THE WASHINGTON TIMES: Wednesday, September 18, 1996
- AMERICAN POWs BECAME "GUINEA PIGS"..
- CZECH tells of Soviets' horrific tests.
BY Ruth Larson The Washington Times
Hundreds of U.S. prisoners of war in North Korea and Vietnam were used as "guinea pigs" in grisly experiments on the effects of radiation and biological weapons, a high-ranking Czech defector told a House panel yesterday.
A former aide to President Eisenhower described some of the Soviet experiments on Americans as "Nazi-like".
The prisoners, the defector said, were "used to test the effects of chemical and biological warfare agents and to test the effects of atomic radiation."
Other prisoners were used to train military doctors in the techniques of performing amputations.
Still other witnesses said more than 900 American POWs were believed left behind in North Korea in 1953, a charge reinforced by newly declassified records released by the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel.
Jan Sejna, a former Czech general who now works for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, said he did not know the fate of all the missing POWs.
"But I do know what happened to many of them," he said. "In brief, hundreds were used in North Korea and in Vietnam as human guinea pigs."
When the Korean War began, the Soviets ordered Czechoslovakia to build a military hospital in North Korea under the pretense of treating military casualties.
Soviet and Czech doctors actually used the hospital to experiment on POWs, Mr. Sejna said. For example, to perfect interrogation techniques, doctors used various mind-control drugs to test the psychological endurance of American GIs.
Mr. Sejna was a senior communist official in Czechoslovakia's defense military when he defected in February 1069 -- one of the highest-ranking COMMUNIST officials ever to defect. He had been a member of parliament who met regularly with top Soviet officials.
"The Soviets were deadly serious in their preparation for nuclear war and in their development of various drugs and chemicals that were to be used," Mr. Sejna said. "Because America was the main enemy, American POWs were the most highly valued experimental subjects."
More than 8,000 U.S. servicemen are listed as missing from the Korean War and more than 2,100 from the Vietnam War.
Retired Army Col. Phillip Corso, a mililtary aide to President Eisenhower, blamed the Soviet Union for what he termed "Nazi-style" experiments. "The brainwashing and atrocities against American prisoners wre conscious acts of Soviet policy," he said.
"In 1953, 500 sick and wounded American prisoners were within 10 miles of the prisoner exchange point at Pamnunjom [Korea] but were never exchanged." Later reports indicated those POWs had died.
But at least 900 others -- perhaps as many as 1,200 -- were shipped by rail to the Soviet Union, Col. Corso said, "to be exploited for intelligence pur- poses and subsequently eliminated."
Newly released documents appear to bolster such statements. For instance, a Dec. 22, 1953, memo recounts a conversation between Mr. Eisenhower and Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens about more than 900 missing prisoners.
Mr. Stevens said the Army had the names of "610 Army people that have just disappeared from the camps. The Air Force has over 300. . . which has led them to believe that they may be holding technicians."
Other documents suggest the Soviets planned to use the identities of dead Americans to provide cover for Soviet agents to be planted in the United States and other countries.
Joseph D. Douglass, a private defense analyst, charged that "thousands of American youth who went to war to serve their country were knowingly and deliberately abandoned after the war was over. . . to a life worse than death."
Mr. Sejna said he believes all but 100 of the POWs were killed in the Korean experiments. The remaining 100 were flown first to Czechoslovakia for medical exams and then to the Soviet Union.
"The same things happened in Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War," Mr. Sejna said. "The only difference is the operation in Vietnam was better planned and more American POWs were used."
Mr. Sejna said he helped organize shipments of POW's to the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War and actually saw some POWs arrive in Prague. He estimated that at least 200 were sent by that route to the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1968.
The North Korean government has said it is not holding any Americans . A number of U.S. defectors are known to live in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
- OUR TOP PRIORITY POW/MIA/VETS BBS
- Dedicated to achieving a full accounting!
Return to Contents Page
Return to The RATS Home Page