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CHAPTER 1 – Yeltsin Speaks Out

WHEN BORIS YELTSIN visited America in the summer of 1992 he stamped a heavy Russian boot on America’s tenderest corn. First in a letter to a US Senate Committee, then in an interview on board his plane, he confirmed what the American people had long believed: that not all the American prisoners of war captured in Vietnam had been returned at the end of that war. Some of them, President Yeltsin said, had been taken into the Soviet Union and might still be alive in the republics of the former USSR even now.

The fate of these missing American prisoners still listed as ‘missing in action’ (or MIA) at the end of the Vietnam War had long chafed at America. Black MIA flags hang from public buildings on Memorial Day. Twenty-four-hour vigils huddle around the Wall, the black marble Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. Bamboo cages with pyjama-clad prisoners crouching inside them appear in veterans’ parades. ‘Bring ‘em back alive’ bumper stickers have sprouted on the fenders of ageing Chevvies and T-shirts bearing pictures of chained eagles are stretched round the beer-bellies of ponytailed, Harley-riding renegades who once saw action in the paddy fields of Southeast Asia.

While Hollywood has mythologised the MIAs in films like Rambo and other muscle-bound epics, the families, friends and former comrades of these missing men have organised themselves into a formidable pressure group. They run veterans’ newspapers, collect and collate information, petition congressmen and organise elaborate publicity stunts – anything to bring the fate of their missing loved ones to the public’s attention.

Several dedicated individuals have realised that the key to the fate of the missing American prisoners lies not in the re-education camps of Vietnam and Laos or the Soviet Gulag but in Washington. America spends countless billions of dollars on Intelligence every year. If American prisoners were being held in communist countries, the Intelligence services would know about it. Somewhere in the vast forests of Intelligence reports and memos the US government generates every year there must be a smoking gun.

Armed with the Freedom of Information Act, a small band of researchers set about proving their case. One of them, Bill Paul of the Wall Street Journal, was advised to set his sights a little wider by a Soviet general who told him that a large number of Allied prisoners of war held by the Germans until 1945 had also ended up in Soviet labour camps. Former cop Jim Sanders, who lived in Virginia near Washington’s National Archives, set about investigating this allegation full time.

Another veteran, John M.G. Brown, author of Rice Paddy Grunt, was asked by a prominent Washington insider to delve into the historical background of the MIA issue. The handling by the administration of the question of American POWs in enemy hands was not a matter of whim or of haphazard decisions taken by witless bureaucrats. Like anything else in the fields of politics, diplomacy or warfare, it was governed by precedent and policy. Brown began looking for the precedents and the roots of that policy in World War I and the Allied intervention in Russia. Another tenacious researcher, Tom Ashworth, a former marine helicopter pilot from Arkansas, also started down that path.

On that same trip to America, Boris Yeltsin also brought confirmation for Messrs Paul, Sanders, Brown and Ashworth of what their vast, self-funded research project had already told them. It was not just American prisoners from the war in Vietnam who had ended up in the Gulag. Men captured – in some cases kidnapped – during World War II, the war in Korea and the Cold War had also been taken into the Soviet Union and had disappeared in the Gulag. Some of those men might also still be alive in the republics of the former Soviet Union Yeltsin said.

Cynics suggested that Yeltsin had only spoken out to get money for his country: knowing American sensitivity on the subject of their missing prisoners, perhaps he hoped to wring aid out of them. But that is to misunderstand the politics of the MIA issue.

American MIA activists have long held that the Nixon administration, in its hurry to pull out of Vietnam, abandoned the missing men in communist hands. George Bush and most of the leading members of his government held key junior posts in the Nixon administration where they would have known that prisoners had been left behind. They had gone on to other key government posts where they would have seen Intelligence about these men’s continued survival in communist captivity. It could even be said that they had built a career on knowing the big secret. After his time (1974-6) as principal liaison officer with the People’s Republic of China – on Vietnam’s doorstep, so to speak – George Bush became head of the CIA (1976-7). And as Reagan’s vice president (1981-8) he was the White House official assigned to handle the MIA issue.

