For the Return of America's Missing Servicemen
+ World War II + Korea + Cold War + Vietnam +
Dolores Apodaca-Alfond, National Chairperson, voice/fax 1-425-881-1499
Lynn O'Shea, NYS Director, voice/fax 1-718-846-4350
One of these pilots, lLt Roland Parks, will have an interesting tale to tell later in this narrative.
Soviet pilots also had interesting stories of contact with U.S. POWs. Lieutenant Colonel (ret) Roshchin stated that an American pilot named Muller had also been shot down. Roshchin described Muller a "real master, the number one American pilot" who "shot down more than ten planes. n Roshchin described a photo of the pilot standing next to the tail of his aircraft. F23
We believe he was describing Lt. Col. Harold E. Fischer, the only Korean War ace with ten kills to his credit, and the only ace among the missing. Fischer stated that the only contact he had with Soviets was right after his shoot down and capture in China. Two Soviets arrived and confiscated his only two possessions, his ID
22 Joint Commission Support Branch, Interview with Retired Colonel Edwin L. Heller, 23 August 1993. Heller stated that he had been badly wounded in the loss of his aircraft and spent his two years of captivity under Chinese hospitalization and underwent four major operations.
23 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Interview with Vladimir M. Roshchin, 18 February 1991, Moscow.
card and a photo of his crew chief standing next to his F-86. Subsequently, this very photo was produced by the Soviet ace who claimed to have shot Lt. Col. Fischer down. F24
A Chinese Link in the Chain of Evidence. An interview with Shu Ping Wa, a former head of a division-level POW collection team (164th Division) in the so-called Chinese People's Volunteers (CPV) serving in Korea, showed that a policy existed to turn over pilots to the Soviets. As he testified in the video recording shown at the April 1993 Commission meeting in Moscow, he himself turned over three American pilots to the Soviets just north of the front lines some time in the Winter months between November 1951 and March 1952. He stated that his superior told him that the "Russians wanted the pilots."F25
A Special Air Force unit. According to Dr. Paul Cole's interview with General Lobov, a special Soviet Air Force unit was organized and deployed, under the command of General Blagoveshchenskii, with the mission to capture F-86 pilots. Its mission was to force down Sabre jets in order to capture the pilots alive. The unit was composed of flyers from units in Mary, in the Turkmen SSR, and from the Primorskii Krai along the Pacific coast. Nine expert pilots were assigned to this mission, each of whom was required to sign a secrecy statement.F26
The mission was to cut a Sabre jet out of a dog fight, then force it to land intact. If the plan worked, the plane and the pilot could be captured simultaneously. In 1951 the mission was a failure. In the course of the operation the Soviets lost two of their own aircraft, perhaps because the Soviet pilots in this unit were forbidden to engage American aircraft in combat. The Soviets managed, however, to damage one Sabre jet which then made a forced landing. It is not known what happened to the pilot, though the Soviet pilots participating in the mission were told the American pilot managed to escape to the Yellow Sea where he was picked up by U.S. search and rescue forces. Some of the Soviet pilots doubted this version of events since they saw the American
24 Joint Commission Support branch, Interview with Retired Colonel Harold E. Miller, 23 August 1993.
25 Korean War POW Transfers to the Soviet Union: Eyewitnesses (RT: 18:35), prepared by Task Force Russia, April 1993.
26 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Interview with Major Valerii Amirov, 18 December 1991, Moscow.
