This is an ABC podcast.

Clarence Adams was an American soldier in the Korean War when he became a prisoner of war.

He was held captive for several years, and you would think once he was freed, he'd want to go home.

You'd think wrong.

The war goes on for three years.

It comes then to a kind of stalemate in 1953.

There's a division of Korea, and there are thousands and thousands of POWs held on both sides.

I mean, many of those POWs don't go back to North Korea or to China. They go elsewhere.

But there are a group, more unexpectedly, of American POWs who choose to go in the other direction.

Clarence Adams is one of those men. Now, the thing to know about him is he's African American,

and he decides to move to China.

And he has been persuaded or influenced by the education he's received in the camps to think,

actually, why would he go back to the US?

He had come out of a history of racism.

He was all too familiar with the brutality of the US of his life in Memphis, and he's looking

for a new life.

And he's persuaded that communism offers something else, that this is a new start.

But this choice, unsurprisingly, causes a huge amount of concern and alarm in the States.

Because how could soldiers from the West really freely elect to choose that fate?

The answer people come to believe is they were brainwashed.

You are listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

From the Korean War to the Cold War to current day campaigns of misinformation, the threat

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