The Journey Podcast 37. Amy Waters Yarsinske: Find the MIAs

Former naval intelligence officer and bestselling author Amy Waters Yarsinske and publisher Kris Millegan discuss Amy’s book, “AN AMERICAN IN THE BASEMENT: The Betrayal of Captain Scott Speicher and the Cover-up of His Death.”  Speicher ejected from his stricken F/A-18 Hornet on the first night of the Persian Gulf War and survived, contrary to reports.  Protected by a Bedouin tribal group, he hid for nearly four years, but was finally captured.  Years later, in 2004/5, he was killed by Saddam Hussein’s forces after America invaded Iraq.  The United States government, since World War I, does little to find its MIAs (missing in action), despite token efforts.

K: The lies that are told to the American public for whatever reason are just quite amazing.

A: We had been allowing this to happen for decades.  It started at the end of World War I.  It raged on in the interim.  In the 30s, when we were dealing with the new Bolshevik regime in Russia, and they would take people.  They were anxious for their industries to be stood up and they didn’t know how to do that so they were stealing people from the west.  They kidnapped many of what they called “the Polar bears” from the American Expeditionary Force.  Those were the guys who came from your industrial states, your car manufacturing states, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.  They knew how to manufacture rubber, how to build cars.  They kidnapped them.

K: Who are they?

A: The Russian Bolsheviks.  They were the first to perfect this slave-holder mentality.  This ability to take someone and make them work for you and if they didn’t comply, they ended up in a gulag somewhere, never to be seen again.  By World War II, the Russians, on a much larger scale, were entraining our POWs from Germany’s East European POW camps back to Russia, to the gulags.  We’re still missing sixty-eight to seventy thousand people from World War II.

K: How come this isn’t talked about?  What’s the reasoning for not telling the American people about this?

A: FDR didn’t want anybody to know that we had these problems with Russia, who was becoming our ally out of convenience for defeating the Germans and the Japanese.  The Russians saw it as opportunity, and they took it.  They saw it as a sign of weakness that we wouldn’t talk about it and we wouldn’t try to get our people back.  I actually talked to George Patton’s niece at a meeting.  She was working on his papers.  She discovered that he was trying to get Eisenhower’s command in Europe to look at what the Russians were doing with those POW camps and taking his people.  Some of his people got captured in the tank war, and he wanted that accountability, but they wouldn’t do it.  And then he was killed in that jeep accident.  It’s an interesting process you see again repeating itself in Korea.  And then during Vietnam, the same thing occurs.

K: The Vietnam War was being fought with weapons that were coming from Russia, that were coming from factories that Americans had built and there had been American engineers there.  Where are the people that are directing this and what’s their reasoning?

A: Chuck Coleman said to me about his brother when he went down in the SPAT, he said, “I often wonder why people like you,” – he had just read AN AMERICAN IN THE BASEMENT – he said, “I see so many similarities with my brother.  I see how strong an argument you make for them when they go down like that.  They should be looked for.  They should be found.  They should be accounted for.  But I often wonder why someone like you, who’s not a family member of a lost one, engages in this miserable research you have to do to get to the answers.”  And I said, “It’s because I believed in the uniform that I put on and I raised my right hand and that oath, to me, still matters.  And it still matters that we account for the ones we missed.”  I don’t care how many decades go by.  You still have to have accountability.

K: How come this story isn’t really told?

A: Reagan did a lot of talking about it.  Reagan wanted them back.  The ones he found out about in Vietnam, he wanted them back.  And the FBI was secretly recording the Oval Office.  And they were talking about this secret exchange program they were planning to do, trying to buy them back.

K: In AN AMERICAN IN THE BASEMENT, you talk about people who were in Vietnam that actually got repatriated and died in our custody, and their relatives don’t even know.  Who’s calling the shots here?

A: I think the intel services.  I think it’s been the agency.  I think it’s been perhaps some of our foreign partners that way.

K: We see the black “missing in action” flag on many, many poles so we think there’s people that are doing something.

A: There really isn’t anybody doing anything about it.  And if you talk to a family member of someone who’s missing, they’ll tell you that every year, it seems, they get a different case officer working that case, and every year you have to bring the person up on 30 years, or 40 years, of information.  And they don’t care.  It’s a stepping stone job for them.  There’s still other people missing that could still be alive today.