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months.

Furthermore, Comrade Mao Zedong noted that at present the government of the People's Republic of China cannot pay in cash for the armaments delivered. They hope to receive arms on credit.

Thus, the 1951 budget will not be affected, and it will be easier for them to explain it to the democrats.

In conclusion, Mao Zedong stated that the leading comrades in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party believe that the Chinese must come to the assistance of the Korean comrades in their difficult struggle. To discuss this matter, Zhou Enlai will have to meet comrade Filippov again.

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I have just received a telegram from Mao Zedong in which he reports that the CC CPC [Central Committee of the Communist Party of China] discussed the situation [in Korea - AM] again and decided after all to render military assistance to the Korean comrades, regardless of the insufficient armament of the Chinese troops. I am awaiting detailed reports about this matter from Mao Zedong. In connection with this new decision of the Chinese comrades, I ask You to postpone temporarily the implementation of the telegram sent to You yesterday about the evacuation of North Korea and the retreat of the Korean troops to the north.

FYN SISTALIN]

13 Oct 1950 [typed:] Sent on 13.X.50

[Source: APRF, fond 45, opis 1, delo 347, listy 74-75]

Document 21: Ciphered Telegram, Fyn Si (Stalin) to Kim Il Sung, 14 October 1950

CIPHERED TELEGRAM # 4829

To PYONGYANG-SOVIET AMBASSADOR

Transmit to KIM IL SUNG the following message:

"After vacillations [kolebaniy] and a series of temporary [provisional] decisions. the Chinese comrades at last made a final decision to render assistance to Korea with troops.

I am glad [rad] that the final and favorable decision for Korea has been made at last.

In this connection, you should consider the recommendations of the meeting of the Chinese-Soviet leading comrades, which You were told of earlier, annulled. You will have to resolve concrete questions regarding the entry of the Chinese troops jointly with the Chinese comrades.

The armaments required for the Chinese troops will be delivered from the USSR. I wish You success."

14.10.50

FYNSI[STALIN]

Typed by Doronchenkova #8865
Made 2 copies: Stalin - 1, 8MDGS - 1.

[Source: APRF, fond 45, opis 1, delo 347, list 77]

1. Although on the front page of the telegram it says that it was sent from Pyongyang at 8:10 a.m. on September 26, I believe that the date was indicated incorrectly because of a typo. It should be dated as of September 27 because at the end of the telegram it says that it was dispatched from Pyongyang at 12:35 p.m. on 27 September 1950 (local time) which is 6:35 a.m. of the same date Moscow time.

2. 8th MDGS stands for the Eighth Main Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR.

CWIHP ACTIVITIES AT V WORLD CONGRESS OF CENTRAL AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES, POLAND, AUGUST 1995

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) organized several activities in connection with the V World Congress of Central and East European Studies, held at Warsaw University on 6-11 August 1995.

CWIHP, in cooperation with the National Security Archive (a non-governmental repository for declassified documents and research institute located at George Washington University), co-organized three panels at the Warsaw meeting. Two were chaired by CWIHP Director Jim Hershberg: "New Evidence on the Polish Crisis, 1980-1981," with presentations by Mark Kramer (Russian Research Center, Harvard University), Michael Kubina (Free University, Berlin), and Malcolm Byrne (National Security Archive); and "Cold War Flashpoints," with Vladislav Zubok (National Security Archive), Johanna Granville (Carnegie-Mellon University), Byrne, and Kramer. Malcolm Byrne chaired a session on "New Opportunities for Research and the Issue of Openness in Cold War Studies," with presentations by Hope Harrison (Lafayette College), Sven Holtsmark (Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies), Hershberg, and Zubok.

During the conference, CWIHP, the National Security Archive, and the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, conducted a day-long workshop on current scholarship and research on the 1980-81 Polish Crisis. CWIHP presented a collection of newlyreleased Soviet documents on the crisis, included Politburo minutes, selected, translated, annotated, and introduced by Mark Kramer, while the Archive assembled declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Plans were discussed to hold an oral history conference on the 1980-81 Polish Crisis, gathering key Polish, Russian, and Americans involved in the events, in the spring of 1997 in Poland. Meetings were also held with German and Hungarian colleagues regarding, respectively, meetings for scholars to present new East-bloc evidence on the 1953 East German uprising and the 1956 Hungarian crisis which are planned in connection with the National Security Archive's "Cold War Flashpoints" project and will be co-sponsored by CWIHP.

