From Mark Sauter: "In April 1990, a 30-year-old Mark Sauter, trim and with a full head of hair, arrived at the regularly scheduled State Department press briefing with a camera crew. Then a local investigative reporter in Seattle, I was in DC to ask questions about evidence I had uncovered indicating US POWs had been held in the Soviet Union after WWII, Korea, and the Cold War.
The evidence included long-buried US intelligence reports revealed by the Freedom of Information Act; diplomatic files from the US National Archives and Presidential libraries; and information from interviews with veterans of the wars, an independent researcher named Jim Sanders, and the relatives of missing Americans such as Dolores Alfond, Bill Sowles and his mother, and Rita Van Wees, who had been protesting and investigating since her Silver Star-winning son Dutch disappeared in Korean and never returned home in 1953.
The evidence left little doubt that American officials had strong reason to believe US servicemen had been imprisoned by the Russians, but that because of Cold War politics, security concerns, bureaucratic intertia and other factors, had failed to obtain the truth and win the repatriation of our missing men. By 1990, in light of the recent arrival of Glasnost between the Soviet Union and US, the evidence seemed enough at least to prompt the US government to open its files and ask the Russians for answers.
As a patriot, military veteran, and optimist, I was certain that spring day that once the buried information was out, the US government would act decisively.
I was wrong.
The State Department spokesman then (and now) was Richard Boucher. Although my evidence included previously classified US government files, Boucher said he was unaware of them and told me on camera that the US government did not believe the POWs existed and would not ask Moscow to account for them. "We do not believe that there are any US POWs in the Soviet Union, (so) we have not raised it," he told me and the permanent State press corps. When asked to account for attempts by the US government to force the Soviet Union to account for missing Americans in the 1950s, Boucher replied: "(It) just sort of become a non-issue I'm afraid."
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