Bush’s response to Yeltsin’s revelations can be judged by the way his face fell when Yeltsin mentioned the missing prisoners again during a televised speech at a White House dinner. The Washington rumour machine went into action, putting it around that Yeltsin did not know what he was talking about, he was drunk. And when Yeltsin was safely back in Moscow, the American administration announced that he had ‘mis-spoken’. Who knows what that can possibly mean, but it must be as close as you can come to calling the head of a foreign power a liar without starting a war.

Yeltsin’s words had not been directed at the Americans. They were for home consumption. More than anything, Yeltsin was afraid of the tanks rolling in on him, as they had on Gorbachev. The American prisoners had been held captive by the military, by the communist old guard. This was one issue he could use to smear them. He could hold them at bay with this shocking allegation, even though it meant treading on the corns of the Western Allies with whom he was now trying to waltz.

Yeltsin’s mention of missing American prisoners from World War II, Korea and the Cold War rang few bells in America. The American public knew only of the missing men from Vietnam. However, the fate of missing American prisoners of war from these earlier wars was in fact already under investigation by the US Senate. In 1991 a number of photographs said to be of American airmen still held in Southeast Asia had come to light. Their families appeared on national television and demanded action. As media interest peaked, Senator John Kerry set up a Senate Select Committee, which held its preliminary meetings in October l991,(to investigate. Its remit included prisoners of war missing from World War II, Korea and the Cold War, as well as Vietnam. Shortly after, when reports of an American pilot being held in a camp in Kazakhstan appeared in the Soviet press, a joint US-Russian Commission was set up to look into the fate of any American citizen who might have ended up in the Gulag.

To begin with, Yeltsin’s words rang very few bells in Britain either. But the media were soon flabbergasted by the suggestion that British prisoners of war might have disappeared into the Gulag too. By contrast, for some time journalists and writers in France had been investigating the fate of French prisoners of war who had fallen into Soviet hands, though many of them had been from Alsace-Lorraine and had fought for the Nazis. The Italian government had also complained about the huge numbers of Italian prisoners of war taken by the Soviets and never handed back. The Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgers, Germans and Japanese had all protested about missing prisoners of war at one time or another. But the British, notably, kept quiet about it. After all, Britain and the Soviet Union had beer; allies during World War II. Who cared if the Soviets had held on to enemy prisoners of war – as reparation or for punishment? Perhaps a few prisoners from friendly nations who had fought on the Allied side had been taken too, mixed up with the others during the general confusion in 1945. But why should the Soviets deliberately take and hold British POWs? President Yeltsin had confirmed that they had taken Americans, though. And America had been an ally of the Soviets too.

Some bells should have rung in Britain. There had been warning signs. In 1990 the work of Sanders, Brown and Ashworth had come to the attention of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee which was examining US policy regarding POWs and MIAs. During their investigations the committee’s staff had discovered that British policy had closely mirrored American policy. The chief of the Senate Foreign Relations committee Republican staff had even been to the British Embassy in Washington with evidence that British prisoners captured during the Korean War had been held in camps in China, and not returned. This, he thought, would make the British government sit up, take notice and do something about the missing British prisoners. They did. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee found that the British government hampered any further investigation.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Republican staff produced its report on 23 May 1991. It alleged that 20,000 Americans, who were prisoners of the Germans in 1945 and were ‘liberated’ by the Red Army, disappeared into Soviet labour camps. It also detailed the numbers of French, Dutch and Belgians who had been taken. The report went on to claim that 20,000 British (which included the Commonwealth) men had been lost into Soviet hands. Sanders, Brown and Ashworth say this is an underestimation. They say that the British forces – which comprised British, Canadian, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, South African and ‘Colonial’ troops and had nearly 200,000 POWs held in German camps – lost over 30,000 to the Soviets.

The report must have come to the British Embassy’s attention. It certainly came to mine. In June 1991 I was in Washington when a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff gave me a copy. I read it on the plane back to England. The G7 conference of the world’s richest seven countries was being held in London later that week. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to London to ask for aid. If Britain was going to give the Soviets aid, it could at least ask about the men the US Senate said were missing. I called my MP Frank Dobson (Labour) – and ran photocopied extracts of the Senate report down to the House of Commons.