land several kilometers from the sea. F27 Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Roshchin, author of the Korean War memoirs cited by Major Amirov in the publication, Na Strazhe, distinctly recalls seeing documents in the office of his regimental commander about the capture of an American pilot named Carl Crone in conjunction with a special operation in 1951 to capture an F-86. One of the 31 missing F-86 aviators believed likely to have survived is Captain William Delbert Crone.F28 Major Avraham Shifrin. The most specific comments by former Soviet officers concerning the transfer of F-86s and their pilots to the USSR were those made by former Major Avraham Shifrin, at that time a lawyer in the Ministry for Military Production. Shifrin discussed his relationship with renowned aircraft cannon designer A. Nudelmann and General (NFI) Dzhakhadze, F29 commander of Vasilii Stalin's support regiment at Bykova, near Moscow.F30 Shifrin recalls that Nudelmann expressed regular concern about the F-86, and about the recurring jamming problems with the cannon he designed for the MiG 15. He also recalled that Dzhakhadze related having to fly to Korea in his "Douglas, in order to pickup crash parts of MiGs and F-86s." Dzhakhadze had related to Shifrin that while he was in Korea on such a mission, the 'security organs' had asked him to transport a group of American F-86 pilots to Kansk in Western Siberia. The move had been done clandestinely, with the pilots traveling in civilian clothes under security escort. F31 The Hunt for the F-86 Sabre Jet Practically all Soviet officers interviewed about Human Intelligence collection in Korea have concentrated on the F-86 in more or less detail. A significant number of documents provided 27 Paul M. Cole, RAND Corporation, World War II. Korean War. and Early Cold War MIA-POW Issues (Draft) (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, April 1993) p. 593. 28 Valerii Amirov, "A Front Far Away From the Motherland," Na Strazhe, Moscow, 30 June 1992. 29 TFR-M requested the Russian side to find General Dzhakhadze. To date, the Russian side has been unable to do so. 30 Task Force Russia-Moscow has been making strenuous efforts to locate General Dzhakhadze to date but to no avail. 31 Task Force Russia interview with Avraham Shifrin, 23 March 1993, Jerusalem.
by the Russian side likewise focus on this airframe.
Two senior Soviet officers distinctly remember a specific mission to capture an F-86, preferably intact, for the purpose of technical exploitation. Several others have commented on knowing about such missions. In a December 1991 interview, Colonel Georgii Plotnikov stated "our troops were hunting for F-86."F32
On 30 March 1992, Colonel Valentin Sozinov recalled a specific order to capture an F-86. Even General Lobov has stated:
We wanted the F-86 gun sight at all costs. One F-86 crashed after it was hit. The aircraft lost fuel which prevented the pilot from ditching in the sea. The other F-86 landed in shallow water at low tide, the only problem was the gun sight had been damaged by gun fire by the crash. One F-86 was located off shore. F33
Major Valerii Amirov, writing in Na Strazhe on 30 June 1992, again describes the arrival in North Korea in 1951 of the special detachment charged with the specific mission of taking an aircraft intact:
This was very difficult to do, even though the best pilots joined this newly formed unit. During a battle, nine planes tried to force a Sabre to the ground and to force the pilot to land. But it didn't work and our men took losses . . . During a routine raid by American aviation, a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell damaged the rudder of one of the engines and the pilot landed on the seashore . . . . Around the downed Saber, a lively aerial battle was declared right away. The Americans rushed in to destroy the plane with bombs, the Soviet pilots to protect it until the ground forces could access it. Finally, we succeeded in saving the it was disassembled, and was shipped to the Soviet The fate of the American pilot remained unknown.F34
Sand in the Fuselage. In addition to officers of the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps in Korea, other former Soviet officers had memories of the seashore landings. On 30 March 1993, Task Force Russia in Moscow (TFR-M) interviewed a retired KGB lieutenant colonel, Yuriy Lukianovich Klimovich, who had served in Korea and
32 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Interview with Colonel Georgii Plotnikov, 17 December 1991, Moscow.
33 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Interview with General Georgii A. Lobov, 18 December l991, in Moscow.
