that during Schlatter’s tenure the performance of the POW/MIA office was repeatedly criticized — by members of Congress, POW/MIA families, returned POWs and the media — and that his own statements proved controversial, in one case leading a senator to allege “false testimony” involving the Colonel and other U.S. POW officials. Schlatter has claimed that only a fringe group believes U.S. POWs were kept by the enemy; PIP responds that this group includes two former Secretaries of Defense and various former senior CIA and Pentagon experts, among many others.
PIP’s current assessment
Based on everything revealed over more than 35 years of research, PIP’s position is:
- Americans from the Korean War were held in secret prisons during the conflict. Some were alive in enemy hands at the end of the war and never returned. Multiple reports — some still classified — of their survival after the war, especially in North Korea and the Soviet Union, lead PIP to believe some were held there for years after the conflict ended in 1953.
- During the Cold War, some U.S. aviators were captured and not returned by the Soviets and Chinese.
- Some Americans were held by the Soviets after World War II. In PIP’s view, evidence that has emerged since the early 1990s does not support estimates that thousands of GIs were retained by the Soviets, as was reported in a book PIP contributed to in the early 1990s. The Russians now acknowledge holding some Americans, but say they were mostly Americans who had fought for Germany. Multiple reports of GIs held by the Red Army after their German POW camps were overrun remain unresolved and, in PIP’s view, deserve investigation.
- On Vietnam, PIP agrees with the 1993 Senate investigation, which found: “There is evidence, moreover, that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number [of US POWs], after Operation Homecoming [when all US prisoners were supposed to be returned].” PIP believes the evidence is very strong that at least a small number of Americans remained alive after the war, and its work is focused on evidence that more may have been held in a “separate camp” system during and after the war.
Could any POWs still be alive?
PIP does not know. A story in the British media used some of PIP’s evidence about Americans held in North Korea and concluded that some are still alive; PIP states that this conclusion was not based on its information. PIP told the reporter it was possible some Americans could still be alive, especially given the confirmed survival of South Korean POWs captured at the same time, but that the passage of time made such hopes dimmer.
PIP states it has never said that POWs remain alive in North Korea, Southeast Asia or the former Soviet Union. It says it does not have evidence to that effect, in part because the U.S. government keeps classified information on alleged POW survival, often for years after it is received — sometimes on the stated grounds that it is still under investigation. In other cases, including alleged sightings in North Korea, the government has admitted holding classified information but has not disclosed when the reports were received.
PIP’s view: multiple reports indicate POWs from the various wars were held in secret, and that some were alive for years after the conflicts ended. Are they still alive? Unknown. But it is equally unknown that they have all died — and, in PIP’s assessment, that uncertainty is reason enough for urgency in the effort to learn their fate, and reason their families and the public deserve the full truth.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Corrections to anything published on this site (such as a name, date or document citation you know to be wrong, and how you know).
- Critiques of PIP’s work or methods (such as a source we have misread or evidence we have missed).
Send suggestions or corrections to investigator (at) 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!