Betrayed

Betrayed is an investigation into American prisoners of war (POWs) who never returned. Vietnam is the focus, although attention is also directed to World Wars I and II, Korea, and the Cold War.

The investigation was triggered by information provided by a high-ranking Czech Communist official, General Major Jan Sejna, who defected to the United States in 1968. Betrayed records his personal testimony about what happened to thousands of prisoners who were captured by the Communists and then used as human guinea pigs in ghastly "medical" experiments.

Equally disturbing is the apparent reason why U.S. officials allowed this to happen – their policy of keeping silent about the crimes of the Communists and sweeping them under the rug rather than try to hold the Communist leaders accountable – and the extensive efforts afterwards to cover-up their actions.

The Western silence respecting the crimes of Communism began with the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917. It was dramatically brought to the public’s attention in 1997 when a French study of the human carnage left in the wake of the Communist regimes – 100 million deaths – was published under the title The Black Book of Communism.ⁱ What the authors found especially difficult to understand was how so many people in positions of authority simply turned and looked the other way.

The lead editor of The Black Book revealed his frustration in two simple questions: "Why is there such an awkward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty years?"ⁱⁱ

While The Black Book has caused serious fissures in this silence, many of Communism’s most heinous crimes and atrocities still remain hidden in secret archives that are not about to be opened. Among the subjects still "too hot to handle" is what happened to the missing American prisoners of war – and hundreds of other Communist prisoners who met similar fates.

Betrayed is an effort to open the door to the truth a little further. While Russian archival information was not available, far more insight is available in this case through the personal testimony of individuals who witnessed what happened.ⁱⁱⁱ The most important source on the Communist POW atrocities was General Major Jan Sejna. As he explains in Congressional testimony (Chapter 21), he was there. He helped design, coordinate, and monitor the operation that used American POWs when he was a member of the Czech Communist decision-making hierarchy. Evidently because what he has to say is so relevant to continuing efforts to hide the crimes of Communism, especially those directed against people of non-Communist nations – and because it raises serious questions with respect to U.S. policy – Sejna has been viciously attacked and slandered, generally "sub rosa, beneath the scenes--a real character assassination," as explained by Representative Robert K. Dornan during the Congressional hearings. It is an uncomfortable fact that, rather than debrief Gen. Sejna (and others from the enemy camp with first-hand knowledge) to learn what he knew about what happened, the main efforts of the U.S. Government have been directed to silence him, bury his information, and sabotage his leads to corroborating sources and documentation.

When the profound nature of the prisoner of war issue was brought to my attention in early 1992, especially the plight of the families who were being stonewalled in their efforts to learn what happened, I reviewed the data I had already collected in my discussions with Sejna over the preceding fifteen years. I then met with him to clarify my notes and probe more carefully the full extent of his knowledge. It quickly became evident that his knowledge was extensive and of crucial importance. According, I set about to systematically extract all that he could remember.

Sejna died on August 23, 1997, before the debriefing process was completed. However, the information he had already provided prior to his death was so important that I believed it would be criminal not to make the information available to all – notwithstanding the questions that I was never able to ask and the presence of errors and intermingling of facts that only he could correct.^iv

Betrayed was written to record Jan Sejna’s memories and set them alongside the actions of U.S. officials to hide information respecting missing American prisoners. To obtain the best picture of these official U.S. actions, I have drawn heavily upon the experiences of other researchers in their efforts to learn what happened (Chapters 16 and 23-25). These experiences are essential. They help us understand what is happening and why what Sejna had to say has been about as welcomed as the plague.

I hope that this book will help those families and friends who lost loved ones in their efforts to learn what happened and help further expose the horrendous crimes and atrocities of the Communists, the worst of which in my judgment are most unlikely to be "officially" disclosed. I also hope to alert people around the world to the nature of present-day Russian (and to a lesser extent Chinese) intelligence capabilities – in particular, their ability to influence attitudes and behavior of people without their knowledge – and to provide a guide that can be used by researchers, especially those in former Communist countries, in their further search for the truth.

Because so much of what has happened has been facilitated – if not made possible – by Western efforts to sweep the crimes of Communism under the rug, I also hope to direct more attention to the roots of this policy and extend the challenge to learn "Why?" that was raised so poignantly in The Black Book of Communism. Given the nature of the conditions that millions of people were subjected to at the hands of the Communists, and still are, it is the least we can do.

It is my fervent hope that the material in this book will motivate others to pursue this information^v and search out additional details (both documentary and personal testimony) on the Communist activities whose secrecy is still carefully guarded and for good reason. There are still many opportunities to penetrate this secrecy. Most of the people when given a task in the Communist system, were also given a false impression of what was behind their task so as to preserve the secrecy of the operation. With the information provided by Jan Sejna, it is possible for hundreds of the people who participated to now understand the true significance of their work. Hopefully, this information will reach one or two such people and stimulate them to tell others what they know and to help investigators in their efforts to fully expose the Communist crimes.

Of special importance, in Sejna’s judgment and in the judgment of many investigators, it is likely that there are many Americans still held captive, most notably in Russia and North Korea, but in other Communist countries as well, such as Laos, China, and Vietnam. This is another area where the efforts of private investigators operating independently, without government knowledge, offers the greatest if not only hope. "Without government knowledge" is important because the government’s predisposition is to sabotage any sincere search efforts.