Information about the refugee killings reached the U.S. command in Korea and the Pentagon by late August 1950, in the form of a captured and translated North Korean military document, which reported the discovery of the massacre. A South Korean agent for the U.S. counterintelligence command confirmed that account with local villagers weeks later, when U.S. troops moved back through the area, the ex-agent told U.S. investigators in 2000. Evidence of high-level knowledge also appeared in late September 1950 in a
New York Times article from Korea, which reported, without further detail, that an unnamed high-ranking U.S. officer told the reporter of the "panicky" shooting of "many civilians" by a U.S. Army regiment that July. No evidence has emerged, however, that the U.S. military investigated the incident at the time. Survivor Yang Hae-chan said he was warned by South Korean police to stop telling others about the massacre. Following the
April Revolution in 1960, which briefly established democracy in South Korea, former policeman
Chung Eun-yong filed the first petition to the South Korean and U.S. governments. His two small children had been killed and his wife, Park Sun-yong, badly wounded at No Gun Ri. Over 30 petitions, calling for an investigation, apology, and compensation, were filed over the next decades, by Chung and later by a survivors' committee. Almost all were ignored, as was a petition to the U.S. and South Korean governments by the local Yongdong County Assembly. Chung published about the events of 1950, raising awareness of the allegations inside South Korea. but U.S. officials refused to reconsider. the AP published its investigative report on the massacre, based on the accounts of 24 No Gun Ri survivors, corroborated by a dozen 7th Cavalry Regiment veterans. "We just annihilated them," it quoted former 7th Cavalry machine gunner Norman Tinkler as saying. The journalists' research into declassified military documents at the U.S. National Archives uncovered recorded instructions in late July 1950 that front-line units shoot South Korean refugees approaching their positions. A liaison officer of the sister
8th Cavalry Regiment had relayed word to his unit from 1st Cavalry Division headquarters to fire on refugees trying to cross U.S. front lines. Major General
William B. Kean of the neighboring
25th Infantry Division advised that any civilians found in areas supposed to be cleared by police should be considered enemies and "treated accordingly", an order relayed by his staff as "considered as unfriendly and shot". In subsequent articles, the AP reported that many more South Korean civilians were killed when the U.S. military blew up two
Naktong River bridges packed with refugees on August 4, 1950, and when other refugee columns were strafed by U.S. aircraft in the war's first months. The AP team (
Sang-hun Choe,
Charles J. Hanley,
Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft) was awarded the 2000
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their reporting on No Gun Ri, along with receiving 10 other major national and international journalism awards. The memo, dated July 25, the day before the No Gun Ri killings began with such a strafing, said the U.S. Army had requested the attacks on civilians, and "to date, we have complied with the army's request". A U.S. Navy document later emerged in which pilots from the aircraft carrier reported that the Army had told them to attack any groups of more than eight people in South Korea. "Most fighter-bomber pilots regarded Korean civilians in white clothes as enemy troops," South Korean scholar Taewoo Kim would later conclude after reviewing Air Force mission reports from 1950. the AP team did additional archival research and reported that one of nine ex-soldiers quoted in the original No Gun Ri article, Edward L. Daily, had incorrectly identified himself as an eyewitness, and instead had been passing on second-hand information. A Pentagon spokesman said this would not affect an ongoing Army investigation of No Gun Ri, noting Daily was "just one guy of many we've been talking to". Army officer Robert Bateman, a 7th Cavalry veteran who collaborated on the
U.S. News & World Report article with a fellow 7th Cavalry association member, later published a book,
No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, repeating his contentions that the AP reporting was flawed. The AP's methods and conclusions were defended by the AP in a lengthy, detailed refutation and by others. The Pulitzer committee reaffirmed its award and the credibility of the AP reporting.
