Lifting Russia's Veil In Search Of Americans

WATERBURY, Conn. - They are looking for the abandoned: American civilians and military personnel believed to have been held captive for 30, 40, perhaps even 50 years inside the former Soviet Union.

They say at least 49 men and one woman - captured during World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War - may still be living in a network of secret camps, isolated prison cells and heavily guarded psychiatric units.

These Americans are "the forgotten ones, and they don't have much time left," said Susan Mesinai, director of the Ark Project, the Waterbury-based group trying to find the missing and bring them home.

Officially organized in March, the Ark Project already has some notable successes. In May it discovered Victor Norris Hamilton, a 75-year-old American who has been held in Russian psychiatric clinics since 1962. The group is now negotiating Hamilton's release with family members, doctors and Russian and U.S. authorities.

According to Mesinai, the group also has verified the 1983 death in captivity of a New England man, a civilian prisoner, who was held for 26 years in Soviet prison camps on espionage charges and pressured, unsuccessfully, to accept Soviet citizenship.

"Unfortunately, the prisoner has died, but his family is freed," said Mesinai, referring to their anxiety and uncertainty.

Malcolm Toon, the American head of a U.S.-Russian commission investigating the fate of American prisoners of war, recently said an intense, weeklong search of alleged camps in the Ural Mountains has revealed no evidence that any American prisoners are still alive in the former Soviet Union.

In reply, Mesinai said, "A KGB-guided tour of the archives is not satisfactory evidence for such a claim, and Toon's trip to the Urals was announced in advance, giving camp officials time to remove any tell-tale signs." In any case, she added, a thorough search will take years.

REPORTS KEEP SURFACING

Meanwhile, reports of prisoners or former prisoners continue to surface. Last Sunday in Moscow, the Russian co-chairman of the joint U.S.-Russian commission said four Americans were held at a Soviet psychiatric hospital in 1953, Reuters reported. Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov said there were no clues yet on the identity of those held in the hospital.

Ark is an acronym; the A in its name comes from the Alliance of Families, a national POW-MIA support group; R is for Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who disappeared in 1945; and K comes from Mikhail Kazachkov, a Soviet dissident and one of Ark's founders.

Supported largely by private donations and a shoestring operation called the Russian Relief Fund, the Ark Project is a nonprofit organization with a two-member staff.

To locate the missing Americans, co-founder Kazachkov and associate director Boris Yuzhin - who both suffered long incarcerations in the gulag system until Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered their release in the last two years - are appealing directly to the Russian people for help.

APPEALS ON TELEVISION

Kazachkov, a prominent Soviet dissident, and Yuzhin, a former KGB official, have appeared on Russian evening news telecasts asking for tips about the Americans' whereabouts.

According to Kazachkov and Mesinai, the approximately 80 responses to these appeals, as well as information obtained from family members, former political prisoners, Russian dissidents, volunteer investigators and recently declassified archival documents in Russia and the United States, helped them piece together the trails that led to Hamilton and the New England man.

Hamilton was a naturalized American citizen, born in the British-mandate territory of Palestine, who had worked for the U.S. National Security Administration deciphering Arabic codes and diplomatic messages intercepted by the agency. He was dismissed for medical reasons in 1959 and defected in 1962 to the Soviet Union, where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to Soviet psychiatric hospitals.

According to his doctors, the KGB attempted for 20 years to extract sensitive intelligence information from him.

TRAIL TO PSYCHIATRIC PRISON

Following a tip from an anonymous caller who had treated him in one of those hospitals, Ark tracked Hamilton to Psychiatric Prison No. 5, in Troitskoye, about 40 miles south of Moscow.

Mesinai, who visited him there May 21 and June 4, described him as "a little man, wearing a cap and a smock, intelligent, very cultured, but very tense, mistrusting and suspicious, with darting eyes" - apparently in good health physically but mentally ill.

Hamilton had been living in a dark dormitory room shared with five other men. A table near his cot was piled high with the journals he has penned since the KGB locked him up 30 years ago.

According to five of these journals that Mesinai was allowed to read, Hamilton was tortured by Soviet agents and was denied requests for repatriation to the United States. In 1972, when he learned that President Nixon was visiting the Soviet Union, he briefly escaped, hoping Nixon would help him. But Mesinai said the KGB "found him praying in a church" and recaptured him.

For a while, Hamilton had a radio and kept a lively political commentary in his journals. But his contact with the outside world stopped sometime in the mid-1980s, Mesinai said, and his journals became "inward, inward, gone."

When told that his wife and daughter, now living in Union City, Ga., still love him and want him to come home, "he had an expression like a kind of rapture," Mesinai recalled, "and then he snapped shut. He said his wife was dead, I should stop talking nonsense, why was I trying to hurt him with this information."

Russian doctors have expressed mixed views about whether Hamilton should be released, and Ark currently is negotiating for his family to visit him in Russia.

As these negotiations continue, Ark also is investigating about 50 other cases, although many of these Americans are presumed by now to be dead.

SOLDIERS, CIVILIANS SOUGHT

Ark says some came under Red Army control after it liberated Allied prisoners of war held in Nazi camps in World War II. According to Ark, some were taken prisoner in Korea by communist forces and subsequently transferred to the Soviet Union. Some were crewmen in surveillance planes shot down over Soviet territory during the 1950s.

Still others were civilians charged with espionage, defectors or people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mesinai says that often they were seized by Soviet officials because they were thought to have some information or skill - expertise in electronics or aeronautics, for instance - deemed useful to the system.

Similar reports were confirmed by a May 1991 staff report for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, citing declassified Pentagon documents and other sources. Such charges are also being investigated by the joint U.S.-Russian commission and the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA affairs, headed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Whatever has become of the missing Americans, said Kazachkov, "Even if they're 85 years old, even if they have only a week to live, this still must be looked into, until there is no hope. And some Russians must be instrumental in getting the truth out.

"Even if the Americans are not alive, their remains must be found and buried with honor," he continued. "They're entitled to it. They have fought the longest war in history."