From the Inside Flap:
Includes dozens of previously secret US intelligence reports, plus photos of missing Americans
About the Author:
Mark Sauter, investigative historian, and John Zimmerlee, POW case expert: The latter’s involvement with POW/MIA issues started with the 1952 disappearance of his father, Air Force officer John Henry Zimmerlee, during the Korean War. Years later, frustrated at the government’s failure to declassify and correlate huge numbers of files in the National Archives and other locations, Zimmerlee took it upon himself as a volunteer, analyzing more than 100,000 pages and creating a unique database of Korean War cases. It includes everything from debriefings of returned Americans to interrogations of captured enemy soldiers. Family members from across the country come to Zimmerlee when the Pentagon has no answers. In many cases, he provides witness evidence on the capture, or death, of servicemen based on information the Pentagon POW office has never collected. In some cases, such as where the death of a loved one was observed by his comrades-in-arms, this information satisfies the family’s questions, providing answers that have eluded them for decades. In others, the information may raise new issues and suggest next steps in the search. John Zimmerlee has provided information to more than 1,000 family members. He is now the volunteer Executive Director of the Korean & Cold War POW/MIA Network and board member of other POW/MIA groups. To this expertise is added almost 25 years of research by former investigative correspondent Mark Sauter, who earlier served as an Army officer in the DMZ between North and South Korea. As a young reporter he became hooked on the issue in 1989, when he discovered the infamous and then classified “RE US PWs in USSR” memo at the Eisenhower Presidential Library. The memo, five years older than Sauter, contradicted government denials that any evidence existed of US prisoners in the Soviet Union. It was kept classified, at one point by direction of the White House, for years after. You can read it later in this book. Aside from extensive archival work, Sauter’s investigation has included interviews with dozens of sources, from a sitting Vice President of the United States to Pentagon insiders and Russian and North Korean defectors; scores of Freedom of Information Act requests; and travel across the United States and to North Korea and Russia. Finally, we retained speakers of Mandarin, Korean, Russian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Japanese and Polish to conduct research and contact sources around the world.
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