Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 22, 1993 TAG: 9308220087
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The evidence comes from an extraordinary source: a former Marine Corps corporal who spent 33 months as a prisoner of war in Korea and whose tale of being interrogated by Soviet officers in 1952 was ignored for 41 years.
U.S. investigators view the information as especially important because it is the first documented case of a returned American POW who was captured by Soviets in Korea and sent directly to a Soviet military post in China for interrogation.
The prisoner, Nick A. Flores, was returned to a POW camp in Korea after two days of questioning, apparently because his Soviet interrogators realized he was not a pilot. They initially were interested in him because they thought he was.
U.S. investigators are pursuing the notion that the Soviet military singled out downed American F-86 pilots in Korea for interrogation and - bypassing the Chinese-run POW system in Korea - possibly transferred them to the Soviet Union.
If true, that leaves open the possibility that some of the 8,177 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for in Korea survived for years in Soviet camps.
The F-86 pilots may have been of particular interest to the Soviets because the single-seat plane was the most advanced fighter on the Korean battlefield.
"Flores puts the capstone on this theory that what happened was that the Soviets were capturing and probably transporting our F-86 pilots to at least China and probably the Soviet Union, and not returning them," said Paul M. Cole, a Rand Corp. analyst who is a leading authority on Soviet involvement in the Korean War.
Russian officials, as the Soviets did before them, maintain that no American POWs were sent to the U.S.S.R. during or after the Korean conflict. The issue is under investigation by a U.S.-Russian commission on the fate of the thousands of Americans still unaccounted for from World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet system has unlocked doors to once-secret records that already point to a more direct Soviet military role in Korea than the Kremlin ever acknowledged.
This is the first published account of Flores' encounter with the Soviets.
His story is even more remarkable because the Marine Corps failed to credit him for the time he spent as a POW, and he was denied an honorable discharge when he left the service two months after he was repatriated by the Koreans on Aug. 20, 1953. He returned to his hometown of San Jose, Calif.
The record was corrected at a quiet Marine ceremony earlier this month, and now Flores has his honorable discharge and the U.S. government has intriguing testimony that its investigators believe casts a new light on the POW issue.
Flores and several fellow prisoners from a POW camp near the Yalu River in northeastern Korea slipped past their guards on July 22, 1952.
This was Flores' third attempted escape.
The 21-year-old Marine private was wearing a borrowed Air Force uniform and flight jacket. He got separated from his fellow escapees, and was recaptured this time by Soviets, not Koreans or Chinese.
He had happened onto a Soviet anti-aircraft artillery unit that hours earlier had shot down a U.S. Air Force F-86 fighter in the same area. Because of his borrowed uniform, with a U.S. Air Force insignia on the jacket, the Soviets figured Flores was the F-86 pilot. Instead of handing him over to the Koreans, they took him directly to a site that Flores says he assumed - but could not tell for sure - was across the Yalu in Chinese territory.
The U.S. investigator who studied Flores' case said there is no doubt from his description that he was taken to Andung, China, headquarters for the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps.
The connection that the Soviet interrogators made initially between Flores and the F-86 shootdown is significant, U.S. investigators say, because an unusually large percentage of F-86 pilots remain unaccounted for from Korea. Of the 56 F-86 pilots never rescued by allied forces, only 15 were repatriated after the war. Thirty of the 56 simply disappeared and remain missing. The others were presumed to have died when shot down.
by CNB