Our evidence standard
PIP publishes source-led reporting on questions where the official record is incomplete and, in places, still classified. That makes it essential to be explicit about what kind of thing each statement is. On every case and lead page we distinguish four categories:
Confirmed documentation. A record exists, we can identify it, and we describe its contents accurately. Examples: the 1956 State Department message to Moscow saying the United States was “compelled to believe” the Soviet government held crew members from the Privateer; the Soviet Air Force order found in 2001 in the Ministry of Defense Archives at Podolsk describing the capture and interrogation of a B-29 radio operator; the 1993 Senate Select Committee finding that there is “no proof that U.S. POWs survived, but neither is there proof that all of those who did not return had died.”
Confirming that a document exists and says a thing is not the same as confirming that the thing is true. A declassified intelligence report of an American prisoner is evidence that the report was made, was believed credible enough to file, and in some cases was assessed by analysts. It is not, by itself, proof of survival.
Reported but unverified. Accounts from witnesses, defectors, former officials and foreign nationals that have not been independently corroborated. We name the source where we can, describe how the account reached us, and note where an official body assessed its reliability. We do not upgrade a single account into a finding.
Reported and verified. Proof that an American was held. That could range from photographic, fingerprint or DNA evidence to official documents from the archives of a formerly communist country. It also remains possible that a living American POW could be located. Eighty South Korean prisoners of war held secretly by North Korea for decades escaped to the South between 1994 and 2010, and several are alive and free there today.
Unanswered questions. What remains open, and — specifically — what evidence would settle it. Most of our pages end here, because most of these questions are settleable: a prison file, a camp roster, a photograph with provenance, a living witness.
Corrections and updates. We correct factual errors promptly and mark what changed. If you believe a page here is inaccurate, incomplete or lacking necessary context, contact us with the supporting evidence and a way to reach you.
What we will not publish
- An identification of a missing serviceman that the evidence does not support. Several reports on this site describe an American prisoner whom no one has identified; we publish those as open requests, without attaching a name.
- Photographs or film presented as authenticated when their provenance has not been established.
- A claim that any individual was retained, survived, or is alive, unless the evidence cited on that page supports that specific claim.
Records and sources we rely on
U.S. government records. Declassified CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Army and Navy intelligence reporting; State Department cables; Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) case files and public statements; and the reports of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs. DPAA’s public resources, including its Vietnam War generic case files, are at dpaa.mil.
Congressional records. The 1993 report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, and subsequent congressional correspondence with the Pentagon obtained with the assistance of members of Congress and their staffs.
Foreign archives. Russian Ministry of Defense holdings at Podolsk; Chinese, North Korean and Vietnamese records that remain closed to U.S. researchers; and the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and comparable East European institutions.
Contemporaneous reporting. Wire service and newspaper coverage from the period, including Associated Press reporting from 1953 and Hong Kong press accounts of American prisoners at Shantou.
Firsthand testimony. Interviews with defectors, former prisoners, former communist officials, and family members — attributed by name wherever the source permits. We attempt to screen such reports for those corroborated by additional information, or from sources investigators found credible and/or who passed a polygraph examination.
Litigation to open the records
Much of the material that would resolve these cases is American, and is still classified. PIP participates in Freedom of Information Act litigation to force its release.
FOIA lawsuits and case documents
Sources that deny U.S. POWs were held
Serious people have spent years arguing that no American prisoner was left behind, and one of them held the government job that would know. We read them. Before we publish a claim, we check whether either has already answered it, and we set out what they say rather than talk around it. Where one of them is right, we drop the claim. Where the record shows the denial itself is wrong, we say so and show why.
H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America
A source that denies U.S. POWs were held.
Lawrence Hill, 1992; revised and expanded, Rutgers University Press, 1993. Franklin argues that belief in live American prisoners is a political and cultural myth, and traces how that belief took hold and who it served. It is the standard scholarly statement of the case against everything on this site, and it is on our books page.
Col. Joe Schlatter and the MIA Facts Site
A source that denies U.S. POWs were held.
miafacts.org. Schlatter is a retired Army colonel who was chief of the analysis branch and then chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Special Office for POW/MIA Affairs from 1986 to 1990, and deputy director of the Defense POW/MIA Office from 1993 to 1995. He ran the office that answered these questions for the U.S. government, and he carries more than 75 articles answering specific allegations.
His site lists as myths that “U.S. POWs remain in captivity today” and that “The U.S. government knew that all POWs were not released,” and answers them with three statements of fact: that “All U.S. POWs captured during the Vietnam War were released, either at Operation Homecoming (spring, 1973) or earlier”; that “No U.S POWs remained in captivity after the conclusion of Operation Homecoming”; and that “No U.S. POWs from Indochina were taken to the Soviet Union, China, or any other third country.”
Read those carefully. The myths he states carry no war and no date. The answers he gives are about Vietnam, Operation Homecoming and Indochina only. His site does not address Korea.
Why the blanket version of that statement is not true: the Ashley Five
A B-29 crew went down over North Korea in January 1953. North Korea confirmed by radio that the men had survived. In August 1953 — after the Armistice, after the prisoner exchanges — U.S. officials declared them alive in enemy hands. They were never returned and have never been accounted for.
That is the government’s own finding, not ours. It does not contradict what Schlatter writes about Vietnam and Operation Homecoming, and we do not claim it does. It does dispose of the unqualified proposition that no American was ever left in enemy hands — and it is the reason this project does not accept a Vietnam-scoped answer as an answer to the whole question.
A note on gaps
Where this site says a document exists but does not reproduce it, that is a gap we are working to close, not a rhetorical device. Where reporting is current only as of an earlier date — Pentagon leadership, agency names, the status of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission — the page says so.