In conjunction with the Warsaw gathering, Hershberg and Byrne gave presentations regarding CWIHP's and the Archive's activities at the International Librarians' Conference on Libraries in Europe's Post-Communist Countries, held near Krakow, Poland, at Jagellonian University's Polonia Institute (Przegorzaly) on 3-5 August 1995.

11 July 1995

To the Editor:

Since Kathryn Weathersby chose once again to stigmatize my work (as "revisionist") in the spring 1995 issue of the CWIHP Bulletin, perhaps I might be permitted a comment. The documents that she reproduced, selectively culled from a vastly larger archive and handcarried to Seoul by a Boris Yeltsin beseeching South Korea to aid the faltering Russian economy, are quite interesting but in ways that she does not seem to understand.

Document #1, a standard transcript of Kim Il Sung's meeting with Stalin on 5 March 1949 widely circulated for use inside the Soviet government, is impressive primarily for how bland it is, adding very little to the existing record. If anything it illustrates how distant Stalin was from the Korean situation, probing Kim on what kind of an army he had, what kind South Korea had, and whether he had utilized the "national bourgeoisie" to organize trade (which Kim indeed had done). This transcript adds virtually nothing to what has been known of this meeting, a relatively full record of which can be found in an archive of captured North Korean materials in Washington. But it does appear to show that no secret military alliance or agreement issued forth from this meeting, as the South long claimed.

This document certainly does not provide evidence for Dr. Weathersby's assertion that the meeting was "revealing in a most intimate way [of] the nature of the relationship" between the USSR and the DPRK or that North Korea was "utterly dependent" on the USSR. The captured archive has large numbers of documents on Korean-Soviet trade, negotiations over various exchanges, and proof that some precious Korean minerals, like gold and monazite (when refined, useful for a thorium atomic bomb) were indeed transferred in large quantities to Russia. (I covered this briefly in my Origins of the Korean War, volume 2 [Princeton University Press, 1990], pp. 151-2, 340-45.) These voluminous materials still do not prove North Korea's utter dependency on the USSR, especially when contrasted to South Korea, which had half its annual budget and five-sixths of its imports in the 1950s provided virtually gratis by the United States. (Stalin, to the con

trary, charged Kim two percent-about what mortgages cost in the U.S. then.)

Document #7, Stalin's telegram to Russian ambassador to P'yôngyang Shtykov on 30 January 1950, does not say what Weathersby says it does, namely, it does not "reveal so bluntly" Stalin's strategic thinking or his "perfect mafioso style." Instead it shows Stalin appearing to be more interested than at any previous point in Kim Il Sung's plans for South Korea, without a hint of what Stalin's own strategic thinking might be. Dr. Weathersby thinks the timing of this change is to be explained by Dean Acheson's famed press club speech on January 12, which is to assume a Stalin so inexperienced as to take Acheson's public statement of a private policy at face value (and even the public statement is always misread by scholars). Finally, Stalin's request that Kim send 25,000 tons of lead (whether gratis or for a price is not mentioned) is no more "mafioso" than the U.S. more or less telling South Korea that it would require Korea's entire annual output of tungsten in the early 1950s, to make up for the lost tungsten supplies of southern China.

Documents number two through six are considerably more interesting, but remain inexplicable unless placed against the backand-forth logic of the developing civil conflict on the peninsula, with full knowledge of what the South and the U.S. were doing. The critical issue in these documents is not a wholesale invasion of the South, but a military operation to seize the Ongjin Peninsula, which juts southward from the 38th parallel on Korea's west coast, reachable from the South only by sea or by an overland route through North Korean territory. This is where the Korean War conventionally dated from 25 June 1950 began, and where fighting between the South and North began on 4 May 1949-in a battle probably started by the South, according to the most reliable.

accounts.

According to these Soviet documents, Kim Il Sung first broached the idea of an operation against Ongjin to Shtykov on 12 August 1949. This came on the heels of the biggest Ongjin battle of 1949, initiated on August 4 by the North to dislodge South Korean army units holding Unp'a Mountain, a salient above the 38th parallel which the South had aggressed against in a previous battle and the summit of which commanded much of the terrain to the north. The North sought, in the words of the American com

mander of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) "to recover high ground in North Korea occupied by [the] South Korean Army." Before dawn it launched strong artillery barrages and then at 5:30 a.m., 4000 to 6000 North Korean border guards attacked the salient. They routed the South Korean defenders, destroying two companies of ROK soldiers and leaving hundreds dead.

