”I spent two minutes on the floor and repeated over and over the phrase…the phrase, ‘I love you, Rose.’ I thought this would keep my mind off what was going to happen. At the end of two minutes they asked me again if I was ready to sign. I said I would not sign. Then he told the officer at my side to move, apparently so that when I was shot, and the bullet passed through my head, it would not hit the officer standing in front of me.

“Then the colonel said: ‘Kill the son of a bitch!’ So the gun was clicked. Then the interpreter said, ‘Well, it was a misfire. You will have another two minutes. You were lucky the last time.’ I had fully expected to be shot, but when the slide was drawn back, presumably to insert another bullet, and I did not hear any bullet hit the floor, I knew it was a game they were playing with me, and they weren’t going to kill me.

“The two minutes went by and I refused to confess. Then the colonel said I wasn’t worth a bullet, and I would be beaten to death. They turned-to and beat me and kicked me, and they worked me over real good. They beat me to the floor, and I lost consciousness after a few minutes…

“Then I was carried out to my room and thrown on the bed…. I asked permission to go to the bathroom, and they marched me to the head. All I could urinate was blood.”

Late that night, the Communists came back and took Commander Lloyd Bucher, skipper of the Pueblo, to another part of the building: “A South Korean was there with a strap around his chest, strapped to the wall. They explained to me that he was a South Korean spy. He was alive, but had been through a terrible ordeal. He had a compound fracture of the upper right arm. The bone was sticking out. He was stripped to the waist. He had completely bitten through his lower lip, and his lower lip was hanging down from the side of his mouth. His right eye had been put out. His head was hanging down. There was a lot of…black matter which had run out of his eye and down his right cheek…”

Americans Held By The Reds

Now that we’re in the mood to understand what it means to be a prisoner of the Communists, it is important to realize that the current furore about the Americans held by the Vietcong is the beginning of a ghastly reenactment of what has happened time and time before. General Mark W. Clark, U.N. commander during the Korean War, writes (From The Danube To The Yalu, Harper & Brothers, New York. 1954) that “we had solid evidence after all the returns were in from Big Switch that the Communists still held 3,404 men prisoner, including 944 Americans.” Syngman Rhee, late President of South Korea, wrote at the time that “thousands of Americans and ROK soldiers are still held by the Communists.”

And John H. Noble, an American who at the time was a slave in a Russian concentration camp, writes (New York Times, April 5, 1955): “From other prisoners I heard some startling news. Laborers coming to Vorkuta from camps in Taishet, and Irkutsk and Omsk in Siberia, and Magadan in the Far East told me there were American G.l.s and officers and South Korean soldiers working as slaves in their camps. They had been taken prisoners by the Reds during the Korean War and shipped to the Soviet Union.”

Indeed, Yuri Rastvorov, a Soviet intelligence officer who defected in Tokyo, described those shipments to American agents. At last word, the American victims not proved dead number 389-and there may be more.

Captain Eugene Guild, U.S.A. (ret.) is the founder of Fighting Homefolks of Fighting Men, at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which for years has done what it can to help free captive American servicemen. He writes: “Evidence? There always has been plenty of evidence. Repatriated POWs saw hundreds of Americans traveling north toward Soviet Manchuria in open trucks, instead of south, toward the exchange site. An English-speaking Red Korean testified that he saw and listened to a trainload of Americans leaving the town of Man Choulee for Manchuria.

“.. At least 389 other servicemen have been seen alive from days to months after capture by the North Koreans and Chinese. Freed POWs told of speaking with them in prison camps. Red Chinese and North Korean broadcasts repeatedly mentioned them by name and serial number; letters were written by prisoners’ attesting they were in Red Chinese camps. Relatives even received Communist magazines containing articles with pictures and text about their boy’s capture!”

For instance, on September 9, 1950, the North Korean Communists shot down the B-29 piloted by Major Samuel P. Logan of Nashville. Shortly thereafter, Logan’s name was found written on the wall of a jail. Seeking more details, his mother visited Eastfoto, the Soviet photograph agency in New York, where she saw two pictures of her son displayed on the wall, as samples of the photographs available. One showed Logan beside his wrecked plane. The caption the other called him a “prisoner of People’s Republic of Korea.” Mrs. Logan bought copies and sent them to Washington, and our delegate showed them to his Communist counterpart at Panmunjom, and asked where Logan was.

