Shareware Supreme Volume 6 #1/swsii.zip/swsii/016/KALUGIN2.ZIP/KALUGIN2.TXT

Text File | 1992-01-22 | 8KB | 171 lines

The Spotlight January 20th. 1992,                                          MJL

                      NEW INFORMATION ON LIVE POWS SURFACES...

  The former head of the KGB
  and former NSA intelligence
  analysts claim they have
  personal knowledge of the
  existence of live American
  POWs sent to the Soviet
  Union. But the departments
  of Defense and State are
  not interested..........
  _________________________

 exclusive to the spotlight
 By Mike Blair
 __________________________

   The man selected by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to head and
 reform the Soviet KGB has said the government of Vietnam is "very likely
 lying" in denying it held American prisoner of war after the end of the
 Vietnam War. And his account is verified by former National Security Agency
 (NSA) analysts who have broken a long silence.

   Retired Soviet Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin has told several Establishment news
 sources that as chief of foreign counterespionage he had subordinates in
 Vietnam from 1975 to 1978 who were involved in interrogating U.S. POWs.

   Jerry Mooney and Terry Minarcin, two former military intelligence analysts
 who spent years working for the NSA, the largest U.S. intelligence organiza-
 tion, have told government officials some American prisoners of war were being
 held by the Vietnamese as late as the early 1980s.

 THREE HUNDRED TAKEN TO USSR:

   Minarcin, a retired Air Force technical sergeant, said he worked as a cryp-
 tologist and communications specialist for the NSA until July 1984. He has
 presented a sworn affidavit that he has personal knowledge of more than 400
 American prisoners being held in Vietnam in 1984 and knew of many others tran-
 sferred to the Soviet Union.

   In his affidavit, Minarcin asserted that between 200 and 300 American priso-
 ners of war were shipped to the Soviet Union in 1983.

   "I found 436 live American POWs," Minarcin explicitly stated in his Novem-
 ber, 1991 affidavit.

   A congressional source close to the select committee said Minarcin's claims
 are being taken seriously and are generally supported by affidavits submitted
 to the panel by one of his superiors at the NSA. His affidavit, the source
 said, gives precise numbers of POWs held in some prison camps.

   The information Minarcin obtained was from Vietnamese communications, parti-
 cularly from prison camp guards.

 TO THE FORE:

   Kalugin, who may shortly travel to Washington to testify about what he knows
 before the new Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs, has brought the issue
 of the missing American servicemen to the highest peak of public consciousness
 in the United States since the end of the war and has U.S. government offi-
 cials, not to mention the Vietnamese, scrambling for answers.

   The Spotlight has learned a representative for the National Alliance of
 Families, a Seattle-based POW-MIA activist group, is now in Moscow seeking
 answers about the missing servicemen from Kalugin and other KGB officials and
 is attempting to gain access to Soviet files on the subject.

   In discussions with Kalugin and others, the alliance representative has
 learned that despite U.S. government and select committee statements that
 they are delving into the KGB revelations, they have actually given the matter
 only "lukewarm" attention.

   When asked how much contact he has had with the Senate Select Committee,
 chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-MASS.), Kalugin replied, "Not very much."

   He was also asked if he had been contacted by the Department of Defense about
 the POW-MIA information and said he had not...

 JOINT COMMISSION:

   The alliance representative indicated he has discussed with both the Soviets
 and U.S.Embassy officials in Moscow the possibility of establishing a joint
 U.S. - Russian commission to look into the POW-MIA situation and has recieved
 Russian agreement. However, he said U.S. Embassy officials have not responded
 to the suggestion.

   Jim Collins, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, has admitted,
 however, it is entirely possible American POWs going back to World War II and
 /or their descendants may be living in the Soviet Union.

   This confirms recent reports one American POW of the Vietnam War was seen in
 the city of Sary Shagan, in the republic of Kazakhstan. Previously, two U.S.
 diplomats dispatched to go there to check out the story were turned back at
 Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, because Sary Shagan, the site of a large Soviet radar
 and communications experimental center, was a restricted area.

   However, John Ohta, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, said Secretary of
 State James A. Baker III has taken up the matter with President Nursultan
 Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, and that he has "received assurances of cooperation,
 and we are now waiting for permission for embassy officials to travel to Sary
 Shagan."

 VIET-SOVIET TREATY:

   Kalugin siad "the Vietnamese gave us a chance to talk to these people [the
 POWs] because one of them was a CIA agent, one was a ranking Navy officer and
 one a ranking Air Force officer."

   Kalugin explained that even though the Soviet Union and North Vietnam were
 allies during the war, the Vietnamese were wary of sharing intelligence with
 the Soviets. He said the American POWs were allowed to be questioned by the
 KGB only after the Vietnamese Interior Ministry and the KGB signed a formal
 treaty of cooperation in 1978, five years after all U.S. POWs were supposed
 to have been repatriated.

   Kalugin said the KGB did not seek precise military information from the POWs,
 which would have been undertaken, he said, by the GRU, the Soviet military
 secret police.

   "We were interested in more general information, counterintelligence, any-
 thing involving CIA operations, anything classified. But not weapons," which
 he said would have been up to the GRU.

 NEAR RESOLUTION?

   The apparent willingness of the KGB to cooperate in helping to resolve
 the POW-MIA issue may provide the information necessary to finally resolve the
 issue of America's missing servicemen dating back to World War II.

   As many as 20,000 U.S. servicemen, supposedly "liberated" by Soviet forces
 from German POW compounds at the end of World War II, are believed to have
 disappeared into the Soviet gulags.

   In addition, there have been several eyewitness reports of hundreds of
 American POWs from the Korean War, which ended in a cease-fire agreement in
 1953, being transferred from Red China, where they were being held, to the
 Soviet Union, both during and after the war. There are 8,177 Americans still
 unaccounted for from the Korean War, including 389 who are known to have been
 captured and in enemy captivity.

 NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY?

   However, the Defense Department is not aggresively pursuing the issue with
 the KGB, activists complain.

   In fact, Susan Strednansky, a spokesman for the department, said, "There is
 nothing new here."

   For years now, the position of the U.S. government has been that there is no
 conclusive evidence live Americans were left behind following the Vietnam War
 or other conflicts in which American servicemen were involved.

   "Here, they now have the `smoking gun' they [U.S.officials] have been talking
 about for so long," a spokesman for the National Alliance of Families said.
 "Here they have the Soviet KGB actually admitting there were POWs held as
 late as 1978, five full years after U.S. troops were withdrawn from the war.

   "They are in fact asking the KGB bosses to prove their confessions," the
 spokesman said.

   "As far as the Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs is concerned, "
 Ted Sampley, chairman of the Homecoming II Project, a POW-MIA activist group,
 said, "we had high hopes for it. However, it is beginning to look like instead
 of a lion we ended up with a kitty cat."