Virtual panic ensued at high levels of the South Korean government, leading Syngman Rhee and his favored high officers in the army to argue that the only way to relieve pressure on Ongjin was to drive north to Ch'orwon-which happened to be about 20 miles into North Korean territory. Rhee, who was meeting with Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] in a southern Korean port, returned to Seoul and dressed down his defense minister for not having “attacked the North" after the Ongjin debacle. The American ambassador and the KMAG commander both intervened, since an attack on Ch'orwon would, in the words of the latter, "cause heavy civil war and might spread." The South did not move against Ch'orwon, but attacks from both sides across the parallel on the Ongjin peninsula continued through the end of 1949.

All this is based on unimpeachable American archival documentation, some of which was reproduced in the 1949 Korea papers of the Foreign Relations of the U.S. and which I treated at length in my 1990 book. When we now look at both sides of the parallel with the help of Soviet materials, we see how similar the Russians were in seeking to restrain hotheaded Korean leaders, including the two chiefs of state. Indeed, two key Russian Embassy officials seeking to restrain Kim used language almost identical to that which John Foster Dulles used with Rhee in his June 1950 discussions in Seoul (both, upon hearing Kim or Rhee declaim their desire to attack the other side, "tried to switch the discussion to a general theme," to quote from document #6). We see that Kim Il Sung, like southern leaders, wanted to bite off a chunk of exposed territory or grab a small city-all of Kaesong for example, which is bisected by the 38th parallel, or Haeju city just above the parallel on Ongjin, which southern commanders wanted to occupy in 1949-50.

The Soviet documents also demonstrate the hardwon, learned logic of this civil war

by late 1949, namely, that both sides understood that their big power guarantors would not help them if they launched an unprovoked general attack-or even an assault on Ongjin or Ch'orwon. Document #6, a telegram from the Russian ambassador to Moscow in January 1950, shows Kim Il Sung impatient that the South "is still not instigating an attack," thus to justify his own, and the Russians in P'yôngyang tell him once again that he cannot attack Ongjin without risking general civil war. Meanwhile Rhee and his advisors (some of whom were Americans with cabinet-level portfolios in the ROK government) had gotten the message (especially through OSS and CIA operative Preston Goodfellow) that the US would only back Seoul in the case of an unprovoked and unequivocal attack from the North. Thus the 1950 logic for both sides was to see who would be stupid enough to move first, with Kim itching to invade and hoping for a clear southern provocation, and hotheads in the South hoping to provoke an "unprovoked" assault, thus to get American help for that was the only way the South could hope to win. What better way for both sides to begin than to do it in isolated, remote Ongjin, with no foreign observers present along the parallel?

Other items in these documents also bear comment. They make clear that well before the war Kim already had begun playing Moscow off against Beijing, for example letting Shtykov overhear him say, at an apparently drunken luncheon on 19 January 1950, that if the Russians wouldn't help him unify the country, "Mao Zedong is his friend and will always help Korea." In general this document underscores my point that the victory of the Chinese revolution had an enormous refractory effect on North Korea (Origins, 1990, pp. 369-71), and that North Korea's China connection was a trump card Kim could play to create some breathing room for his regime between the two communist giants. The documents also show that Kim's timing for an invasion was deeply influenced by his desire to get large numbers of Korean soldiers back from China, where they had been fighting for years with Mao's forces (Origins, 1990, pp. 451-53).

These documents put to rest forever, in my view, P'yôngyang's canard that it was Pak Hon-yong, the southern communist leader, who argued for war in 1950 and foolishly thought the southern people would

"rise up" to greet northern troops (Origins,
1990, pp. 456-57). Kim Il Sung trumped up
these charges in show trials in 1953, and then
had Pak and his close allies executed. Mean-
while Kim told Shtykov in January 1950 that
"partisans will not decide the question. The
people of the south know that we have a
good army." South Korean "liberation" was
to come courtesy of, and only of, the Korean
Peoples Army.

half-century-old documents?) And even when we have every document the Soviets ever produced, we will still need the South Korean archives, the North Korean archives, the Chinese archives on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and the American intelligence, signals and cryptography archives, before we will be able to argue on truly solid ground the question we ought all try to forget, namely, "who started the Korean civil war?”

