North Korea has presented one of the most vexing and persistent problems in U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. The United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the official name for North Korea), although contact at a lower level has ebbed and flowed over the years. Negotiations over North Korea's nuclear weapons program have occupied the past three U.S. administrations, even as some analysts anticipated a collapse of the isolated authoritarian regime. North Korea has been the recipient of over $1 billion in U.S. aid (though none since 2009) and the target of dozens of U.S. sanctions.

This book is an insider’s account of the search for missing American servicemen who became trapped in the Soviet Union and the US government’s efforts to free them or discover their fates. The book, which is based on years of work as a consultant to the US government, includes archive research that took place in Russia and four other republics of the Soviet Union as the USSR broke apart. Volume I explores the history of missing American servicemen, with particular emphasis on thousands who were not accounted for during the Korean War and Cold War era. As US relations with Russia and North Korea become more intense, this book is an extremely timely resource for scholars, laymen, and policymakers.