The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (57 page)

Forty-four years after this meeting in the hospital, Vladimir Trotsenko saw an advertisement in a Khabarovsk city newspaper and came forward with his evidence. The American investigators interviewed Trotsenko twice and were convinced of his authenticity. But when they put their findings to the Russian side of the Joint Commission, the information was received with overt skepticism and the accuracy of Trotsenko’s account was called into question. According to a Russian colonel, Vinogradov, “There are many inventive people in Russia who can conjure up good fairy tales.” Three visits were made to the hospital, and it was discovered that Trotsenko’s memory for key details of the building and its grounds were correct. A U.S. Navy historian also confirmed that between 1940 and 1956, the dog tags issued had been round and not rectangular. The grave of the fifth American was searched for in the hospital cemetery, and although remains were exhumed, they were not matched by DNA testing for ethnicity. Of the four surviving Americans, no further evidence was discovered, barring the self-evident facts that they had been seen alive in a Russian military hospital as prisoners and they had never returned home.
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Another witness, a former Soviet MVD colonel, Vladimir Malinin in response to an advertisement claimed to have seen a group of foreign prisoners in a Leningrad KGB prison in 1953 or 1954, who had waved at him from a separate room and shouted “American, American, American.” Later, on duty in Kolyma, Malinin was told that “there was a nuclear power generating plant far north of Magadan and that a number of uranium mines were located within eighty kilometres of the plant. Foreign prisoners were used exclusively in this work area . . . Prisoners who were sent there were not expected to return.”
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General Georgi Lobov, the former commander of the Soviet Sixty-Fourth Fighter Aviation Corps, was interviewed by a Russian journalist for a newspaper article:
“I know that in summer [of] 1952 at least 30-40 American POWs were placed in a separate and closely guarded carriage, attached to a goods train, and sent to the USSR . . . They must have been a treasure-trove . . . This is what I know for certain. As regards the subsequent fate of those 30-40 Americans, I, like yourself, can only guess.”
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Colonel Pavel Derzskii, the former adviser to the Soviet ambassador in North Korea, told the American commission that there had been a standing order to send captured American pilots back to the Soviet Union. Another witness, Colonel Gavril Korotkov, stated that he had personally interrogated two American prisoners of war in Khabarovsk during the Korean War.
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In his interview, Korotkov discussed the method by which Americans had been screened in North Korea, and then transferred north for further interrogation in the USSR. In a subsequent interview, however, the colonel became more cautious. Korotkov explained that he had received phone calls and a late-night visitor whose behavior left him with the impression that he was from the “special services.” His subsequent testimony became more tentative— retracting key points, Korotkov equivocated on the most politically sensitive details.
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Later, during a subsequent Joint Commission meeting, Colonel Mazurov of the Russian security forces denied that any pressure had been brought to bear on Korotkov:
“I exerted no pressure—if I wanted to exert pressure, I wouldn’t do it by telephone, but by other means.”
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IN PURSUIT OF such clues, the Joint Commission continued its work in Russia. Led by aging witnesses, they searched for the missing American servicemen, and found only fragments of their lives. In 1999, their patience was, in a sense, rewarded when the American investigator Norman Kass unearthed the unpublished memoir of a Russian survivor of the camps, the response to another radio advertisement. The survivor was interviewed and his testimony judged to be the credible witness statement of a former prisoner in his late seventies, who had spent many years in the Gulag. Perhaps mindful of the forces brought to bear on previous witnesses, initially a decision was made to keep his identity secret. Only later was it revealed that Kass had found the memoir of Benjamin Dodin.

Key details of Dodin’s recollections were checked against what was known of the historical record. The director of Memorial, the Russian organization dedicated to the victims of Stalinism, confirmed the existence of Rybak, “a top-secret uranium mine located on the Leningradskaya River,” where Dodin reported he had encountered the “citizen of the United States of America, Allied Officer Dale.” No known archival records existed from Rybak, but geologists who had spent time there had passed on their knowledge to Memorial. When the Americans examined military records for the existence of the officer whose gaunt face Dodin remembered so clearly, they discovered two “Dales” listed as missing from World War II: Lieutenant Harvey Dale and Lieutenant William Dale.