“That case is closed,” was the answer.

At seven a.m. on October 27, 1952 the liaison plane piloted by Captain Harry D. Moreland, Jr. was shot down. Returning prisoners verified he had been captured. On November 15, 1952, he was seen in a Red Chinese military hospital, where he lost a leg.

On November 14,1952, at 12: 15 a.m., just north of Simmak, North Korea, B-26 #44-34699A was shot down. The crew parachuted safely, was captured, and like all captured fliers taken not to regular P.O.W. stockades but kept incommunicado in mud huts. Lieutenant Andrew W. Schmidt. the pilot, later repatriated, said that on January 25. 1953, he was interrogated by an English-speaking Chinese major, who told him that his navigator, Second Lieutenant Edward S. Guthrie Jr.. was a prisoner as well. And things the Chinese knew about Guthrie showed it was true. Indeed, other repatriated P.O.W.s later gave Guthrie’s mother evidence that her son was in Kanggye, farther north in Red Korea.

On November 30, 1952, Corporal Ronald Van Wees, of the 179th Infantry, disappeared during an attack on an enemy entrenchment at Songnaedoing, Korea. His parents were notified that he was “missing and presumed dead.” But in 1953 photographs of American P.O.W.s marching into Communist stockades appeared in the American press. Ronald was in one.

Later, his mother heard from an underground agent – a White Russian who sabotaged Nazi installations during World War II, and now works with Russians who pose as Communists and have access to Siberian prisons. She gave him a description and a photograph of her son. On April 4, 1960, the agent wrote from Athens, in purple ink, in Russian, on the margin of a Russian newspaper: “They have seen your friend R. in September, 1959. He is alive, healthy and works as a tractor driver together with his countrymen in the District of Krasnoyarskaya Oblast (Northwest) near Turinskaya Kultbaza. He also was in Kalkan, Muya, Kuskomda, Chara – of the District Vitmo-Olekminskaya Oblast.”

Captain Guild went to Athens to gauge the agent’s veracity, was satisfied – and was told that other agents had seen “hundreds of young Americans working in Siberian slave camps.”

Of course, we can be absolutely sure that the Russian Communists have for years been holding our men, because Henry Cabot Lodge and the federal government say so. On July 29, 1953, Russian MlGs shot down a B-50 over international waters, and the crew parachuted into the sea. On October 11, 1954, then U.N. delegate Lodge wrote to the President of the Security Council about it, saying that the United States Government “must conclude that these persons were either picked up alive by surface vessels of the Soviet Government in the area in which they hit the water, or that in due course, dead or alive, they were carried by the prevailing currents to Soviet-held territory and into the Soviet Government’s custody…”

Indeed, said Lodge: “Those that were alive when they came into the custody of the Soviet Government, the United States Government finds and charges suffered in addition injuries and anguish caused by their long detention by the Soviet Government, by the failure of the Soviet Government to inform the United States Government with respect to their whereabouts and their condition or to permit them to communicate with United States Government authorities.”

And on July 16, 1956, the American Embassy in Moscow delivered a note from the State Department to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, in which we read that reports of American servicemen being held in Russia “have now become so persistent and detailed and so credible …. “

Our government, we are told, “is informed and is compelled to believe that the Soviet Government has had and continues to have under detention the following:

“1. One or more members of the crew of a United States Navy Privateer-type aircraft which came down in the Baltic Sea area on April 8, 1950. The United States Government has since that time received reports that various members of the crew of this United States aircraft were, and are, detained in Soviet detention places in the Far Eastern area of the Soviet Union. In particular, it is informed. and believes, that in 1950 and in October, 1953, at least one American military aviation person, believed to be a member of the crew of this United States Navy Privateer, was held at Camp No. 20 allegedly near Taishet, and Collective Farm No. 25, approximately 54 kilometers from Taishet, said to be under sentence for alleged espionage. This American national was described as having suffered burns on the face and legs in the crash of his aircraft and using crutches or a cane.