34 Valerii Amirov, "A Front Far Away From the Motherland," Na Strazhe, Moscow, 30 June 1992.
Klimovich had appeared on the Ostankino 1 TV New Magazine show "Chorta S Dva" and told of two F-86 "Sabre" fighters being brought to Moscow in 1951/52. Klimovich told TFR-M that a very close friend and confidant, now deceased, had confided to him that a U.S. F-86 and an American pilot had been brought to Moscow. His friend reportedly told Klimovich that one of the aircraft was in excellent condition and was disassembled at the Sukhoi Design Bureau in an attempt to copy it. Klimovich said that neither his friend nor he knew what happened to the alleged American pilot since he fell immediately into KGB hands.F36
Lieutenant Colonel Klimovich then escorted Task Force Russia interviewers to the Sukhoi Design Bureau where they met designers who clearly remembered that an F-86 had been brought to the bureau during the Korean War. These designers confirmed Klimovich's assertion that two F-86s had been brought to Moscow, one in good and the other in poor condition. They recounted that it had been stripped of markings and serial numbers. None of them had spoken to an American pilot but they concluded that a pilot would be invaluable in helping them discern operational characteristics during reverse engineering. They did, however, receive information from a member of the project that appeared to be from a pilot. One of the designers remembered that this individual had once told him he was participating in the interrogation of the aircraft's pilot. The designers also stated that the aircraft had been at the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) Design Bureau.
The Task Force Russia interviewers then visited the Zhukovskii Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute (Tsentral'niy Aerogidrodinamicheskiy institute imeni Professora N. Ye. Zhukovskogo-Tsagi) (formerly MiG Design Bureau) on 1 April 1993 escorted by Lieutenant Colonel Klimovich. There they spoke to Professor Yevgeniy I. Rushitskiy, Chief of the Institute's Information Division and Chairman of the History Section.
During the course of the interview, Professor Rushitskiy confirmed that an F-86 had been delivered to the institute
35 The Russian side of the Joint Commission had been informed of the scheduled interview but declined to participate.
36 Amembassy Moscow Message, 1411521Z Apr 93, POW/MIA Team - Moscow: Weekly
Activity Report 13/93, March 28 to April 3, 1993.
to be disassembled and copied. According to the professor, when they were finished, all parts from the F-86 were destroyed or recycled. He also stated that when the aircraft was delivered to them from the State Red Banner Scientific-Research Institute of the Air Force F37 at Chkalovskiy airfield north of Moscow, there were no longer markings or identification numbers of any kind on it.
One of designers distinctly remembered the study and disassembly of a sand-filled fuselage of an F-86 at the design bureau. This source also remembers an American pilot having been available at another location for follow-on questions. This story was repeated by other personnel from the Design Bureau.F38
The remarkable central fact of this episode is that at least two and possibly three F-86 were captured and returned to Moscow for exploitation. At least one of the F-86s was captured by being forced down on a beach. This same information is provided by three separate sources: General Lobov, the retired KGB officer, and the designers from the Sukhoi and MiG Design Bureaus. The inescapable follow-on question deals with the presence of the pilots of the aircraft, held to assist in the exploitation of the aircraft. That presence is maintained by both the retired KGB officer and the designers. Who were the pilots? What became of them after they provided his information? Likely candidates are shown at Appendix B.
In interviews with numerous former officers of the GRU (Military Intelligence) who served during in the Korean War, a distinct picture emerges of the specific roles of both the GRU and the MGB in the handling of POWs. The military intelligence officers uniformly describe a division of labor in which Army personnel capture POWs, GRU officers conduct tactical and operational interrogations, and then POWs are turned over for custody and final disposition to the MGB. This system operated from before World War II to the present. These officers repeatedly assert that if any POWs were taken to the Soviet Union, it would have been a closely controlled operation of the MGB at the time.
37 Gosudarstvennyi Krasno-Znamennyi Nauchino-Issledovatel'sky Institut V.V.S.
38 Amembassy Moscow Message, 1411521Z Apr 93, POW/MIA Team - Moscow: Weekly
Activity Report 12/93, March 28 to April 3, 1993; also debriefings of Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Poltoratsky, U.S. Army Reserve, who had been a member of the TFR-M team that visited the design bureaus.
