From the March, 1999 Coalition Newsletter
What is U.S. Policy with Russia
on the Full Accounting?
By Donna Downes Knox
The late Russian
General Dmitri Volkogonov mentioned in his memoirs a 1960s KGB document that he
said discussed a plan to transfer Americans to the Soviet Union. Once news of
this document caught the media’s attention, there was a flurry of charges and a
spate of denials concerning how much (or how little) the Clinton Administration
had done to get to the bottom of the report.
The Administration
listed a number of inquiries that had reportedly been made by high ranking U.S.
officials to their Russian counterparts over the last year. In a February 17,
1999 letter to Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), the State Department cited nine
different occasions within the last year on which U.S. officials, including
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Al Gore, reportedly
raised the issue with Russian officials. We are not told what it means to
‘raise the issue’, but we are told by President Clinton that "Mr. Primakov
[the Russian Prime Minister] has promised to look into the report and to update
us on his efforts".
The United States
Government has numerous documents and considerable testimonial evidence
spanning years of inquiry, all of which tell a collective story, sometimes in
significant detail, of a Soviet KGB program to take and exploit American POWs
from various wars. One such CIA document about transit camps for Americans in
the Soviet Union can be viewed in its entirety on the Coalition’s web site at
<coalitionoffamilies.org>. Despite the evidence, including the KGB report
mentioned by Volkogonov, the Russian leadership has offered little more than
blanket denials that such a program, if it existed, was ever implemented. They
now categorically deny that any American servicemen were taken to the Soviet
Union, and they have requested that this issue be closed. U.S. investigators
from the U.S. Russian Joint Commission on POW/MIAs are not satisfied with the
Russians’ response on the transfer question, and have sought to keep the issue
open as part of the Joint Commission’s ongoing investigation.
While no proof
positive has been revealed to date, the collective evidence is compelling and
scores of U.S. officials have stated that there is little doubt that the
so-called Transfer Program did, in fact, exist. The only real questions seem to
be ‘how many and which men were taken’, and ‘what became of them?’. And yet,
the Russians continue to offer ‘no recollection’ interspersed with categorical
denials as comebacks to the many detailed reports that surface. We have to
wonder how much time this avoidance of the issue will buy for the Russians.
Will the questions go unanswered forever because no one has the political will
to bring out the truth?
Simply ‘raising’
the issue...whether it be nine times or nine hundred times...does not appear to
produce results. It is rather clear by now that the Russians will avoid the
darkest corners of this issue unless they are given sufficient incentive to
address it in a meaningful way. Can the Clinton Administration provide that
incentive, and put an end to the empty question/empty answer cycle? Bearing in
mind the oft-repeated ranking of the POW/MIA issue as a ‘highest national
priority’, this issue should, one would think, make its way into the Administration’s
overall foreign policy on Russia.
As we wonder if
the Clinton Administration can turn this inquiry around, we must also ask
ourselves if this Administration wants to. Congressman Weldon, mentioned above,
made a trip to Moscow recently during which he was told by a member of the
Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, that the U.S. State Department has
told them in the past not to cooperate with investigation into the transfer
question because the matter is too politically sensitive. The Russian
legislator reportedly was complaining of the mixed signals they are getting
from different offices in the U. S. government.
Congressman Weldon
was disturbed by these allegations and contacted the State Department upon his
return. A State Department representative wrote to Mr. Weldon that the State
Department has looked extensively into the allegation and found no basis for
it. She requested any details the Congressman might provide.
This type of
report, though difficult to prove, is also difficult to discount because it
seems largely corroborated when you scrutinize President Clinton’s overall
foreign policy. The issue appears nowhere on this President’s public agenda;
nowhere in his rhetoric. He does not raise it at appropriate summits, he does
not weave it into policy pertaining to the many benefits this country bestows
upon the countries involved. To be sure, whenever asked, the President’s men
and women repeat the mantra...fully committed to the fullest possible
accounting...but then seem to lack the political fortitude to do anything other
than ‘raise the issue’.
Work on this issue
cannot be delegated to the Joint Commission and left alone at higher levels of
the government. It must be actively supported by the White House, or it becomes
a sort of charade, no doubt designed to appease public sentiment and to provide
political cover.
As an indication
of the political landscape at work, consider that in the early 1990s, a
representative of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR) told
members of the Joint Commission that the subject of Russia’s recruitment of
Americans for intelligence purposes was off-limits to the Commission, and the
question of their fate was therefore beyond the scope of the Commission’s
jurisdiction.
Such a policy
would relieve the Russians of the obligation to produce information about any
men who they might have considered possible recruits. Since our own
intelligence reports, and those of returning POWs, clearly show that
essentially every POW was evaluated for propaganda potential, it seems the
Russians could easily dismiss their obligation to reveal to the Joint
Commission the fate of any missing servicemen. Indications to JCSD
investigators are that the off-limits policy, while not definitively spelled
out by the Russians in any public forum, is on-going.
If such a policy
were left unchecked, we would have a significant gap in the accounting process.
It is, thus, paramount that the White House..now and in the future... develop
and implement a policy whereby the Russians must openly address the reported
transfer of American servicemen to the former Soviet Union. It is not enough
that high ranking U.S. officials raise the issue. If just putting the issue on
the table were going to produce results, we would have had answers by now.
U.S. foreign
policy must address the consequences of an on-going failure to cooperate in a
meaningful way on the transfer question. It seems that the Russians have
determined to date that there will not be any such consequences. It will be up to
President Clinton, and his successor, to turn this situation around.