“Reports have been received from former prisoners of the Soviet Government at Vorkuta that in September, 1950, as many as eight American nationals . . . had been seen in the area of Vorkuta and specifically, that one person who was interned at Vorkuta in September, 1950, stated that he was serving a twenty-five year espionage sentence and had been a member of a downed United States aircraft.”

Could this be Major Sam Logan, shot down on September 9,1950?

“2. One or more members of the crew of a United States Air Force B-29 which came down on June 13, 1952 either over the Sea of Japan or near the Kamchatka area of the Soviet Union. An officer believed by the United States Government to have been a member of this crew, was observed in October 1953 in a Soviet hospital north of Magadan …. “

Indeed, says Lodge, “it may well be that the Soviet Government has in its custody members of the crews of other United States aircraft, particularly crew members of aircraft engaged on behalf of the United Nations Command side of the military action in Korea since 1950.”

And Benjamin Fleck, head of the Korean desk at the State Department, grudgingly admitted recently to the Reverend Paul D. Lindstrom, founder of the Remember The Pueblo Committee, that North Korea still holds 389 of our men.

So observe first that the people who run our government know and admit that many Americans are in Communist hands – and, second, that it is the “mild, mellowing” Russian Communists who are shooting down American planes and holding our men.

Indeed, the Reverend Lindstrom, whose authoritative government sources have yet to be wrong, reports that the EC-121 we lost in April, 1969 – which, by the way, was a flying Pueblo, packed with the latest electronic equipment – was shot down by fighters which took off from Vladivostok, in Russia, and that the Communists captured seven survivors.

Over the years, the Russian Communists have shot down about 35 of our planes, containing almost 150 men.

As for the Communists in China, they have been holding civilians John Downey and Richard Fecteau since 1952. They were shot down while flying from Korea to Japan. They have held businessman Hugh Redmond Jr. since his arrest in Shanghai in 1951. They have held Bishop James Walsh, a Maryknoll Brother, almost as long. In 1965, Air Force Major Philip Smith strayed over China while on Vietnam duty, was downed and captured. The same thing happened to Navy Lieutenant Robert Flynn in 1967.

On February 14, 1968, Navy Lieutenant Joseph P. Dunn, flying an unarmed, propeller-driven A-l Skyraider in a group of two, strayed to five miles off Communist China’s Hainan Island and was shot down. Communist China claims a twelve-mile limit. The other pilot saw his parachute open and that the water was alive with Communist vessels. And others heard Dunn’s manually operated beeper, a device designed to help rescuers locate downed pilots, indicating that Dunn was alive in the sea. Joe Dunn vanished and presumably is a prisoner of Communist China.

Eleven American flyers have been held by Communist Armenians since 1958. Forty-six Americans are imprisoned in Communist Romania. More than a thousand American civilians and their dependents are being held in Communist Cuba. Almost a thousand American servicemen are missing and possibly prisoners in Vietnam. More than four hundred others are definitely known to be prisoners. Late last year, Lindstrom’s sources delivered a list of ninety-seven Americans held in North Korea and North Vietnam. After shaking free of a government tail, the Reverend Lindstrom found the list, as advised, in a bag on a pew in a Montreal church. On it was the name of pilot James A. Van Fleet Jr., shot down eighteen years ago, and the son of the then commander of U.N. ground forces in Korea.

The Way It Is

It was this way, writes Don Crawford (Pueblo Intrigue, Tyndale House, Wheaton, Illinois, 1969) for another member of the Pueblo crew:

“The pain started in the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger of Ginther’s hands where the weight of the chair rested; it spread into his knuckles, swollen from his tense grasp; then traveled through his wrists, seared the muscles of his arms, inched across his shoulder blades, and cascaded down his spine into a whirlpool of agony in the small of his back. His knees ground into the rough floor and his toes numbed from his weight resting on them as he tried to keep the chair in position. At last, as he – and the waiting Koreans – knew he must, he relaxed his grip and the chair began its slow descent.