Bruce Cumings

Finally, what is absolutely fascinating
about documents two through six is Kim Il
Sung's basic conception of a Korean War, Sincerely yours,
originated at least by August 1949: namely,
attack the cul de sac of Ongjin (which no
sane blitzkreig commander would do pre-
cisely because it is a cul de sac), move
eastward and grab Kaesong, and then see
what happens. At a minimum this would
establish a much more secure defense of
P'yôngyang, which was quite vulnerable
from Ongjin and Kaesong. At maximum, it
might open Seoul to his forces. That is, if the
southern army collapses, move on to Seoul
and occupy it in a few days. And here we see
the significance of the collapse of the ROK
2nd and 7th divisions, 25-27 June 1950,
which opened the historic invasion corrider
and placed the Korean People's Army in
Seoul on the 27th, and why some people K. Weathersby responds:
with intimate knowledge of the Korean civil
conflict have speculated that these divisions
may have harbored a fifth column (Origins,
1990, pp. 572-73, 582-85). Kim did not by
any means get what he wanted out of the
Korean War, but, rest his soul, he got his
minimum demand: Kaesong and Ongjin re-
main firmly on the other side of the 1953
demilitarized zone....1

1. The armistice did not end discussions of seizing
Ongjin and Kaesông, however. According to American
intelligence reports in February 1955, Syngman Rhee
had held "meetings in which Rhee told Korean military
and civilian leaders to prepare for military actions
against north Korea," and in October came reports
saying that he had ordered plans for the retaking of
Kaesông and the Ongjin Peninsula. This never hap-
pened, probably because the U.S. once again prevented
Rhee from doing it. See declassified information cited
in Donald S. MacDonald, U.S.-Korean Relations from
Liberation to Self-Reliance (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1992), 23-24, 80.

Readers of this Bulletin may not be as interested in the details of Korean history as I am. But they make the point that Korean history is made first and foremost by Koreans, which is something that much of the Korean War literature (from all sides) still fails to grasp. The Soviet documents also show that they are merely documents, that is, evidence that remains to be interpreted with all the intelligence, hindsight, imagination and care that the historian can muster. Furthermore these documents are highly selective, drawn from one portion of one section of one archive, and proferred to a Seoul still socked into the Korean civil struggle by a mendicant from Moscow. (Can we imagine the reverse? An American president currying favor in P'yôngyang with a handful of

*

Professor Cumings attempts to downplay the significance of the Russian documents by asserting, first of all, that the documents on the decision-making behind the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950 published in the previous issue of the Bulletin were "selectively culled from a vastly larger archive." In fact, the collection from the Presidential Archive declassified in preparation for Yeltsin's presentation of a portion of them to South Korea includes the great majority of what that archive contains, as can be ascertained from looking at the "Delo" and page numbers. The important gaps in that collection are from April-June 1950 and October 1950, not from the earlier period.

Cumings also writes that these documents were "handcarried to Seoul by a Boris Yeltsin beseeching South Korea to aid the faltering Russian economy." Actually, Yeltsin presented them to President Kim Young Sam while the latter was in Moscow. Furthermore, Yeltsin's government's economic reasons for wishing to improve relations with South Korea are only relevant to

our discussion if this motivation led the Russian declassification commission to exclude certain documents, presumably ones that would present the Soviet role in the Korean War in an unfavorable light. As is apparent from the documents published in this issue as well as the previous issue of the Bulletin, unflattering documents have not been excluded; these records are, in fact, remarkably frank.

Cumings disparages the usefulness of the transcript of the first meeting between Kim Il Sung and Stalin by describing it as a "standard transcript...widely circulated for use inside the Soviet government" which "adds virtually nothing to what has been known of this meeting." With regard to this assertion, it must be pointed out that Cumings has no knowledge of the circulation of this transcript within the Soviet government, and neither does any other scholar. Furthermore, nothing was "widely circulated" within the Soviet government; in the Soviet context this claim simply makes no sense. In addition, the account of Kim's meeting with Stalin provided in the captured documents is limited to a report of the trip Kim Il Sung presented to a party assembly, in which he described the agreements reached, the "friendly atmosphere" of the talks, the sites the delegation visited, etc. Obviously, an actual transcript of the meeting with Stalin provides a much more substantial piece of historical evidence.

