The Ark Project or Ark Project of Freedom was an organisation co-founded by Susan Mesinai in March 1991 in Waterbury, Connecticut

Waterbury, Connecticut

Waterbury is a city in New Haven County, Connecticut, on the Naugatuck River, 33 miles southwest of Hartford and 77 miles northeast of New York City...

 to find out information on non-Russians taken prisoner by the former Soviet Union. These have included Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. He is widely celebrated for his successful efforts to rescue thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary from the Holocaust, during the later stages of World War II...

, American military POW

Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

s and others. Mesinai was a former program director of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States

The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States

The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States was created in May 1981 to "perpetuate the humanitarian ideals and the nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg"....

.

While searching for American POWs, the group discovered Victor Norris Hamilton

Victor Norris Hamilton

Victor Norris Hamilton , a Palestine-born American cryptologist, defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. He was rediscovered in a mental hospital in Russia in 1992, where he had been for 20 years.-Early life:...

in 1992.