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“The Families Have Waited Long Enough!”

Kin of Cold War POW/MIAs Demand Action

(Memorial Day Weekend, 2016) The families of US aviators lost during spy flights near the Soviet Union, China and North Korea have fought for 60 years to learn the fate of their loved ones -- some captured alive according to intelligence reports. Now time is running out for the aging wives and sisters of the missing and they’ve grown tired of what they call indifference, stone-walling and secrecy from the U.S. government.

“The U.S. government has approached the investigation of its missing cases in a most ineffective way,” says Dr. Beverly Deane Shaver, 83, who learned decades after the loss of her husband Jim Deane that classified intelligence reports indicated he and a fellow crewman had been captured alive and tracked in Chinese captivity for at least two years after their plane was downed.

Sam Busch was on a plane attacked by the Soviets in 1952. The State Department later informed Moscow the United State was “compelled to believe” some of the plane’s crew were imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, and more information has surfaced in recent years that Busch and some of his fellow aviators were captured. But Busch’s wife Ruth recently died without ever learning his fate, which his sister Charlotte Busch Mitnik, now 82, blames in substantial part on indifference by the U.S. government. “There has been nothing new for years (from the Pentagon). Every year the same b.s.”

The Pentagon has recently been forced to admit its much-publicized agreement to pay China for research in Beijing’s archives has failed to resolve the case of even a single American known or suspected to have been in Chinese hands during the Korean and Cold Wars. Beijing in effect pulled a “bait and switch” on the U.S., admitting years after signing the archives agreement that it considered files on Americans in its prisons “classified” and not part of the deal. Meantime, the US-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs has essentially ground to a halt due to the tense relationship between Washington and Moscow. Former insiders say Moscow has played a “shell game” on U.S. investigators, providing access to some documents and sources but protecting files from the KGB/GRU (military intelligence) that could probably reveal the fate of many Americans.

A Russian team from the Commission is now visiting Washington, we’ve been told, but the Pentagon has kept the visit under wraps and failed even to inform POW/MIA families now meeting near Washington, mere miles from Russian officials who might be able to account for their loved ones. “It’s just another way they (Pentagon POW/MIA officials) do things, not including family members,” says Janella Rose, sister of a Vietnam War POW/MIA and chairperson of the National Alliance for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen. “It’s a pretty sad situation that the government keeps stonewalling families.”

“It’s scandalous,” asserts Norm Kass, the former executive director of the U.S. side of the Commission, who notes the Pentagon has even removed from its web site large volumes of information Kass and his investigators obtained in the former Soviet Union. Kass, a Russian linguist and Vietnam veteran, compares the removal of the information and Pentagon failures to follow up on it to “Soviet revisionist history.” He attributes the situation to persistent bureaucratic infighting at the Pentagon that has impeded efforts to account for the missing, including those reported by former senior Soviet officers and other witnesses to have been shipped to Siberia.

Perhaps most infuriating to many family members is the continued classification of America’s own POW/MIA-related information, much dating to the 1950s, and the failure of Pentagon leaders to locate and then act on intelligence information obtained at the time the aviators were lost.

“I cannot fathom why this is still happening, other that there is still so much we are not being told,” says Terri Mumley, whose grandfather Lloyd Smith was reportedly captured by the Chinese in 1953 after he and another Naval aviator drifted ashore near Shantou, China. The Associated Press reported a manhunt for the survivors and U.S. intelligence received multiple reports they had survived and been captured, including one from a foreign missionary. A classified Navy report concluded: “It is the opinion of this command that Smith and his companion survived the ditching without injury and were probably taken prisoner by the Chinese Communists.” But the men were declared dead anyway. “Why did they ever consider him dead?” asks Mumley.

“We have no conclusive proof U. S. POWs were held after their loss incident or are living

in those countries,” says a recent statement from Michael Linnington, the director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the most recent incarnation of the long scandal-ridden Pentagon POW/MIA operation.

decision by leaders of the Pentagon’s POW/MIA bureaucracy, who typically rotate through rapidly in association with a continued strong of scandal and Congressional investigation.

