WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration has asked China to help account for several Americans missing from the Korean War, including two pilots apparently killed when their plane was shot down on a CIA covert mission in Manchuria in November 1952, according to internal Pentagon records.
The administration also has requested information on three missing corporals -- Roger Dumas, William Glasser and Richard Desautels -- who were held in a Chinese-run POW camp in North Korea. Several repatriated American prisoners reported seeing the three alive and well at the close of the war in 1953.Pentagon officials have been pressing the Chinese communist government for more than a year to open its wartime records but with little result. The People's Liberation Army has insisted that war losses are a closed issue, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has declared wartime records to be classified.
Chinese soldiers intervened in the Korean War in October 1950 after the American-led U.N. force, propelled by the Marines' famous Inchon landing the month before, fought their way to the Yalu River on China's border. Later, the Chinese army ran the prisoner of war camps in North Korea, and it moved some American prisoners into China to be interrogated, according to declassified U.S. records.
In the face of China's reluctance to pursue the matter, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., wrote to President Clinton on Tuesday urging that he push the issue when he meets at the White House on Thursday with Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji. Smith said U.S. diplomatic and defense officials had made no headway.
Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said, "The POW issue and the issue of missing Americans is certainly something that is going to come up."