Colonel Georgii Plotnikov was asked hypothetically if it would have been possible to effect such a transfer without GRU officers being aware of it. "Yes," he answered without hesitation. "It would have been a KGB [MGB] operation in cooperation with North Korean intelligence. The Soviet Army had no Gulag and was not prepared to deal with a stream of prisoners. The KGB [MGB] could do all of these things." The Soviets had the capability to move POWs, the Koreans would have permitted such an operation, and transport across the PRC would have been no problem, in Plotnikov's view. "At the time there was train service from Pyongyang to Moscow with a stop in China." The POWs, he stated, "would have been loaded into trucks with canvas drawn around them, then transferred to trains at night . . . The North Koreans hated Americans. They would have cooperated in such an operation if asked by the Soviets. The North Koreans could have not said no to a Soviet request." In Plotnikov's view, "specialized organs" in the Soviet Union would have made requests for particular types of Americans. "Design Bureaus might have made such requests," he said. The Deputy Chairman of the KGB [MGB]would be the lowest political level that could have approved such an operation that kept the GRU out of the picture.
Grabbing American POWs [would have been a] political decision in response to a request. Infantry was of no interest to Soviet intelligence. There would have been no regular transfer. American POWs would have been moved as specialists fell into the camps. They would be identified and moved. The interest would not have been in people who operated equipment as much as it would have focused on people who understood the principles of how things worked.F39
Plotnikov's 'hypothesis' conforms to Avraham Shifrin's account of transfer of POWs by the "security organs" as well as the accounts of the exploitation of F-86s and at least one pilot by the Sukhoi and MiG Design Bureaus.
Further confirmation of the MGB role was provided by Major Valerii Amirov.
The intelligence center in Sarashogan (Sary Shagan) belonged to the KGB [MGB]. A task was [started] from 1949-1950. Soviet engineers started to design Soviet anti-aircraft and missile equipment and weaponry. In other words the SA-75 (SA-2 Guideline) complex that later provoked such noise in Vietnam. They had to create a radar system for that complex and secondly, a missile system. The American Air Force then
39 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Trip Report of Moscow Visit December 15-22, 1991, pp. 10-11; and Interview with Colonel Plotnikov, 17 December 1991, Moscow.
was better than the Soviet one, by its flying characteristics. They were mostly interested in the Sabre planes, the F-84 [the Sabre was the F-86], it was also called "Cross. They were interested in weak points of the American planes. How to guide a missile in order to make Air Force actions more difficult. Second, they were interested in flying characteristics, materials used for building these planes and so on.
The source [of the requirement] was one of Beria's [Chief of the MGB] deputies, who was curator of that complex's construction. The construction of that rocket complex was a state task. In other words, it was like Komsomol [Young Communist League] construction. It was one of the most important directions of the engineers activities. Since Korea was a first encounter of the Soviet and US military equipment and technology, and the US Air Force was stronger then, there was a classified directive issued by the KGB on collecting all the information concerning the US Air Force.
The First Directorate of the MGB was responsible for collecting information, and the other one, whose number I don't know was in charge of providing security. Discipline was very strict. Pilots could not cross certain parallels in order to fall on their own territory. In order to collect all the necessary data on the aircraft technology the first group was organized. They would collect planes' fragments and send them back through a window on the border. There was a window on the Soviet-[Chinese] border, Otpor station. This was the window for transporting planes, their fragments. They would transport everything including pieces of metal up to some navigation equipment, all documents they could find. They transported all this through Otpor F40 Alma Ata - Sarashogan [Sary Shagan]. . .F41
Major Amirov further stated that in January-February 1952, the MGB issued a secret directive through the Ministry of Defense to forces in the field in Korea to not only try to shoot down planes but to also capture pilots. F42
So far in the work of the Commission, most of the information provided by the Russian side has been from former officers of the
40 Otpor was a czarist era name for Manchuria.
41 Paul Cole, RAND Corporation, Interview with Major Amirov, 18 December 1991, Moscow.
42 ibid