The Soviet Union shot down nine U.S. planes in the early 1950s and held 12 American survivors in prisons or psychiatric clinics, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said in a letter hand-delivered to U.S. senators Friday.
The fate of the fliers is being investigated, he said.Other than the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers' spy plane in 1960, neither U.S. nor Soviet officials had formally acknowledged that American planes had been downed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
"The U.S. government was aware of the losses, but this is the first time the Russians have admitted" there were survivors, said Susan Strednansky, a Defense Department spokeswoman.
Yeltsin, who will meet President Bush at a Washington summit next week, also said in his unprecedented acknowledgment that Soviet records show:
- Several U.S. servicemen in World War II were held and detained "in isolation for a year or more" in what he called a "double standard" by the Stalin government.
- Some American prisoners in the Korean War were taken to China and held there and that 59 captured U.S. servicemen were interrogated by Soviet officials.
- The only information found so far in Soviet archives about U.S. troops missing in the Vietnam War is that several defectors "were clandestinely moved from the territory of Japan to the territory of the USSR."
He said the records show that they remained in the Soviet Union only "for a short period of time and later went to various European countries."
The letter was delivered to Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Bob Smith, R-N.H., chairman and vice chairman of the Senate POW-MIA Affairs Committee, by Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a senior defense adviser to Yeltsin.