'Manchurian Candidate' Was No Mere Fiction

Still, as Homeland dramatizes, brainwashing is not necessary to produce spies – indoctrination and blackmail are quite sufficient. U.S. military intelligence certainly understood this in 1953 and eventually confirmed that some returned Progressives had indeed received missions from their captors. A soldier we’ll call “Corp. C.” admitted that in North Korea he “accepted an espionage mission in the United States, and in preparation therefor, accepted training and instruction in the espionage service of the Chinese Communist Government …,” a now-declassified intelligence file reported (Because people mentioned in the declassified documents may still be alive, their names are redacted here.)

Remarkably, after coming under scrutiny, Corp. C. legally registered as an official “foreign agent,” apparently to avoid penalties against unregistered agents. The Army had the registration yanked from public examination in the “interest of national security” (we could not determine which country Corp. C represented, presumably China or the Soviet Union.) A returned prisoner of Filipino descent, the files said, had been ordered to conduct espionage, including recruiting agents, first in the Philippines and then Indonesia. The intent of another returnee, “Corp. S.,” was “to commit sabotage against the U.S.” and overthrow the government. 

Awaiting their homecoming in America was a network of sympathizers and friendly organizations. The CPUSA, or Communist Party USA, was to keep the men under surveillance, according to one report (a separate file shows the name, address and phone number of a returnee was found in possession of a “known (civilian) communist” named “M.G.”)  Some returnees were to report for membership in the Party. New York’s Jefferson School of Social Sciences, a large left-wing academic institution, was recommended as a place to study. More ominously, “Soldier H.” confessed he and others were told to join the Save Our Sons (SOS) Committee, an Illinois-based group claiming to represent families of GIs in POW camps and on the battlefield. Said to reach 17 states and send information to 3,000 parents of imprisoned servicemen, the group also petitioned the President and members of Congress. 

The Chairman of SOS, "Mrs. G.," had a son-in-law wounded in the war. But the son-in-law did not support the group, an FBI informant close to the group later testified to Congress in 1956, reporting Mrs. G. had been an active member of the Communist Party long before the war and subsequent launch of SOS. 

SOS was well known to U.S. POWs in North Korea, returned prisoner Dale Jones testified in that 1956 congressional hearing. The Chinese even suggested Jones sign an SOS petition to avoid punishment for getting in a fight. “Well, they used to ask us to do things like that. They told us that we weren't forced to do nothing like that, but we were in no position to refuse,” he told a questioner. “Well, it meant just that – if you did go against them and refused them a lot of times, be reactionary (note: resistant or pro-American) toward them, you might just some night disappear out of the camp, like a lot of boys did.” (For information on such disappearances, like that of Sgt. Richard Desautels, spirited away to China from a Korean prison camp and never returned, see www.kpows.com)

Back at home, apparently unknown to Jones in his frigid hovel thousands of miles away, SOS distributed a letter it claimed was written by him. Like many of the group’s communications, the screed echoed communist negotiating points. It read in part: “Thousands of people are dying just because there are a few individuals who want a little more for themselves. … (I)t is up to all the peace-loving people of the world to make more and more people see how they are being fooled by these handful (sic) of profit-makers …” Once home, Jones denied before Congress that he had penned the missive. Such bombast did seem unlikely from a soldier with just an eighth-grade education, one congressman concluded sympathetically.

Faced during the hearing with questions about this letter and the group’s operations and finances, Mrs. G. and SOS’s treasurer took the Fifth repeatedly.

The U.S. Postal Service was also a cruel tool for other people and groups - some apparently part of a shadowy network - that contacted relatives of missing and imprisoned GIs. An FBI official at the time described such letters to family members as “exploiting them for information, propaganda, or money.” In some cases, mysterious correspondence arrived from abroad, including Czechoslovakia, a close Soviet ally with a presence in North Korea. Many others were sent from inside America. Aside from political points, the correspondence sometimes implied that contacting a certain foreign address or sending money to the letter writer’s organization might lead to information about a missing loved one, or better treatment for a known POW, said reports at the time. We found evidence of such letters being sent long after the war. Aside from propaganda and fund-raising (probably including scams by common crooks), the letter campaigns may have advanced intelligence-gathering objectives still unknown.

Meanwhile, Army intelligence was running its own Top Secret operation involving mail, this one to intercept and withhold certain correspondence home from American prisoners in Korea. Letters from “PFC S.” were held back “because of evidence of collaboration and the fact that his parents, active in Communist movements on the West Coast, use material furnished by him in making additional contacts and spreading Communist propaganda,” revealed a document from the program.

The exact size, extent and duration of Moscow and Beijing’s Korean War POW espionage operations, and America’s response, remain unknown. Although a 1950s media report claimed up to 75 returned prisoners were espionage agents, declassified files show the actual number of detected operatives was much lower. Right after the war, military officials and the FBI were surprisingly lenient with these suspects and other collaborators, perhaps because a segment of public opinion opposed vigorous prosecution of servicemen who, despite their potential crimes, had certainly suffered during captivity. This somewhat relaxed attitude changed briefly in 1959 when the House Un-American Activities Committee asked the Army for detailed information on returned spies. Bureaucratic alarm ensued as Army officials reviewed their files and the effectiveness of their coordination with the FBI, which assumed jurisdiction over returnees once they left the military. 

Documents from this review show the focus remained on Progressives, many from the same North Korean prison camp. They were generally lower-ranking Army enlisted men whose wartime cooperation with camp officials had been blatant, such as making propaganda statements or acting as leaders in communist activities. Some had spent time alone with top Chinese commissars. Our review of internal Army suspect files found the “short lists” had relatively few officers and were surprisingly lacking in men who seemed destined for high or sensitive positions. None of them appeared to be a “Raymond Shaw,” the politically-connected POW in The Manchurian Candidate, or a ranking official of the importance and prospects of England’s George Blake.

Had the communists restricted their elaborately planned recruiting efforts only to known Progressives, who aside from their generally low positions and weak personalities were also the most obvious targets for U.S. spy hunters? Not likely. An Army intelligence expert on the POW issue was quoted as saying that some Reactionaries, or pro-Americans, had missing time (our term) in their histories of captivity. He asserted they had been removed from the regular prisoner population, indoctrinated and given intelligence training, and then returned - so their fellow prisoners and U.S. intelligence would never suspect them.

Another source of potential low-profile, high-quality spies was the population of American prisoners who never returned from captivity (other than the 21 known U.S. "turncoats" remaining in China). Among some 8,000 American POW/MIAs who did not return from Korea, intelligence reports indicated, were men secretly held in China and the Soviet Union. The reported motive: Exploitation for espionage, propaganda, intelligence and even technical and unskilled labor. The Soviets, whose fighter pilots downed many Americans during the Korean War, viewed all-out war with the U.S. as a real possibility, so captured pilots and other experts on U.S. weapons and technology had great value. Other Americans might be assigned to “high-level propaganda purposes” such as establishment of an “American Government in Exile,” reported one military intelligence report. (When the Korean War started, the Soviets already had a sophisticated, nation-wide program to use foreign POWs for propaganda, technology development and spying – it was then focused on German and Japanese prisoners from WWII.)