In a seminal paper, Martin Clark (Communications Systems and Random Process Theory, Darlington, 1977, pp. 721-734, 1978) showed how the filtered dynamics giving the optimal estimate of a Markov chain observed in Gaussian noise can be expressed using an ordinary differential equation. These results offer substantial benefits in filtering and in control, often simplifying the analysis and an in some settings providing numerical benefits, see, for example Malcolm et al. (J. Appl. Math. Stoch. Anal., 2007, to appear). Clark's method uses a gauge transformation and, in effect, solves the Wonham-Zakai equation using variation of constants. In this article, we consider the optimal control of a partially observed Markov chain. This problem is discussed in Elliott et al. (Hidden Markov Models Estimation and Control, Applications of Mathematics Series, vol. 29, 1995). The innovation in our results is that the robust dynamics of Clark are used to compute forward in time dynamics for a simplified adjoint process. A stochastic minimum principle is established.