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There were other American prisoners documented by name in the Dodin memoir. From the U.S. Air Force archives, it was already established that an RB-29 aircraft stationed at Yokota Air Force Base, Japan, had been shot down on June 13, 1952, while on a reconnaissance mission over the Sea of Japan. During the American search-and-rescue efforts one, possibly two, empty life rafts were spotted in the water, but no survivors or bodies were picked up, and a presumptive finding of death was issued to the entire aircrew on November 14, 1955. Benjamin Dodin had given the names of two of the men recovered by the Soviet authorities as “Bush and Moore.” In the U.S. Air Force records, the crew list of the lost RB-29 included a “Major Samuel Busch” and a “Master Sergeant David Moore.”

For decades, skeptics had doubted the credibility of the witness testimony of Gulag survivors. In key details, Dodin’s memoir validated the essential truthfulness of such men and women. It was also apparent that both Major Samuel Busch and Master Sergeant David Moore had been declared dead when they were still alive and imprisoned in the USSR. After the shoot-down, the U.S. government had issued a formal diplomatic note asking for an investigation into the missing aircrew of the RB-29, among several other lost planes of the Cold War. But such diplomatic requests were routinely ignored or denied by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and when released to the American media, had warranted only a few lines in
The New York Times
of July 17, 1956. Nothing more was said or done. And just three years later, Nikita Khrushchev received his rapturous welcome on a state visit to the United States.
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For Major Samuel Busch’s surviving sister, Charlotte Busch Mitnik, the latest evidence was little comfort for the years spent agonizing over her brother’s fate. Her reaction was guarded:
“Time after time we asked the government to help us with our search for the truth. All we had received in the past were lies, half-truths and misinformation. How do you mourn a POW/MIA? You can’t, you don’t . . . We must insist that our government make North Korea, China, and Russia accountable as to what happened . . . These men paid the ultimate price, their lives. The cost was not too great for those men or their families to pay.”
For certain families, the price paid was disproportionately high. The Busch family had already lost one son, Morris T. Busch, killed in action during the liberation of France in World War II.
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What happened to Major Samuel Busch after the shoot-down of his plane remained unknown. However, one document relating to his fate was discovered in the Russian state archives. A military report dated June 13, 1952, had been sent to Joseph Stalin. The report, marked “top secret,” recorded the American search-and-rescue efforts for their missing aircraft and stated that the shoot-down had been recorded on film. But neither the photography nor the fate of the missing crew could be discovered.
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At their meetings, the Russian side of the investigation could seldom explain the American evidence. Usually an effort was made to call into question the authenticity of the American sources, which were usually eyewitness accounts with little or no documentation. And throughout the period of the investigation, the Russians steadfastly refused to open the KGB archives or Stalin’s personal archives for examination. It was evident, if always diplomatically expressed, that passive resistance took precedence over active quest. Any other outcome smacked too much of Cold War defeat for the Russians, or triumph on the part of the Americans. Colonel Mazurov, formerly of the KGB, first expressed this view in a meeting in 1993:
“We studied your report, sixty percent of the information was obtained from ex-prisoners . . . These people have their own axes to grind.”
A decade later, a Colonel Vinogradov of the FSB reported “to the incredulity of the US side” that
“a check of camp statistics revealed that there had been no American citizens detained anywhere in the camp system of the former USSR.”
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When the same Colonel Vinogradov was presented with the memoirs of Benjamin Dodin, he commented that such evidence was “not realistic.” It was a “waste of time for Russians and Americans to follow up on such bad information,” which he claimed was a “fairy tale.” It was the same metaphor once used by the prisoners of Kolyma—“just like a fairy tale,” the years and their lives had disappeared.
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IN AUGUST 2001, some fifty-seven years after Henry Wallace’s ill-fated visit, Major-General Roland Lajoie boarded a plane for Far East Russia. As the leader of the American commission, Lajoie was in charge of overseeing the examination of the crash site of a U.S. Navy bomber missing since March 1944. Forensic scientists from the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory had recovered human bone fragments from the isolated site in Kamchatka scattered across the steep slope of a volcano, amid scrub brush and wildflowers. But despite months of painstaking investigation, the scientists had failed to locate the remains of the whole crew. Their bodies may have been taken away by wild animals; they may also have been removed by the authorities at the time. It was not known.

