MORE THAN 15,000 Polish soldiers, among them 800 Doctors of Medicine, were murdered in one operation. Originally they had been taken into captivity by the Soviet Army in 1939. There was a possibility, however, that the prisoners, while still alive, had been taken from Soviet custody by German forces in 1941. Some of the bodies were found in German-held territory. The ropes with which their hands were tied were Soviet-made, but the bullets with which the men were killed were of German origin. The Soviet and German governments accused each other of the massacre. To obtain or remove the evidence, the intelligence services of several nations carried on a merciless secret contest in the Katyn Forest, Poland, Germany, Italy, England, and the United States. Men disappeared; so did files, including one from the United States Military Intelligence Office. In the process a key witness was found hanged, diplomatic and military careers were destroyed in the United States, personnel of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg lied by omission, and so did some of the greatest Allied leaders of the Second World War. This book attempts to reconstruct, in detail, the fate of the prisoners and to provide the answers to these questions: (1) Who killed these men? (2) How were they killed? (3) Why were they killed?