At first the government simply covered up, telling the families their loved ones had died on training missions.

“It’s just another way they (DPAA) do things, not including family members,” says Janella Rose “It’s a pretty sad situation that the government keeps stonewalling families.”

“We have no conclusive proof that remains of POWs from the above wars were imprisoned in

those countries. It follows that no cases of Americans held in the Soviet Union, FSU (Former Soviet Union, or Warsaw Pact have been resolved by the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission,” Linnington asserted in his statement to us (obtained with the assistance of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and his indefatigable staffer Lillian Cruz.)

This assertion amazes and infuriates Kass, the former Commission executive. “I don’t know who’s writing Linnington’s scripts, but they should be fired,” he said, citing multiple cases in which the Commission’s had helped led to the recovery of U.S. remains in the Former Soviet Union and even Vietnam. These include celebrated cases such as the recovery of the Capt. John Dunham, a downed Cold War aviator secretly buried on Soviet territory in 1952, six members of a U.S. reconnaissance plane downed over then Soviet-Armenia in 1958 and other cases not widely publicized.

The comment also implies that no American POW/MIA were ever in the Soviet Union, so the Joint Commission should not expect to find any -- a position that contradicts available intelligence and numerous previous Pentagon and Commission statements, plus sends a message to Moscow that America’s top POW/MIA official may not expect tangible results from the Commission. Kass suspects the Pentagon may even be conducting an “intentional campaign” to downplay the Joint Commission.

“There have been no cases of Americans last known alive in Chinese custody resolved by files

provided under the Department of Defense China archival program. China has not provided any classified files associated with Richard Desautels, Gerald Glasser, Harry Moreland or other

Americans.”

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. George OrwellRead more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_orwell.html

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” ― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

"In Front of Your Nose," Tribune (22 March 1946)

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

"The Freedom of the Press", unused preface to Animal Farm (1945), published in Times Literary Supplement (15 September 1972)

The Cold War cases began in earnest during April 1950, when a Navy PBY4 “Privateer” was shot down by Soviet fighters over the Baltic Sea. During the following years, reports of surviving crewmen from the plane began to escape the Soviet Union.

One of the aviators aboard was Joe Danens, who had married a couple years before. “Can you imagine? Its 1948 and the Jewish girl Ruth Feinberg from Passaic, NJ and Joe Danens part Native American (Blackfoot) from Cutbank, MT got married,” recalls Ruth’s daughter Gail Miney.  “Not all that common in those days.”

U.S. investigators from the Joint Commission uncovered reports the spy plane had been salvaged, but Stalin himself ordered that fact kept secret from the U.S. These facts were supported by previously classified U.S. Navy intelligence files that concluded the Soviet Navy was operating captured US electronic equipment similar that that on the Privateer. “In view of the successful salvaging and operation of the electronic equipment, there exists the possibility that some or all of the crew were taken into custody and are being held by the Soviets,” the Navy concluded.

“There exist a number of reports from released Gulag inmates indicating that there were indeed survivors from this flight who were imprisoned in the Gulag. There are enough of these reports over the years to suggest that they cannot be ignored,” U.S. investigators concluded in the 1990s, adding” the frequency, content, and timeframe of these reports at a minimum suggest that some American aviators were detained in the Gulag.”

After Joe’s death, Ruth married Robert Miney, a Navy flyer. Several years later Miney’s plane disappeared during a routine flight over the Atlantic; no survivors were found.

“Once again, no bodies, no plane recovery, no explanation of what happened.,” recalls Gail, her daughter. “Honestly, I don't know how my mother coped with these tragedies.” But the 92-year-old continues to request answers from the government for which she and her two lost husbands sacrificed so much.

“My grandfather’s legacy and what he gave for his country is why I wear a uniform, and why four of my sons wear a uniform,” says Terri Mumley, a full-time non-commissioned officer with the National Guard. “We have all answered the call just as my grandfather did and by answering that call we expect that our country will not leave us behind in a foreign land to suffer. It is time we demand accounting for those that were left behind. This Government owes that to them!”