POW Investigators Go to Russian Camp : Captives: Amid confusion in the wake of Yeltsin’s bombshell, team looks into reports of an American survivor.

WASHINGTON — As Pentagon officials struggled with the shock waves set off by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s remarks about POWs, a team of U.S. and Russian investigators arrived Thursday at a remote prison camp far north of Moscow to investigate claims that a missing U.S. airman had been seen there alive.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said that a Russian source approached U.S. officials last week in Russia and told them he had seen the American “at one time” in a prison camp in Pechora, 900 miles north of Moscow.

The missing airman, reported to be 1st Lt. Robert Lee Martin, disappeared during a mission over North Korea in the 1950s, according to a knowledgeable defense source.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said information provided to a U.S-Russian commission investigating the possibility that U.S. servicemen have been detained in the Soviet Union indicated that Martin might have been at the camp “as recently as 18 months ago.”

Last week’s report of the American--and the immediate dispatch of the investigative team--came as Bush Administration officials and lawmakers expressed some skepticism that Martin or any other Americans will be traced and found.

Adding to the growing skepticism was a report Thursday that Russian officials in the region where Martin was allegedly seen have denied any knowledge of a U.S. prisoner. According to the Associated Press, Maj. Gen. Leonid Khamluk, chief of the Perchov region, which includes roughly 10 labor camps built before and during World War II, told investigators Thursday that “we don’t have any Americans here.”

On Thursday, lawmakers and Bush Administration officials sifted through confusing and contradictory reports offered by the Russians and warned that investigators may not be able to penetrate a wall of Russian disorganization to reach the truth of what happened to thousands of U.S. servicemen missing from World War II and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

Yeltsin said Monday that some American POWs were sent to Soviet labor camps from Korea and Vietnam and promised in an emotional speech to Congress on Wednesday that any U.S. prisoner still alive in Russia will be found and repatriated. “We don’t have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive,” he told NBC News as he flew to Washington to meet with President Bush.

The commission investigating the issue, headed by Russian Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov and former U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon, had said in March that it had found no evidence of U.S. servicemen from the Vietnam or Korean wars in the former Soviet Union. Toon and other members of the U.S. delegation are scheduled to travel to Moscow on Saturday to continue earlier investigations and look directly into the statements that Yeltsin made this week, officials said Thursday.

But one senior Defense Department official privately said that documentation offered to support Yeltsin’s statements already indicates that the effort to clarify the situation may become mired in language difficulties and haphazard Soviet record-keeping.

In the meantime, the Associated Press reported that the Vietnam News Agency, monitored in Tokyo, quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Hanoi as denying that any POWs were sent to the Soviet Union.

“As we have said many times before, we state again here that no American deserters or prisoners of war were transferred from Vietnam to the Soviet Union during or after the war,” the official was quoted as saying.