Korean War · Documented in declassified U.S. government records
Status: Documented — this page draws on declassified U.S. intelligence and government records, together with the project’s own reporting on the Sgt. Richard Desautels case. Where a claim rests on a single report or an official’s public statement, that is noted.
What happened to Maj. Logan?
Air Force Major Sam Logan was captured in 1950. The Soviets distributed a picture of him in communist custody. He never came home.
How do we know the communists kept American prisoners after Korea?
Numerous U.S. intelligence reports during and after the war — sourced from Soviet officers to refugees — documented the movement of American POWs out of North Korea to China and the Soviet Union. Army intelligence, for example, confirmed and monitored secret prison camps in China; no Americans returned from them. Hundreds of prisoners held in North Korean camps the communists did acknowledge — such as Sgt. Richard Desautels — were not released at the end of the war. In the years since, information about their survival in Russia, China and North Korea has continued to emerge.
The general in charge admitted U.S. POWs were kept back
“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, who signed the truce that ended the Korean War.
The Pentagon wanted covert action to recover them after the war
In March 1954, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining asked the CIA for “clandestine and covert action to locate, identify, and recover” American prisoners he said were still held by the communists. See What happened to the men who were kept?
The U.S. government asked Moscow to give them back
In 1954, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow delivered a note to the Soviet government asking it “to arrange their (U.S. POWs taken from Korea to the Soviet Union) repatriation at the earliest possible time.” The Soviets responded by denying they had the prisoners.
So why isn’t the U.S. government doing more to find these lost heroes?
By 1955, the U.S. government had in large part determined it could never recover the lost men. “The problem becomes almost a philosophical one,” concluded a then-classified 1955 Pentagon memo. “If we are ‘at war,’ cold, hot or otherwise, casualties and losses must be expected and perhaps we must learn to live with this sort of thing. If we are in for fifty years of peripheral ‘fire fights’ we may be forced to adopt a rather cynical attitude on this (the POWs) for the political reasons.”
Today’s Pentagon POW/MIA effort focuses mostly on recovering the remains of those known killed since World War II — an important task, and one it does well. This involves determining where to look for the remains of the missing (almost always those our former enemies claim were killed in battle during the war) and then recovering and identifying them.
PIP has found no U.S. government program dedicated to tracing the men reported kept after Korea.
Imagine what the American leaders of 1953 — not to mention the prisoners and their families — would think, and what they would make of the decades since.
Declassified U.S. government records and other intelligence demonstrate that — despite decades of official denials from both sides — the communists secretly held U.S. prisoners during and after the war. Reports continued of their survival in North Korea, China and the Soviet Union following the war. What happened to them? The U.S. government owes these men and their families a relentless, high-priority effort to uncover the truth.
The case of Sgt. Richard Desautels
Sgt. Richard Desautels was a known POW in a North Korean camp. He feared his Chinese captors would keep him, telling a fellow U.S. prisoner: “(I)f he should disappear to make inquires concerning his whereabouts with the proper military authorities….”
When asked by the United States what happened to him, the Communist side listed him as having “escaped,” in its March 1954 accounting and again in 1956 — they made the same claim about another GI who was a double amputee. For decades, both China and the Pentagon insisted there was no evidence Sgt. Desautels had been secretly shipped to China.
The attitudes of the Pentagon and the Chinese
In 1990, Defense Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Rear Admiral Ronald Marryott provided a written statement to Congress concerning American prisoners in North Korea, stating that “there are no intelligence indicators that U.S. personnel from the Korean conflict were not returned to U.S. control at the end of the war.” He went on to state that the Soviet Union and China had also been under intense U.S. intelligence scrutiny for many decades. “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,” he stated.
He was in step with the Chinese government, which in 1992 claimed: “The Chinese side settled the issue of American prisoners of the Korean War long ago…None of the POWs under Chinese control was transferred to a third country or to the Chinese territory.”
Then in 2003, Beijing admitted Desautels had been taken — but said he had soon died of “mental illness” and China had lost his body. That reported location was, coincidentally, a place wartime U.S. intelligence had indicated was a trans-shipment point to Siberia. Beijing even conceded it still held a classified file on the sergeant. But the Pentagon has not obtained that file, or the full story about Desautels — or about the hundreds of other Americans reported to have suffered similar fates.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Documentation or firsthand accounts of Americans held in communist custody after the Korean War (such as on Sgt. Richard Desautels, Maj. Sam Logan or the Chinese file on Desautels).
- Family records on these men (such as letters, photographs or government correspondence).
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.
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!