Standing next to the wreckage of the American plane broken into silver pieces over the desolate landscape, Major-General Lajoie spoke cautiously to American and Russian television news: “People are reluctant to talk about MIAs in the past tense for fear they might be alive, regardless of how many years go by.” If Lajoie understood that the history of the missing American servicemen cast a long shadow beyond this brief flare of media interest, then he was doubtless also aware that Russia’s vast empty spaces had a habit of throwing up the most unlikely of survival stories.
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Just the year before, in April 2000, a Hungarian soldier had been discovered in a psychiatric institute in the depths of rural Russia, missing since World War II, unclaimed and forgotten for over half a century. Judging from his physical condition, doctors assumed that he was around seventy-five years old. His medical files stated that he had been in a “pitiful state” when he had first arrived, “emaciated in the extreme and suffering from extreme psychosis”—a not uncommon condition for a Gulag survivor. Eventually, with care and attention, the traumatized patient was able to tell his carers that his real name was Andras Toma and that he came from a village in eastern Hungary. Six weeks later he was reunited with the brother and sister he had last seen as a nineteen-year-old conscript.
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Nor was Andras Toma’s case unique. Two years earlier, in 1998, Kenji Maruko, a Japanese prisoner of war, was found living in Siberia and returned to a rapturous welcome in his home country—fifty years after being imprisoned in the Gulag at the end of World War II. Maruko told the press he had forgotten how to speak Japanese. In 1990, Ivan Bushilo, a Byelorussian peasant, reappeared in his village after forty-two years as a hermit hiding in the dense forest. In 1947 he had been called an “enemy of the people” by a local militiaman and Bushilo had fled to live alone for four decades in fear.
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A Polish prisoner, “Mr. Strajinski,” was reported to have died in a psychiatric prison hospital in Raizan, aged eighty-two, having survived fifty-one years of incarceration. Victor Hamilton, a defector from the National Security Agency, was discovered in 1992 at Special Hospital No. Five, near Moscow, where he had been held since 1962 and known only by the letter “K.” The Memorial psychiatrists had long experience of treating such “unknown people with unknown identities.” It would, of course, take a miracle to discover an aged American serviceman still alive in some remote Russian backwater.
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In September 1992, a letter was sent to investigators describing an American encountered in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 1979 who was seen again in 1986. The man went by the name of “Vladimir,” spoke fluent English, and claimed to be an American pilot. Stripped of its wider context, the details of this single thread seemed far-fetched. And yet history is full of such improbabilities: the lost human casualties of a great ideological conflict. They were the men who were left behind. According to the American investigation, there were “hundreds like him.”
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THE WORK OF the Russian-American commission has reached stasis in its second decade, as the search for witnesses and evidence struggles against time and the priorities of international relations. The last best hope lies within the archives of the former KGB, which may yet provide definitive knowledge for the families of the disappeared, for the men themselves, and for history. According to the American investigators, three quarters of the available archival evidence has yet to be examined, despite the fact that Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin once described each other as friends and allies.
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While the KGB archives and Stalin’s personal archives remain closed, there is little cause for optimism. In all likelihood, the demands of realpolitik have already prevailed. From the Russian side, a view is likely to have been taken that the release of such information would be too damaging to the reputation of the former Soviet Union and, by extension, the contemporary Russian state. Vladimir Putin remains, after all, a former lieutenant-colonel of the KGB. In the past decade, sage eyes have long recognized the ongoing shifts in the political landscape of Russia—the signals that began with the reinstatement of the former Soviet national anthem and the choice to commemorate the anniversary of Stalin’s secret service with a set of postage stamps bearing the portraits of six NKVD agents. The warnings continued with the use of Stalin’s portrait in an election campaign for the ruling United Russia Party, and the murder of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in London by the use of the poison polonium-210, allowing his killers sufficient time to return to Moscow, leaving a trail of radioactivity in their wake. The chief suspect of the murder, a former FSB operative, Andrei Lugovoi, was then “elected” to Russia’s national parliament.