“Ginther heard the gloat from the interrogator. The guard was ready. His heavy boot tore into Ginther’s right arm. With a grunt Ginther lifted the chair, but now it was harder to hold because of the added pain in his arm. He had no idea how often he repeated the scene. Eventually the muscles would burst with pain, he would lose control of them, and the chair would drop. Automatically the boot would jab, sometimes into the arm, sometimes the ribs, sometimes the side of the head. More slowly and with greater effort each time, Ginther would lift the chair On one attempt, when it had seemed impossible to lift again, Ginther muttered, ‘God! Please help me.’

“With an oath, the interrogator grabbed the belt from the table and whipped it across Ginther’s face. As the buckle cracked against the sailor’s temple, he heard a hollow pop as if from inside his skull. For a second everything was darkness, followed immediately by a fireworks’ burst of brightness …. Then he could hear the voices, and the sound reverberated inside his head. One of the officers was yelling in English, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Another slapped him across the face with a ruler. The interrogator used the belt again. The guard was kicking, but it no longer mattered.”

And this of course is standard operating procedure for the Communists. A liberated veteran described the murder, by Korean Communists, of eight hundred helpless wounded in 1950 as follows (New York Times, April 30, 1953): ”Then they bayoneted them. The wounded were screaming. They couldn’t do anything.”

The atrocity victims number almost thirty thousand, we read. Roger M. Kyes, Deputy Secretary of Defense at the time, wrote the State Department (New York Times, November 29, 1953): “The prisoners were shot down in cold blood, were burned alive in prison buildings, were beaten to death – all in total disregard of the rules and customs of war or of an elementary sense of common decency.” In a Defense Department report, Sergeant Glenn I. Oliver tells what happened at Prison Camp Five: “Men in poor condition were placed outdoors with little or no clothing and eaten by flies and worms. I saw at least fifteen men given injectionsof an unknown type of fluid and they would die within five minutes.”

General Clark writes: “There was evidence that the Communists used POWs as human guinea pigs for medical experiments. One returned doctor said he was forced to use inadequate quantities of drugs or take measures of which he disapproved. Some prisoners said chicken livers and other parts of animals were implanted beneath the skin of sick prisoners as experiments in healing techniques.”

Indeed, says then Major John J. Dunn, a P.O W. for more than three years in twelve different camps during the Korean War (Tom Tiede. N.E.A., January 27, 1969): “They worked on me from start to finish. They were very cruel. I remember one guy in a camp, he was a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald, and he said the Korean camps were worse than anything the Nazis had.

“The Koreans knew a lot of little tricks. One was to get two men side by side and then smash their heads together. One guard did it while the others urged him on by yelling, ‘Harder, harder.'”

Today in Vietnam in one form of torture (U.S. News & World Report, July 15, 1968), “a man’s ankles are bound and his legs pulled up behind him. The other end of the rope is looped around his neck. A man who struggles or tries to straighten his cramped legs runs the risk of strangling himself.”

Lieutenant Dieter Dengler, who later escaped, was forced to watch (U.P.I., July 25, 1966) as the Vietcong beheaded another Navy pilot. On the next day. the Cong executed six wounded Marines. During his captivity. Dengler was (U.P.I., September 13, 1966) tied upside down to a tree with ants placed on his face; was dragged behind water buffaloes; and was beaten. In the mornings. the guards shot at the prisoners as they ran to a latrine.

And Navy Lieutenant Robert F. Frishman, who spent almost two years as a prisoner in Vietnam, reported recently (The Review Of The News, September 10, 1969) that the Vietcong use solitary confinement, forced statements, and fingernail removal. They keep men in cages for years, put them in straps, don’t allow them to sleep or eat, hang them from ceilings and drag them along the ground with broken limbs. For instance, he says, they yanked out Lieutenant Commander Richard A. Stratton’s fingernails. They strung him up by the wrists with straps. Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III, son of our Pacific Command Admiral, has been kept in solitary confinement for more than a year with many broken bones.