The Senate report also mentioned that Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Belgians had been taken. I called their embassies and faxed the appropriate extracts through to them. It did no good. The question of Allied prisoners missing in the Soviet Gulag did not arise at the summit.

Undaunted, I pressed for the British Embassy in Moscow to ask the Russian authorities about the missing British POWs. The allegation had not come from a journalist or an author but from the US Senate. A charge from such an august source demanded an answer. The answer was no. The fate of British prisoners of war was not a matter for the Foreign Office, the British government said. It was the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence.

I was referred to the Army Historical Branch who were ‘actively looking into this matter’. However, they told me they had no evidence that British prisoners of war had been taken into the Soviet Union. The report of a US Senate committee whose staff had taken two years to investigate this matter did not count for anything.

Despite a flurry of letters from me and Frank Dobson, it took over a year for the Foreign Office to recognise its responsibility. And that was only after Boris Yeltsin had spoken out and journalists had descended on the site of a camp at Tambov, twenty-five miles southeast of Moscow, searching for missing Americans. Examining the records there, they discovered that the camp commandant had been ordered to prepare the camp for ‘foreign prisoners’ in May 1945. Some of those prisoners had been British.

This should have come as no surprise. The 1991 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report had mentioned French, Dutch, Belgians, Americans and British being held at Tambov after the end of the war. In France, several books had been published about Tambov and the foreign POWs who had been held there.

According to the Moscow News of 10–17 February 1991 other French prisoners who had been at Tambov and had ‘lost their French citizenship’ were still alive in the then Soviet Union forty-five years after being taken there. If Frenchmen had survived, and if as Yeltsin said some Americans had survived, surely some British men could have survived too. People do survive a long time in captivity, even in the appalling conditions experienced in the Gulag. It is not uncommon for people to complete a twenty-five-year sentence.

Very long sentences are often commuted, but politically sensitive prisoners are rarely allowed to go free. They are forced to settle near the camp or in some other closed area where they have to report to the militia every day.

In 1945 a German mapmaker from the Leipzig Cartographic Institute was captured by the Red Army. His job at the Institute had been to change the names on maps from Russian into German as the German army advanced in 1941. For this he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ forced labour in a lead mine near the Arctic Circle in the Bering Straits area. Occasionally, when he was allowed above ground, he could see the lights of Alaska.

The mapmaker knew that, even after twenty-five years, he would not be released. If he stayed, he would die there. In 1951 he escaped, made his way on foot and by train across Siberia and eventually escaped through Iran. On the journey he was helped by a man called Leopold Messmer. When he asked why, Messmer explained that they were fellow countrymen. He was an Austrian who had been captured by the Czarist army in 1914. When the Russian Revolution came, he had been moved from a POW camp into a labour camp. In the mid-1920s he was released – but only after he had been forced to take out Soviet citizenship. There was even a cruel little ceremony. He was handed his repatriation papers, allowing him to go back to Vienna. Then they were taken away again. As a Soviet citizen he could not leave the country. Messmer was a baker by trade, so he opened a bakery in a small town called Abakan in Siberia. He married, raised a family and got on with his life. It is doubtful whether he ever saw Austria again.1

British newspapers briefly took up the story of Tambov and the missing British POWs. They questioned the Ministry of Defence who said that the Senate’s suggestion of 20,000 British having disappeared in Soviet hands was ludicrous. There were only 2,780 men unaccounted for from the whole of World War II.2

Plainly, it is the figure of 2,780 that is ludicrous. World War II involved bombing on a massive scale, shelling, mortars, sea battles and submarine warfare. Huge numbers of ships were sunk and planes downed. Hundreds – if not thousands – of times that number were simply incinerated, vaporised or lost for ever in Davy Jones’s locker.

However none of these men is literally ‘unaccounted for’. Every missing serviceman from World War II and Korea has been accounted for, otherwise they would still be on the payroll. The salaries of servicemen who are unaccounted for still have to be paid. They are still taking the King’s shilling.

I called the Ministry of Defence myself and asked what this figure of 2,780 could possibly mean? They were adamant that this was the number of missing from World War II. So I asked about the accounting procedure. They asked if they could call me back.