U.S. and South Korean military investigations On September 30, 1999, within hours of publication of the AP report,
Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered
Army Secretary Louis Caldera to initiate an investigation. The Seoul government also ordered an investigation, proposing that the two inquiries conduct joint document searches and joint witness interviews. The Americans refused. In the ensuing 15-month probes, conducted by the U.S. Army inspector general's office and Seoul's defense ministry, interrogators interviewed or obtained statements from some 200 U.S. veterans and 75 Koreans. The Army researchers reviewed 1 million pages of U.S. archival documents. On January 11, 2001, the two governments issued their separate reports.
U.S. report After years of dismissing the allegations, the Army acknowledged in its report that the U.S. military had killed "an unknown number" of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri with "small-arms fire, artillery and mortar fire, and strafing". However, it held that no orders were issued to fire on the civilians, and that the shootings were the result of hostile fire from among the refugees, or was firing meant to control them. The South Korean report said five former Air Force pilots told U.S. interrogators that they were directed to strafe civilians during this period, and 17 veterans of the 7th Cavalry testified that they believed there were orders to shoot the No Gun Ri refugees. The Koreans noted that two of the veterans were battalion
communications specialists (Levine and Crume) and, as such, were in an especially good position to know which orders had been relayed. A joint U.S.-Korean "Statement of Mutual Understandings" issued with the reports did not repeat the U.S. report's flat assertion that no orders to shoot were issued at No Gun Ri. The Korean investigators cast doubt on the U.S. report's suggestion of possible gunfire from among the refugees. Instead, the U.S. offered a $4 million plan for a memorial at No Gun Ri, and a scholarship fund. The survivors later rejected the plan, because the memorial would be dedicated to all the war's South Korean civilian dead, rather than just the No Gun Ri victims.
Reaction to U.S. report; further evidence emerges The No Gun Ri survivors' committee called the U.S. Army report a "whitewash" of command responsibility. "This is not enough for the massacre of over 60 hours, of 400 innocent people who were hunted like animals," said committee head Chung Eun-yong. The survivors rejected the notion that the killings were "not deliberate", pointing to accounts from veterans and to documents attesting to front-line orders to shoot civilians. Lawmakers of both the ruling and opposition party in South Korea criticized the U.S. position. Former U.S. congressman
Pete McCloskey of California, the only one of eight outside advisers to the U.S. inquiry to write a detailed analysis afterward, agreed with the Koreans, saying, "I thought the Army report was a whitewash." In a letter to Defense Secretary Cohen, another U.S. adviser, retired Marine general
Bernard E. Trainor, expressed sympathy with the hard-pressed U.S. troops of 1950, but said the killings were unjustified, and that "the American command was responsible for the loss of innocent civilian life in or around No-Gun-Ri." Journalists and scholars subsequently noted that the U.S. report either did not address or presented incomplete versions of key declassified documents, some previously reported in the news media. News reports pointed out that the U.S. review, in describing the July 1950 Air Force memo, did not acknowledge that it said refugees were being strafed at the Army's request. during this period documenting the strafing of apparent refugee groups and air strikes in the No Gun Ri vicinity. After the Army issued its report, it was learned that it also had not disclosed its researchers' discovery of at least 14 additional declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the shooting of refugees in the Korean War's early months, and to "shoot all refugees coming across river". In addition, interview transcripts obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests showed that the Army had not reported repeated testimony from ex-soldiers that, as one put it, "the word I heard was 'Kill everybody from 6 to 60'" during their early days in Korea.
Law of war and No Gun Ri In disclaiming U.S. culpability in January 2001, then-President Clinton told reporters, "The evidence was not clear that there was responsibility for wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible". The South Korean government's inquest panel, the Committee for the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims, concluded in its 2005 report, "The United States of America should take responsibility for the No Gun Ri incident", citing six South Korean legal studies as saying that No Gun Ri constituted a crime against humanity. Nevertheless, Army Secretary Caldera said early in the investigation that he couldn't rule out prosecutions, a statement that survivors later complained may have deterred some 7th Cavalry veterans from testifying. == Later developments ==