The suffering of these men’s families is different, but in its own way almost as bad. Mrs. Rita Van Wees, Ronald’s mother, has gone almost completely blind “from grief and sorrow.” Over the years, she has visited innumerable government offices and written letter after letter. She still does. Her son was nineteen when he enlisted, and was sent to Germany, where he was safe. She begged him not to, but he volunteered for Korea (where he won a Silver Star), saying that if he was going to be a soldier, he wanted to fight. Today, after all these years, he is only thirty-six.

All this is frightfully corny, of course – inexcusably unsophisticated, maudlin, emotional, and subjective. I understand that – but I am sure Secretary of State Rogers would like to know.

Then there is Mrs. C.L. Hanson, whose husband, a helicopter pilot was shot down over South Vietnam three years ago, and is listed as Missing in Action. In an open letter of February 24, 1969, Mrs. Hanson writes as follows: “No additional information has been obtained in all this time. Words cannot describe the difficulty in trying to meet each day, week after week, month after month with no knowledge whatsoever as to whether he is being treated humanely, is sick or well – or even if he is alive or dead.

“For each of us in this situation it is as if you are suddenly thrust into a state of limbo, not knowing how long will be the wait or what its outcome will be. You think if only you could receive some word, some small sign to indicate his well-being – and your prayers continue.”

I asked Joe Dunn’s wife, Maureen, what it’s like. “It’s living death,” she replied. Indeed, the imagination of a mere clam would be sufficient to understand the anguish of these women. Are they wives? Or have they unknowingly been widows for years? Would it be wrong if they remarry? Would they be disloyal if they date other men, as a substitute for the companionship of the husbands for whom they yearn? Maybe Secretary of State Rogers could issue a ruling.

All of us have seen those motion pictures – usually on the late show and thirty or thirty-five years old – in which a scientist or an explorer or a salesman selling rotisseries to the cannibals, disappears; seven years pass, his wife remarries, and then the first husband reappears. They are always comedies. Some, as you will recall, are remarkably amusing. Yet, when I tried to ask Mrs. Dunn about the matter, it wasn’t funny. I was embarrassed. I could imagine no way to do it that wasn’t clumsy.

Mrs. Dunn put me at ease. “I can’t marry again,” she said brightly, explaining that even if she wanted to the military will not declare her husband dead, because they did so in similar cases during World War II and were embarrassed when some husbands returned to find their wives remarried, and, therefore, that the courts would not grant her a divorce.

That solves the problem, doesn’t it?

Knife In The Back

You probably already know it, but in case you don’t, the story of Teddy Roosevelt is worth repeating. T.R had his faults, of course – who doesn’t? – but he did do the job he was hired for: protecting the people of the United States. It seems a naturalized American of Greek extraction, a chap named lon Perdicaris was kidnapped by a North African bandit named Raisuli. Teddy Roosevelt did not apologize. He did not beg to negotiate. He did not offer “most favored nation” status and a loan. He sent a gunboat – and a telegram, which read: “Perdicaris alive, or Raisuli dead.”

They say Raisuli got Perdicaris aboard that gunboat quicker than a bureaucrat jumps at a promotion. Teddy Roosevelt used the full force of the United States Government to rescue a single, lone naturalized American.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who changed all that. His name may be vaguely familiar. probably because, for instance, the author of Eisenhower’s Crusade In Europe was Soviet agent Joseph Fels Barnes. Eisenhower was also an expert on repatriation. As commanding general after World War II, he conducted what our soldiers called, Operation Keelhaul, in which millions of Poles and Hungarians and others – including women, children, and men who had served in our army in our uniform – were forcibly shipped in boxcars to Stalin, prepaid.

Speaking of Korea, Eisenhower said that “some prisoners are still left there.” But, of course, Mr. Eisenhower did nothing. Mrs. Van Wees represented Fighting Homefolks of Fighting Men, after its attorney suddenly dropped the case, when it tried to sue then President Eisenhower for “illegally abandoning to the Red enemy at least 400 servicemen whom they still hold.” Naturally the suit was unsuccessful.

