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Part 1: Introduction
Since it was established as a distinct
component of the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in the
fall of 1994, the Joint Commission Support Directorate has
carefully examined a series of reports and sightings of U.S.
servicemen held in the Soviet gulag, a network of penal camps
that crisscrossed the former Soviet Union.
Several points have become clear.
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Part 2: Three Shooting Wars, One Cold War, One Invasion
In World War I,
the Allies (United States, Britain, France, and Russia) fought
the Germans on the Western Front in Europe until the
Brest-Litovsk Treat of 1918, engineered by Lenin, pulled Russia
out of the war with Germany. One result of the treaty was an
Allied Expeditionary Force being sent to protect the Russian
ports of Murmansk and Archangel from the Germans. In a campaign
little known except to historians, Americans fought Soviet
Bolshevik forces in the Archangel area of the Northern USSR.
According to the Senate Report, “[a]s a result of the fighting
against Soviet Bolshevik forces around Archangel in 1918-1919,
there were many...eyewitness accounts of hundreds of U.S. and
British and French personnel who disappeared.”
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Part 3: The First and Second Vietnam Wars
The information
contained in the Senate Report and in “The Gulag Study,”
covering the period immediately after World War I to the eve of
the Vietnam War—through World War II, the Cold War, and The
Korean War—prove beyond any doubt that American military
personnel were held captive in the Soviet Union over the course
of some forty years, from approximately 1918 to 1960. Whether
these men were held by Soviets, Chinese, or Koreans; whether
they were enlisted or officers; whether they were native born or
immigrants; whether they were pilots or had other military
occupational specialties; whether they were wounded or not;
whether they were arrested, kidnapped, shot down, survived
crashes, not repatriated, or were POWs liberated by the Soviets
from Germans and Japanese prison camps; or whether they or fell
under communist control some other way—the unarguable fact is
that thousands-upon-thousands of our countrymen lived, and died,
in Soviet prisons, labor camps, “hospitals,” and
other detention facilities.
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Part 4: The Case of Captain Michael Joseph Bosiljevac
As noted, there
is overwhelming evidence that ever since Lenin’s gang took over
the Soviet Union in 1917 communists worldwide have been using
captured American military personnel “1) as leverage for
political bargaining, 2) as an involuntary source of technical
assistance, and 3) as forced labor.” As further noted, “there
were two other purposes for which the communists used American
POW/MIAs: 4) to obtain hard cash and needed goods, and, 5) to
turn them into human guinea pigs.” Based on the available
evidence, it is very likely that Mike Bosiljevac fell into at
least two of these five categories.
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Part 5: The Conclusion
In its 1978
reclassification of Mike from Missing in Action to Killed in
Action—a gambit that saved the government a lot of money—the
United States Air Force effectively wrote him off, literally and
figuratively. Even though from time to time tireless MIA-seekers
like Bill Bell would make inquiries to the Vietnamese about Mike
Bosiljevac’s status, after 1978 our government officially would
no longer make serious efforts to ascertain whether he might
still be alive, or even whether he had lived for some time after
his 1972 shoot down.
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About the Series
On November 24, 2007, American newspapers and
international news wire services carried the obituary of John H. Noble.
The Los Angeles Times headline read “John Noble, 84; wrote, lectured
about captivity in Soviet camps. The obituary went on to explain how
Noble, an American citizen, had survived World War II in Dresden,
Germany, been “liberated” by Soviet troops in 1945, and then spent years
as a slave “in the Vorkuta coal mine and prison complex near the Arctic
Circle.”
Although for years the Soviets denied knowing
anything about Noble, nearly ten years after his capture he was
released. Afterwards, John Noble tried to make the American people
understand that his was but one of countless similar stories—and that
thousands of Americans had vanished behind the Iron Curtain at the end
of the War.
But Noble’s story, as compelling and informative as
it was, did not start early enough.
The fact is that as early as World War I, when
American troops fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia, the communists
snatched and captured Americans who then vanished into the black hole of
the Soviet slave labor system. This communist tactic continued in the
1920s and 1930s, during and after World War II, throughout the Cold War,
in the Korean War, and, needless to say, as an integral part of North
Vietnamese strategy in the Vietnam war.
The following article reveals in detail this
decades-long unspeakable communist abuse of American military and
civilian personnel, and then focuses on one case in particular—that of
Air Force Captain Michael Joseph Bosiljevac. Mike—the Electronic
Warfare Officer in an F-105G, who earlier had worked in our atomic
weaponry program—was shot down in late September 1972, he landed safely,
and was never seen again.
Until, that is, 1987, when his skeleton was
suddenly returned to United States custody—containing extremely
suspicious coloration.
Mike’s story, and the tale of what began in the
frozen wastes of Siberia and has not yet ended for countless Americans
who vanished at the hands of communists, cries out to be told.
About the Author
Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a
constitutional and appellate lawyer. His most recent book 'The Supreme Court
Opinions of Clarence Thomas (1991-2006)' has just been published. He
maintains a website at
www.henrymarkholzer.com |
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