Korean War's Ghost Pilots and Mystery Planes

The release of incomplete documents can pose even more questions for the Russians. For example, as far as we can tell Moscow has not provided scores of POW interrogation reports that other records indicate should exist. In other words, as with the MGB/KGB records, it appears Russia has classified and is withholding the very files the U.S. most needs to see. But the U.S. government is not entirely cooperative either. John Zimmerlee, the researcher and son of a Korean War POW/MIA, has been battling the U.S. National Archives this year to obtain large numbers of documents, some still classified after more than 50 years.

KorCon has found wartime CIA documents, declassified only in recent years, that apparently never surfaced(at least publicly) during Congressional investigations of the Korean POW issue in the 1990s and may not have been shared with senior U.S. officials of the Joint Commission either. One CIA report covered a communist POW interrogation center that operated at different, specified locations starting in 1951: “Most of the inmates were U.S. airmen … and after interrogation were taken to the USSR.” The reported also noted that “Natives of the area said they had seen a group of about seven persons, reportedly ‘U.S. Army spies,’ including U.S. Nisei (Japanese-American) soldiers,” at the center in 1952. Another document is subtitled “PWs Expected from Korea, including Americans” and reports the Soviets in 1951 were preparing a specified Ukrainian prison, formerly used to house German POWs, to accept American prisoners. 

Those CIA documents join others released in the past that detail Soviet abduction of American prisoners, but the most persuasive details come from former Soviet officials themselves. Several retired senior Soviet military and intelligence officers, both on and off the record, have confirmed that dozens of Americans, at least, were shipped to the Soviet Union and never returned. In one case, a former Soviet military official reported details about a U.S. pilot from Korea who was captured with his plane and taken to a specific facility in Russia where, over an identified span of years, he was forced to assume a Russian name and provide certain types of technical assistance; KorCon is not providing additional details, including the potential identify of the American, at the request of a POW/MIA family. 

Col. Pavel Grigorevich Derzskii had a “distinguished military career” and was a senior advisor to Moscow’s top official in the Korean theater. He not only told U.S. investigators that American pilots had been sent to the Soviet Union, he said it was a standing order he helped execute. Not only that, Derzskii recounted that he himself captured an American pilot.

While returning from visiting his family in China “he saw a plane make a forced landing in a rice paddy not far from the road on which he was traveling. Initially, he thought it was a Soviet plane, but upon reaching the site, he realized that it was an American aircraft. Derzskii immediately sent his interpreter to call Col. Gen. Shtykov (the senior Soviet official) with the news. Then together with his driver, he helped the American pilot out of his aircraft and administered first aid to him,” a U.S. report recounts. Derzskii said when he visited the hospital some time later, he saw what he believed to be the same American pilot. The jet and pilot were taken to the Soviet Union, Derzskii said.

Mikhail Yakovlevich Fomin said he was commander of the 2nd Squadron, 117th Fighter Aviation Regiment, 50th Fighter Aviation Division when he met an American F-86 pilot in December of 1950 or January of 1951. He told American investigators that Chinese personnel brought the American to a room with a stage at his base in Antung (now Dandong), China, where Soviet pilots and aircraft operated in relative safety behind the Chinese border. The American addressed the Soviet pilots in the unit, using a Russian interpreter, on the training of U.S. pilots and capabilities of their aircraft. Fomin said the American was young and thin. He showed his military identification card and a document indicating Americans were paid money for shooting down Soviet planes. Fomin says he learned the American was a member of the Republican Party. The pilot was taken away by Chinese (KorCon note: The handlers may have been Chinese, but Soviet intelligence sometimes used ethnic Asians to impersonate Chinese and North Koreans).

Soviet fighter pilot and squadron commander Vasily Nikolayevich Shalev said he met an American prisoner brought to his airfield in Mukden (now known as Shenyang and the focus of other sightings of American prisoners, including Army Sgt. Richard Desautels, whom the Chinese have admitted taking from Korea; see www.kpows.com). Shalev said the American was an aviator from a B-29 downed in May 1951. A young man with light-colored hair, the American said his tour of duty was almost over when he was shot down. He shared pictures of his family, a wife and daughter about eight years old. Shalev said the America stayed at his base for several days; Soviet pilots ate with the American and asked him questions about the U.S. Air Force before he was taken away.

Another Soviet pilot, Nikolay Pavlovich Alintsev, reported rumors of an American pilot captured by his unit in the summer of 1951. He heard the pilot was a handsome blond man who turned 30 on the day he was shot down. U.S. investigators associated the case with Capt. William Delbert Crone, who was shot down on June 18, 1951, his 30th birthday. Another Russian, Vladimir Mikhailovich Roschchin, separately said he had been shown the ID card of an American officer named, he explained (apparently in Russian), “Kron.” 

These helpful sources can also assist American investigators in determining what happened to pilots who fell into Chinese or North Korean hands. Mikhail Ivanovich Dramenko was commanding a Soviet anti-aircraft artillery unit when he saw an F-86 shot down in spring 1953 close to a nearby hydroelectric station. The pilot ejected successfully. “When the American landed he was captured, blindfolded, and taken away by North Korean soldiers,” Dramenko reported. Pentagon investigators noted: “Two American pilots shot down in the Spring/Early summer of 1953 were last seen alive on the ground and are listed as MIA. These were John E. Southerland, shot down on June 6, 1953, and Joseph P. Ziegler, April 23, 1953.” Searchlight operator Ivan Khoteevich Khomenko said he too saw an American pilot in the hands of North Koreans during the late spring or early summer of 1953. The American was tall, in his mid-20s, had brown hair and was wearing a flight suit. He showed the Soviets a picture of himself with his wife and son before he was taken away. U.S. investigators also associated this sighting with the cases of John Southerland and Joseph Ziegler.  

KorCon wonders what the American leaders of 1953 would think about such Russian confessions of what were once top state secrets, or how the U.S. government has handled them. At the end of the Korean War, U.S. officials were frustrated at their inability to recover all American POWs, according to their statements and previously classified documents. Public demands for an accounting by the communists did no good. A year after the war, according to a newly revealed 1954 document, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining requested covert C.I.A. assistance to recover “an unknown but apparently substantial number of U.S. military personnel captured in the course of the Korean War (who) are still being held prisoners by the Communist Forces.” Soon after, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow delivered a note to the Soviet government asking it “to arrange their (U.S. POWs taken from Korea to the Soviet Union) repatriation at the earliest possible time.” The Soviets simply denied they had the prisoners. 

By 1955, many in the Pentagon had apparently given up hope of recovering the men from such an implacable enemy, according to a then-classified memo: “The problem becomes almost a philosophical one. If we are ‘at war,’ cold, hot or otherwise, casualties and losses must be expected and perhaps we must learn to live with this sort of thing. If we are in for 50 years of peripheral ‘fire fights’ we may be forced to adopt a rather cynical attitude on this (the POWs) for the political reasons.”  

Now that 50-year period is up and the President of the United States has announced a “reset” with a Russian nation freed of Soviet control. In 1996, the U.S. side of the USRJC issued a “comprehensive report” stating - in what appears to be diplomatic understatement based on the contents of the voluminous report - “the probability is high that transfers (of U.S. POWs to the Soviet Union) took place.” Yet since then the most basic questions about America’s lost heroes continue to go unanswered in a bog of Russian obstruction and Pentagon bureaucracy. Almost 20 years after compelling evidence emerged that Russia retained U.S. pilots, successive U.S. administrations have failed to secure the return of the men or their remains. Unlike jet aircraft recognition, it doesn’t take much training to identify a “cynical attitude.”