And the conspirators who manipulate the United States Government have rigidly followed the Eisenhower tradition. On May 27, 1957, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen S. Jackson told a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. which was investigating the prisoner problem: “. . . While the possibility exists that there may still be some personnel held, alive and against their will, we do not have any further positive information or intelligence from any source that such is the case …. “

Yet, as we have seen, the evidence has always been abundant. The people who run the government just ignore it. For instance, Mrs. Van Wees sent the State and Defense Departments her proof. She got the usual form letter in return.

But observe that, in 1957, Defense is still admitting a “possibility.”

In a letter dated January 6, 1965, Robert E. Lee, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations, spoke of the 944 Americans “who we had reason to believe had at one time been alive in the hands of the Communist forces….” Observe the oblique admission that the Communists kept our men.

But, Assistant Secretary Lee said: “Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of State has ever received any reliable information or intelligence to indicate that any of the men listed as unaccounted for may yet be alive and held prisoner by the Soviet Communists, the Chinese Communists, or the North Korean Communists . . . “

Which, of course, is simply a lie.

By September 19, 1969, in another letter, Louis J. Link, of the State Department’s Office of Public Services, wrote as follows: ” . . In the absence of any evidence that any of the 389 men might be alive, the Department of Defense made a finding of presumptive death for each of them. This action was necessary in order to settle estates and to pay insurance and other benefits to survivors.”

On October 23,1969, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations H.C. Torbert Jr. wrote to Senator John O. Pastore: ” . . . To the knowledge of the Department of State, the only American citizens presently imprisoned in the Soviet Union are three young men who were convicted recently of narcotics smuggling. In the absence of any convincing evidence to the contrary, the men downed in the 1950 and 1952 incidents have been presumed to be dead.”

Why? Isn’t this the wrong way round? Shouldn’t we assume they are alive – still in Communist hands – “in the absence of any convincing evidence to the contrary”? Why put the burden of proof on the victims? Why risk abandoning them? Why make it easy for the Communists?

Two weeks before the 1960 Presidential election, Captain Guild wrote John F. Kennedy about the situation. Kennedy answered immediately as follows: “Of course, I shall do everything possible to obtain the release of these victims of the cold war struggle. It is disgraceful that more has not been done to make free these unjustly detained individuals.” On November 4, 1960, Mr. Kennedy wrote essentially the same thing to Mrs. Van Wees.

On February 17, 1961, Guild wrote Kennedy again, asking what he intended to do.

President Kennedy never answered.

The government apparently also falsifies the figures. Captain Guild writes ” . . . The Defense Department’s Final Report of Korean Casualties listed 4735 men missing and presumed dead. Then casualty officers said 2944 bodies resumed by the Reds in the Operation Glory exchange had reduced the number of missing men. This story seems plausible. But it isn’t true. The 2944 bodies were not those of missing Gls. These remains were Gls already buried by Americans in North Korea and dug up by the Communists after recapturing the territory.”

The Reverend Lindstrom mentions parents who received a sealed coffin from the government. The father paid off the funeral director and broke the seal, which apparently is some sort of violation, and found inside nothing but a small bag containing a few bones. These few bones were supposed to be his son.

Captain Guild describes the treatment of other parents as follows: ” . . . If the mother was docile, she was treated with cordiality and sympathy at government agencies. If a mother protested, she was met with brusqueness, misinformation and intimidation. The standard Pentagon operating procedure has been to ask the protesting mother a loaded question. In December, 1953, a colonel told Mrs. John Schuab: ‘Really, now, madam, do you want to start another war and sacrifice more lives just to save your son? If you keep this up, the Communists might kill your son.’

“Other mothers were visited and questioned by the FBI. Military officers threatened them into silence. Women in New York and San Antonio were threatened with prosecution for writing and illustrating their protests on postcards. A Bronx politician told a mother to shut up about Korea or she would be arrested. A mother in Iowa was threatened with loss of her job as a schoolteacher. Two women with radio programs were fired when pressure was applied on the radio stations.”

Eighty-three mothers and wives went to the U.N. in New York. Their men, after all, had been U.N. personnel. They had an appointment with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. waited three hours in the lobby, but he wouldn’t see them. The U.N. police shoved them off the sidewalk and forced them to remove ribbons bearing the names of their men.

