Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union

Soldiers of Misfortune is the outrageous and compelling story of thousands of American POWs held captive by the Soviet Union and of the U.S. government officials who lied about their fate for half-a-century, keeping a lid on the most disgraceful cover-up in American history. Soldiers of Misfortune reveals for the first time that top U.S. officials, from Roosevelt to Bush, made the determination to write off America’s missing sons, secretly held hostage in the Soviet Union. In an explosive revelation, Colonel Philip Corso, an intelligence aide to President Dwight Eisenhower, revealed exclusively to the authors that the president personally made the decision to abandon hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. POWs from the Korean War. More than six years ago, Jim Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth about American POWs “liberated” by Soviet troops in Germany and Eastern Europe near the end of World War II. Then Mark Sauter and R. Cort Kirkwood joined in the search – sifting through thousands of formerly classified documents, interviewing military brass and escapees from Russia, and evaluating chilling eyewitness accounts. As the authors neared the truth, top level Pentagon officials attempted to “neutralize” and silence them in a desperate attempt to bury the truth from the public. At the same time a newspaper office and Sanders’s car were surreptitiously entered, his apartment ransacked and crucial documents stolen. A secret covenant of the 1945 Yalta agreement provided that the U.S. and Britain would return Soviet citizens residing in the West. In exchange, Stalin promised to return Western soldiers who had been liberated by the Red Army. After the war, American and British authorities breached that agreement by secretly permitting Soviets to remain in the West. Stalin learned about the deception and retaliated by holding 23,500 American and 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers captive in the vast Soviet gulag system. The authors trace the fate of Ameri