As for Cumings' conclusion that the transcript reveals "how distant Stalin was from the Korean situation," it would be possible to interpret Stalin's remarks in this way if one had no knowledge of Soviet/ North Korean relations and no knowledge of Stalin's style with subordinates. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Stalin was very well informed about events in North Korea. The ranking Soviet official in North Korea was General T.F. Shtykov, one of Stalin's "own men," who had direct access to Stalin, reporting to him outside the normal channels of the Foreign Ministry and General Staff. Throughout 1949 and 1950 Shtykov regularly communicated with Stalin about the situation in Korea, particularly about the U.S. military presence in the South, the opposition movement in the South, and the actions of the U.S.-backed government in Seoul. Stalin's request to Kim to provide him with information on such topics was a familiar style of dealing with subordinates,

testing him and reinforcing his vulnerability by making him expose himself through his replies to such questions.

Cumings also argues that this transcript does not provide evidence for my assertion that North Korea was utterly dependent on the Soviet Union. Of course it doesn't-it would have been ridiculous to claim that it did. What I wrote was that "the thousands of pages of documents on post-war Korea in the Russian Foreign Ministry archive" show "in exhaustive detail" that "in the years prior to and during the Korean War, North Korea was utterly dependent economically on the Soviet Union," a subject I address further in my essay in this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin.

Cumings adds that the collection of documents captured by UN forces in Pyongyang in the fall of 1950, which is housed in the National Archives in Washington, reveal considerable trade between the DPRK and the USSR, but "still do not prove North Korea's utter dependency on the USSR." With regard to this argument, it must be pointed out that the collection of captured documents consists of documents that the North Koreans left behind when they withdrew from Pyongyang in the face of the U.S./ UN advance into North Korea. They thus include only those documents that were not considered important enough either to evacuate or destroy. This is why there is nothing in that collection about the planning of the June 1950 attack and no records of high-level correspondence between Pyongyang and Moscow. It is not sound reasoning to argue that something was not the case if it is not documented in this collection.

The captured documents are a very rich source of information on many aspects of the history of North Korea that are little illuminated in the Soviet documents, such as politics at the village level, economic records of individual factories, and party personnel rosters. But to get the big picture we must turn to the Russian documents. And to get a complete picture, we must examine both sets of records, a laborious undertaking which a handful of scholars from South Korea has begun.

With regard to Cumings' disagreement of my reading of Stalin's telegram of 30 January 1950, I refer readers to my article in the present issue of the Bulletin. Cumings goes on to discuss documents #2-6, recounting the reasons why he concluded in his 1990 volume that the war of June 1950 began as a

limited military operation on the Ongjin peninsula. As the Soviet documents show, he was correct to conclude that something was up on Ongjin. However, he stops his account before the punch line. In 1949 Kim did raise the possibility of a limited operation to seize Ongjin, but the Soviet leadership rejected the plan. In early 1950 Stalin changed his mind, and, as the article in this issue details, in April and May Soviet and North Korean military leaders together worked out a plan for a full-scale offensive against South Korea. Cumings is right that leaders of both sides hoped to gain their patron's support for a war by provoking an assault by the other side and that "the 1950 logic for both sides was to see who would be stupid enough to move first." But the end of the story is that the Soviet Union eventually decided to support its client's plan for military reunification while the United States did not. Thus, though Cumings is right that Korean history is made first and foremost by Koreans, the war of 1950-53 was not a purely Korean product.

Of course it's true, as Cumings notes, that we must examine the archives from all the major actors in the war before we can fully understand this unusually complex conflict. The Cold War International History Project is facilitating just such a multiarchival investigation, beginning with a close comparison of the Chinese and Russian sources. Nonetheless, certain important questions about the war have been resolved by the Russian archival sources; to pretend otherwise is simply dishonest.

SOVIET INTERROGATION OF U.S. POWS IN THE KOREAN WAR

by Laurence Jolidon

The extensive, covert involvement of Soviet intelligence in the interrogation of American prisoners throughout the Korean War has been laid bare thanks to a trove of long-secret military documents unearthed by the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on missing Americans in the former Soviet Union.

Despite accounts in the debriefings of repatriated U.S. POWs-and even brief mentions in the Western press during and immediately following the war-that Russians had questioned U.S. POWs, Soviet officials steadfastly maintained for decades that it never happened.

The Kremlin's obvious interest in the details of American weapons, strategy and morale in the Far East-as early-Cold War indicators of what to expect once the battle for world supremacy that most assumed would eventually occur in Europe was joined-had never gone that far, Stalin and his successors argued.