On May 23, 1969, Senator Margaret Chase Smith introduced S. Con. Res. 27, asking that “a more determined effort be made by our State Department to obtain the release and freedom from captivity of those American fighting men of the Korean conflict….” This resolution and all others like it have been stifled by the Department.

On May 27, 1957, Stephen S. Jackson, of the Defense Department, testified as follows: “…In support of the efforts of the Department of State, the Department of Defense and the military services have concentrated on an intensive effort to collect every scrap of information and intelligence regarding the unaccounted for 450. The military services, under a quarterly report requirement, have been producing individual dossiers on each case….”

And in a letter dated December 20, 1969, Hobart Luppi, Director of the State Department’s office of Special Consular Services, declared: ‘While this office is concerned with the general welfare of American citizens abroad, including those who are arrested, we do not maintain a central listing of all those under detention. Changes in the status of individual

cases worldwide would preclude an accurate account. Also, many citizens imprisoned abroad do not wish such to be known – even by their closest relatives….”

Mr. Luppi apparently does not know how to reach the Department of Defense. Would someone please explain it to him? Observe his expert use of the Conspiracy’s classic weapon: a stupidity so obvious it is insulting. Of course individual cases change; and when that happens you change the record. You don’t say there’s no point in keeping a record. And is it even remotely possible that many Americans imprisoned abroad want to keep it a secret?

On January 6,1965, Robert E. Lee, of the State Department, wrote as follows: “…During the Geneva Conference of 1954 the United States delegation requested the assistance of the International Committee of the Red Cross on behalf of the missing men. The Central Tracing Agency of the International Red Cross made inquiries …. “

In his letter of September 19, 1969, Louis J. Link of the State Department said the same thing. But, in 1963, Captain Guild asked Marcel Junod, Vice President of the International Red Cross, what his outfit was doing about the missing 389.

“Nothing,” Dr. Junod said, “nothing. Your government has never once even asked us to check on a prisoner. It’s part of our mission, to locate prisoners, but we haven’t received one request.”

Yes, Virginia, there is a Conspiracy.

And Mrs. Joe Dunn had the same problem. Five Commanders assured her that the Navy Department would ask the International Red Cross about her husband. Some time later, she asked them herself. She was told that hers was the first request – that no one in our government had asked about her husband. Instead, the State Department told her that the more she does about it, the more she’ll hurt her husband. “I’ve been given the polite run-around,” she says. Indeed, in an attempt to prove it is trying to free her husband, the Navy Department once wrote Mrs. Dunn that it had sent a telegram of inquiry to the Chinese Red Cross on February 12, 1968 — two days before he was shot down.

And, believe it or not, there is more. When Joe Dunn was shot down, the Commander of the Seventh Fleet ordered ships to the rescue. But, an order came from Washington forbidding the ships to go closer than twenty miles from Hainan – to be sure to honor the twelve-mile limit the Chinese claim.

Yet in his statement to the Security Council on October 11, 1954, U.N. delegate Henry Cabot Lodge declared: “…the United States Government takes this opportunity again to inform the Soviet Government that it does not recognize the claim of the Soviet Government to territorial waters in excess of three miles from its coast. In the opinion of the United States Government there is no obligation under international law to recognize claims to territorial waters in excess of three miles from the coast.”

So, according to stated American policy, Joe Dunn, shot down five miles at sea, was as much as two miles in international waters – and yet the people who run our government ordered that he be left to the non-existent mercies of the Communists.

Then there is the mother of Ed Guthrie, who in 1955 was told by the State Department that her son was among the then approximately 450 Americans for whose release we were allegedly negotiating with the Chinese Reds in Geneva, but that there is no hope of getting him back. A State Department officer told her: “The reason we’re not making any concrete move for the prisoners’ return is the United States has nothing they are willing to trade for these men.”

