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The Missing Report. One of the first things they investigated was a report made by Lieut. Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr. As a wartime prisoner in Germany, West Pointer Van Vliet had been one of four Allied officers forced by the Germans to go under guard to Katyn. When he was liberated in 1945, Van Vliet promptly made a report to Major General Clayton Bissell, chief of War Department Intelligence in Washington. Bissell had him dictate a full account of the trip, marked it "Top Secret," and swore him to silence. Then, somehow, the Top Secret report disappeared. Bissell said he sent it to the State Department; State says it never received it and the Army had no receipt to show that it did.
When this was discovered, five years later, the Army asked Van Vliet to reconstruct his report from memory. His conclusions: "I believe the Russians did it. I hated the Germans, I didn't want to believe them. I realized the Germans would do their best to convince me that Russia was guilty ... It was only with great reluctance that I decided finally that it must be true."
Van Vliet admitted that no single piece of evidence provided absolute proof, but particularly, Van Vliet noticed the condition of the uniforms and boots. If the officers had been killed after two years in prison camp, these would have shown much more wear, Van Vliet thought. Lieut. Colonel Donald B. Stewart, another U.S. prisoner of the Germans, told the committee that he agreed with Van Vliet. Other investigators have pointed out that many officers were dressed in fur coats and woolen scarves—dress suitable for Smolensk's cold spring but unlikely for August when the Russians claim the Poles were shot by the Germans.
If the Russians were indeed responsible for the Katyn massacre as such preliminary findings indicated it would be clear evidence that the Kremlin had planned the extirpation of Polish army leadership far in advance (some 11,000 other Polish officers had simply disappeared without trace in Russia). The Kremlin's rule in Poland today is maintained through the Communist party and through Red Army Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, who is Poland's Defense Minister. Russian control is greatly facilitated by the fact that the major part of Poland's officer corps is either dead or in exile.