Moscow's leaders hid behind the fiction that the Soviet Union, while lending moral and logistical support to the troops of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and air protection along the Manchurian border for the sanctuary it had recently ceded to the new Chinese ruler, Mao Zedong, had primarily been a neutral, disinterested party in

Korea.

But just as Soviet Communist Party archival documents made public in the past few years have drawn a clear, intentional and decision-making connection between Stalin's hand and the North Korean invasion, documents from Soviet military files have deepened our knowledge of what became in effect an extensive, bold, yet largely covert intelligence war conducted by the Soviets north of the 38th parallel.

One key document, obtained in April 1994 by investigators from the Pentagon's POW/MIA Affairs Office working under the aegis of the Joint Commission, came from files at the Soviet military archives in Podolsk.

The two-paragraph message, dated 26 November 1952, from S. Ignatyev, the chief Soviet military advisor in North Korea, to G.M. Malenkov, one of Stalin's principal

ministers, stated:

Representatives of the MGB of the USSR and China came from Peking to conduct further prisoner interrogations, in order to gain more precise information on spy centers, landing strips and flights over the territory of the Soviet Union.

The interrogations will continue in Pekton [Pyoktong].

While seemingly cursory and matterof-fact, this document had several important implications.

First, it contradicted previous Russian assurances that Soviet officials had not been involved in the interrogation of American POWs.

Even after veterans of the Soviet military intelligence service had told the Joint Commission of their personal involvement in numerous interrogations, the Russian side had insisted that the rules under which Soviet forces operated in the Korean War theater forbade such acts.

As proof, they cited message traffic to Soviet posts in the war theater dating from January 1951, and repeated as a standing order throughout the war, that "our translators are categorically forbidden to interrogate American and British POWs, or prisoners of any other nationality."

The Ignatyev-Malenkov message, on its face, was either a reversal of that policy or-as some American analysts believed— a clue that the "categorically forbidden" order was only for public consumption.

(In the course of the Russian-American dialog on this subject through the meetings of the Joint Commission, the Russian position shifted several times. Some Russian members of the commission admitted reluctantly that one favored method of interrogating American POWs was to have the Russians' questions put to the prisoners by Chinese interrogators while the Soviets sat, unseen, in an adjacent room. Testimony taken by the commission also made clear that in some cases the Soviets carefully chose Russian officers of Asiatic cast to do the interrogating.)

While Americans are not specifically mentioned in the Ignatyev-Malenkov message, the reference to "flights over the territory of the Soviet Union" could pertain only to American reconnaissance flights, disguised in public statements by U.S. authorities-who had their own reasons for keeping

such activities secret-as "weather" or "training" missions.

These flights, which actually began before the outbreak of the Korean War and continued for years afterward, were themselves responsible for the loss of approximately 140 U.S. pilots and crewmen shot down over or near Soviet territory. Except in rare cases these men were never publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government and the very existence of their missions was routinely disavowed.

Just as routinely, the Soviets denied finding or capturing any survivors of these shootdowns. They were secret casualties in a secret war. So long as the U.S. and the USSR remained superpower enemies, to publicly seek their whereabouts would violate their secret status.

But the interrogations referred to in the 26 November 1952 message were primarily those conducted on Americans taken prisoner in hostile action in the Korean War. In the case of U.S. aviators, they included men shot down over or otherwise forced to ditch or parachute in Manchuria.

By UN Command edict, U.S. planes were forbidden to enter Chinese air space. This stipulation was frequently breached by U.S. pilots, although it was customary for official military records to mask this fact in after-action reports.

Secondly, the 26 November 1952 message to the Soviet advisor in North Korea is an important clue to the dynamics of the covert war the Soviets were then conducting behind the lines in Korea.

Rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the reports of POW interrogations to be sent through channels, from the prison camps that were ostensibly under the control of the Chinese army, the Soviets were taking the initiative to monitor and direct the process more directly.

This speaks to the apparent competition for access to the most valuable POWs— documented in wartime accounts of UN prisoners-among the three Communist allies in the war.

By the fall and winter of 1952, for instance, the Chinese had capitalized on the capture on Manchurian territory of a number of U.S. aviators by charging them with "war crimes," including the much-disputed allegation of waging "germ warfare" by dropping infected plants and insects while overflying Chinese territory.

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