Harry Moreland’s family wrote him many letters. All were rejected, not by the Communists but by the United States. They were returned by the Defense Department with the statement that “there are no facilities for delivering letters over there.” Both the State and Defense Departments promised Moreland’s father “whatever information they learned.” In March of 1956 the Red Chinese admitted to State that they had held Moreland, and State asked where he was. “He escaped,” the Chinese said – quite a feat, because by then Moreland had lost both legs. The Moreland family was told nothing about this admission. State and Defense reiterated that they had “not received a word of information.” In January of 1957, ten months later, President Eisenhower said of Moreland: “Our last reliable report is sometime in November, 1952 . . . nothing further, official or unofficial, has been obtainable since then despite our ceaseless efforts.”

Later that year, Moreland Sr. testified at the House Hearings held to placate angry parents, and heard Stephen Jackson of the Defense Department describe the case of an unnamed P.O.W. closely resembling his son. Jackson was apparently trying to take the heat off the Department by showing how the Communists won’t cooperate.

Moreland asked whether Jackson was speaking of his son.

“The answer is yes,” Jackson said.

As we have seen, the Communists in Russia are holding hundreds of our men. Indeed, as we have seen, the fighters that shot down our EC-121 came from Vladivostok – in Russia – and the Communists in Russia took seven more prisoners.

Yet. on October 23. 1969, H.G. Torbert, of the State Department, wrote as follows to Senator Pastore: “…The Soviet Union, at our request, ordered two of its ships to assist in the search for survivors. The Soviets were instrumental in recovering some of the wreckage.”

I asked Specialist Herman Hofstatter, a member of the crew of the OH-23 helicopter the North Koreans captured last August when they shot it down, how the Communists had treated him in prison. He answered that Army Intelligence had ordered him to sign a promise not to discuss that subject or his meetings with Army Intelligence. I said the American people would surely want to know how he was treated and asked why Army Intelligence did this. Hofstatter said he wonders too. I said they apparently wanted to keep the information secret because it would make Americans mad. He’s in the clear, Army Intelligence. He did not answer. He just chuckled. I got the definite feeling he was with me.

And in the Pueblo case, the people who run the government told the families of the crew to shut up, and refused to release the names and addresses of the crew so the families could communicate. Benjamin Fleck of the State Department told the Reverend Paul Lindstrom that the only thing the government was doing was talking at Panmunjom and including the case in its yearly protest note to North Korea.

It is amazing to note that on June 21, 1968, Dean Rusk announced: “If anyone wants to organize a committee to remember the Pueblo, I am a charter member.” Lindstrom promptly made Rusk a charter member of the Remember the Pueblo Committee and personally presented Rusk a charter membership certificate in his office. Soon thereafter, the Reverend Lindstrom circulated a resolution excoriating “continued vacillation and inaction on the part of our leaders who are charged with protecting American lives, property and honor.” On September 20, 1968, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Richard I. Phillips wrote Lindstrom on orders from Rusk, and asked that Rusk’s name be removed from Committee stationery.

Lindstrom replied that he would do so only after Rusk publicly withdrew his name in a press conference and returned the charter membership certificate.

The Hard Truth

What should we conclude? What should we think about such people as Dean Rusk? The words now at my fingertips, Anglo-Saxon in origin, pungent in effect, would be deleted anyway by our elderly managing editor, so there’s no point in recording them.

The hard truth is that the conspirators who manipulate our government don’t want these men back. They would prefer that the entire crew of the EC-121 be at the bottom of the sea; that the crew of the Pueblo still be in Korea, that the enslaved 389 never be heard from again. Each man who returns, you see, is capable of exposing the Socialist inferno the conspirators who manipulate our government love.

And this makes their crime even worse than that of the Communists. The Communists, after all, admit they are our enemies. But the conspirators who manipulate our government actively publicize the lie that the Russian Communists – who hold hundreds of our men in slave camps – are mild and “mellowing.” Trade restrictions with Communist Europe recently were eased. Indeed, we recently relaxed restrictions on “trade” with Red China. And now we are beginning our retreat from Vietnam, leaving our men captive there as we did in Korea.

It is a court-martial offense – punishable even by death – for a commanding officer to abandon his men.

We should never leave Vietnam until our men are returned.

They and our forgotten soldiers need your help.