The accounting procedure went like this, I was eventually told. When a man goes missing on the battlefield, his name is entered in a column headed ‘missing’. But it does not stay there. In a week or two an investigation is held. This decides whether the man has been killed and the body not recovered, or whether he has been taken prisoner. If he is presumed dead, he is moved on to the ‘KIA’- the killed in action – list his salary is stopped, any widow’s pension due is paid, and all the necessary paperwork is done. If he is not deemed to be dead, he is moved on to the POW list and his salary is cut to two-thirds – under the Geneva Convention the detaining power is supposed to pay the other third directly in the prison camp.

Families could delay any declaration of death, if they had good reason to believe that the man was not dead. But they could not delay a finding of death for ever. A finding of death was never made, I was assured by the Ministry of Defence, against the wishes of the family. They all, apparently, came round pretty quickly.

When I pressed the matter, I was told that the figure of 2,780 was the official figure of British missing as of February 1946. But how could anyone – even a man who disappeared on the last day of World War II – still be listed as missing eight months after the end of hostilities? By then, he would surely have to be listed either as dead, or as a prisoner, a few weeks after the fighting had ended.

The MoD seemed at a loss to explain this. They simply repeated that 2,780 was the official figure as of February 1946. I, however, ventured an explanation of this anomaly. Previously I had written a book about the missing prisoners from the Vietnam War and I knew how the Americans had handled similar casualty figures. It was simple. At the end of a war, those who had gone missing on the battlefield and subsequently been listed POW, but who had subsequently not been returned in the prisoner- of-war exchanges, were moved back on to the missing list. Then the procedure simply started all over again. A week or two later, a new investigation would have been made into their fate. Were they dead or were they prisoners? Plainly, if they had not been returned home in the prisoner-of-war exchanges, they were not prisoners. The only other alternative was to move them on into the KIA column.

So why were there 2,780 men still unaccounted for in February 1946? Because it takes time to do that much paperwork. People cannot just be written off without due bureaucratic process. Every file must be gone through, each dealt with individually. Relatives would have to be contacted, regiments informed, kit disposed of, pensions paid and orders issued to the pay corps, the adjutant general, the provost marshal. Then the files would have to be sent for archiving. It all takes time – months – especially if you have tens of thousands of files to go through.

Even taking all this into account the figure of 2,780 was contradicted by that given by The Statistical Digest of the War, published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1953. This publication said that 6,244 men were still listed missing as of 28 February 1946. And that figure includes only United Kingdom citizens. It leaves out Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Rhodesians, African Colonials, West Indians, Indians, Gurkhas and other people who had been fighting in British uniform in World War II.

Nevertheless, I was assured, the Army Historical Branch were on the job and the British Embassy had asked the Russian authorities in Moscow for further explanation. Plainly, the government had things in hand. Besides, the story was so fantastical. How could tens of thousands of British prisoners of war have gone missing in 1945 without anyone noticing? And how could it be that the story had never surfaced before? Wasn’t the idea of missing British prisoners of war from World War II and Korea as crazy as the crazy stories of America’s Rambo fringe? Then, suddenly, the London Evening Standard unearthed records in the Soviet archives in Moscow that told of 1,400 British POWs taken into the Gulag. On 7 August 1992 it printed a list of 132 names of Britons who had disappeared in this way. The prisoners, it said, had been taken for their technical expertise. They had specialist Western knowledge badly needed in the Soviet Union as World War II ended and the Cold War got into full swing.

The allegations were now coming from both sides – from the US Senate and the Moscow archives. That gave the story a new veracity. The number of missing British was still debatable. No ageing Siberian peasant had as yet stumbled forward and claimed to be a former British soldier, captured by the Germans, held in a POW camp, ‘liberated’ by the Red Army and having spent the rest of his life in the Soviet labour system. Yet the story was taking on more and more substance. So why had it never come up before?

But it had. One man, Frank Kelly, a Lewisham lad captured by the Germans at Arnhem and ‘liberated’ from Stalag 4B, had been returned in 1953 after eight years in a Soviet prison. He was immediately arrested by the British authorities for being absent without leave and his story was quickly dropped.

The story of missing British prisoners of war from World War II and Korea has cropped up repeatedly in the media, in a very disconnected way, over the last forty-seven years, but no one had ever attempted to piece the whole story together, until now.

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