In the past six decades since the end of the Korean War, the U.S. government has successfully created and maintained an historical amnesia over its use of Chinese and Korean prisoners of war as intelligence agents during the war — a practice in flagrant violation of international law. Several hundred Chinese prisoners and many more Koreans were selected and declared “escapees” from UN prison camps. The U.S. Far East Command Liaison Detachment (Korea), the 8240th Army Unit sent these prisoner-agents into North Korea by air, sea, or land to gather intelligence, and they had to return to the UN side on foot. More than half of the Chinese prisoner-agents — probably more than 200 — were either killed or captured during missions, and some of the captured were executed by the People’s Republic of China. The cream of the crop among the Chinese anti-Communist POWs were expended. Only some 100 Chinese prisoner-agents survived and went to Taiwan in January 1954.

While the PRC made repeated allegations during the war, the U.S. simply denied the charges, and has maintained its information blackout until this day. Thanks to the recent interviews of surviving Chinese prisoner-agents and newly available documents in Taiwan and the U.S., it is now possible to uncover the history of Chinese prisoner-agents in the Korean War, who had either met tragic deaths or made narrow escapes.