04:39 PM ET 09/17/96

U.S. may have left more than 900 POWs in Korea

(Updates with hearing testimony) By Jim Adams

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - More than 900 U.S. prisoners of war may have been left behind in North Korea when the Korean War ended in 1953, according to a newly declassified memo and testimony at a House hearing Tuesday. And more than 100 of them may have been subjected to deadly medical experiments and then executed, witnesses told a House National Security subcommittee. Al Santoli, a congressional aide who helped gather documents for the hearing, said one purpose was to show that the large numbers of prisoners left behind add credence to reports that North Korea still holds Americans prisoner. ``In discussions with North Korea, that should be a top priority,'' Santoli said. He said there had been several reports, one by a defector from the North Korean secret police, that Americans had been seen not in North Korean prisons but in guarded villages and encampments. North Korea has said it is not holding any Americans prisoner. A small number of U.S. soldiers who defected during the Korean War still live in North Korea in addition to those reported seen in villages and encampments, Santoli said. The subcommittee released a Defense Department memorandum saying then Army Secretary Robert Stevens told President Dwight Eisenhower months after the Korean War armistice of July 27, 1953, that more than 910 American prisoners might have been left behind. ``Stevens said that a couple of weeks before Big Switch (an exchange of prisoners) we had the names of 610 Army people that have just disappeared from the camps. The Air Force has over 300,'' it said. Santoli said the memorandum, dated Dec. 22, 1953, was among papers the subcommittee obtained from the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, and had declassified. Retired Army Col. Phillip Corso, who was a National Security Council aide to Eisenhower, testified that 500 sick and wounded American prisoners were still being held within 10 miles of the site where the 1953 armistice was signed. Corso also said he confirmed later that two trains and possibly three, each carrying 450 American prisoners, were sent to the Soviet Union. `Therefore, the final figure was 'confirmed 900, and 1,200 possibly,''' he testified. ``These POWs were to be exploited for intelligence purposes and subsequently eliminated.'' A Czech defector, Jan Sejna, testified that about 100 American prisoners were shipped from North Korea through Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union after the Korean War for medical experiments. He said Soviet doctors used American POWs during the Korean and Vietnam wars to test chemical and biological war agents and the effects of atomic radiation. He said the Americans were also used to test physiological and psychological endurance and various mind control drugs. Moscow ordered Czechoslavakia to build a hospital in North Korea for the experiments there, Sejna said. ``Czechoslovakia also built a crematorium in North Korea to dispose of the bodies and parts after the experiments were concluded,'' he said. The subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Robert Dornan, a California Republican, accused the U.S. government of ``writing off captured American fighting men after no-win stalemate wars'' throughout the Cold War period. Dornan said Presidents Eisenhower and John Kennedy faced a ``classic dilemma'' of risking a new war if they had issued an ultimatum to North Korea to return the prisoners but he said there was no excuse for not demanding more recently that the missing Americans be accounted for.

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