Delivered-To: info@pownetwork.org
From: "Henry Mark Holzer " <hank@henrymarkholzer.com>
To: "Erika Holzer" <erika@erikaholzer.com>
Subject: Major MIA Article
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:19:42 -0800


Beginning today, at www.therant.us, in the “commentary” section, there appears the first of a 6,000-word, five-part original series by Henry Mark Holzer.  It is entitled “Archangel 1918 to Hanoi 1972.”  If you think this story deserves to be widely known, please forward it to others with the request that the recipients do the same.
 
About the Series:

On November 24, 2007, American newspapers and international news wire services carried the obituary of John H. Noble.  The Los Angeles Times headline read “John Noble, 84; wrote, lectured about captivity in Soviet camps.  The obituary went on to explain how Noble, an American citizen, had survived World War II in Dresden, Germany, been “liberated” by Soviet troops in 1945, and then spent years as a slave “in the Vorkuta coal mine and prison complex near the Arctic Circle.”

Although for years the Soviets denied knowing anything about Noble, nearly ten years after his capture he was released.  Afterwards, John Noble tried to make the American people understand that his was but one of countless similar stories­and that thousands of Americans had vanished behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the War.
But Noble’s story, as compelling and informative as it was, did not start early enough.

The fact is that as early as World War I, when American troops fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia, the communists snatched and captured Americans who then vanished into the black hole of the Soviet slave labor system.  This communist tactic continued in the 1920s and 1930s, during and after World War II, throughout the Cold War, in the Korean War, and, needless to say, as an integral part of North Vietnamese strategy in the Vietnam war.
The following article reveals in detail this decades-long unspeakable communist abuse of American military and civilian personnel, and then focuses on one case in particular­that of Air Force Captain Michael Joseph Bosiljevac.  Mike­the Electronic Warfare Officer in an F-105G, who earlier had worked in our atomic weaponry program­was shot down in late September 1972, he landed safely, and was never seen again. 

Until, that is, 1987, when his skeleton was suddenly returned to United States custody­containing extremely suspicious coloration.
Mike’s story, and the tale of what began in the frozen wastes of Siberia and has not yet ended for countless Americans who vanished at the hands of communists, cries out to be told.
 
I do so in the following article.  The paragraphs below introduce each Part, the full text of each appearing on the named day.
 
The five-parts:
 
Monday.  Part 1: Introduction
Since it was established as a distinct component of the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in the fall of 1994, the Joint Commission Support Directorate has carefully examined a series of reports and sightings of U.S. servicemen held in the Soviet gulag, a network of penal camps that crisscrossed the former Soviet Union.
Several points have become clear.

Tuesday.  Part 2: Three Shooting Wars, One Cold War, One Invasion
In World War I, the Allies (United States, Britain, France, and Russia) fought the Germans on the Western Front in Europe until the Brest-Litovsk Treat of 1918, engineered by Lenin, pulled Russia out of the war with Germany.  One result of the treaty was an Allied Expeditionary Force being sent to protect the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel from the Germans.  In a campaign little known except to historians, Americans fought Soviet Bolshevik forces in the Archangel area of the Northern USSR. According to the Senate Report, “[a]s a result of the fighting against Soviet Bolshevik forces around Archangel in 1918-1919, there were many...eyewitness accounts of hundreds of U.S. and British and French personnel who disappeared.”

Wednesday.  Part 3: The First and Second Vietnam Wars
The information contained in the Senate Report and in “The Gulag Study,” covering the period immediately after World War I to the eve of the Vietnam War­through World War II, the Cold War, and The Korean War­prove beyond any doubt that American military personnel were held captive in the Soviet Union over the course of some forty years, from approximately 1918 to 1960. Whether these men were held by Soviets, Chinese, or Koreans; whether they were enlisted or officers; whether they were native born or immigrants; whether they were pilots or had other military occupational specialties; whether they were wounded or not; whether they were arrested, kidnapped, shot down, survived crashes, not repatriated, or were POWs liberated by the Soviets from Germans and Japanese prison camps; or whether they or fell under communist control some other way­the unarguable fact is that thousands-upon-thousands of our countrymen lived, and died, in Soviet prisons, labor camps, “hospitals,” and other detention facilities.

Thursday.  Part 4: The Case of Captain Michael Joseph Bosiljevac
As noted, there is overwhelming evidence that ever since Lenin’s gang took over the Soviet Union in 1917 communists worldwide have been using captured American military personnel “1) as leverage for political bargaining, 2) as an involuntary source of technical assistance, and 3) as forced labor.” As further noted, “there were two other purposes for which the communists used American POW/MIAs: 4) to obtain hard cash and needed goods, and, 5) to turn them into human guinea pigs.” Based on the available evidence, it is very likely that Mike Bosiljevac fell into at least two of these five categories.

Friday.  Part 5: The Conclusion
In its 1978 reclassification of Mike from Missing in Action to Killed in Action­a gambit that saved the government a lot of money­the United States Air Force effectively wrote him off, literally and figuratively. Even though from time to time tireless MIA-seekers like Bill Bell would make inquiries to the Vietnamese about Mike Bosiljevac’s status, after 1978 our government officially would no longer make serious efforts to ascertain whether he might still be alive, or even whether he had lived for some time after his 1972 shoot down.