http://www.pownetwork.org/nvp/nvp_1.pdfNORTH VIETNAMESE PERSONNEL ASSOCIATED WITH U S PRISONERS OF WAR (U)1 JUNE 1970
Declassified in accordance with Executive Order 12812 22 Jul 92 ...
http://www.nationalalliance.org/cuba/benge2.htm*Research conducted for the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen by Board Member and former Vietnam POW Mike Benge.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/1078302/postsCuban War Crimes Against American POWs During the Vietnam War* National Alliance of Families for the Return ^ | 1999 | Mike Benge
Posted on 2/14/2004 3:08:31 PM by Mike Darancette
Cuban officials, under diplomatic cover in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, brutally tortured and killed American POWs whom they beat senseless in a research program "sanctioned by the North Vietnamese."(1) This was dubbed the "Cuba Program" by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, and it involved 19 American POWs (some reposts state 20). Recent declassified secret CIA and DOD intelligence documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the extent of Cuba's involvement with American POWs captured in Vietnam. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report states that "The objective of the interrogators was to obtain the total submission of the prisoners..."(2)
According to former POW Air Force Colonel Donald "Digger" Odell, "two POWs left behind in the camp were 'broken' but alive when he and other prisoners were released [1973 Operation Homecoming]. ... They were too severely tortured by Cuban interrogators" to be released. The Vietnamese didn't want the world to see what they had done to them."(3)
POWs released during "Operation Homecoming" in 1973 "were told not to talk about third-country interrogations. .... This thing is very sensitive with all kinds of diplomatic ramifications."(4) Hence, the torture and murder of American POWs by the Cubans was swept under the rug by the U.S. Government.
The "Cuban Program"
The "Cuban Program" was initiated around August 1967 at the Cu Loc POW camp known as "The Zoo", a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. The
American POWs gave their Cuban torturers the names "Fidel," "Chico," "Pancho" and "Garcia." The Vietnamese camp commander was given the name "The Lump" because of a fatty tumor growth in the middle of his forehead.
Intelligence and debriefing reports reveal that testing "torture methods were of primary interest" of the "Cuban Program." The Cuban leader of the "Cuban Program" ["Fidel"] was described in debriefing reports as "a professional interrogator," and a second team member was described as looking like a Czech ["Chico"]. "The Cubans has (sic) the authority to order NVNS [North Vietnamese] to torture American PWs [POWs]." The Vietnamese "catered" to the Cubans.(5)
...
Other Cuban Involvement With POWs Documents reveal that Cubans not only tortured and killed a number of American POWs in Vietnam, but may have also taken several POWs to Cuba in the mid-1960s. The POWs, mostly pilots, were reportedly
imprisoned in Las Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro's G-2 intelligence service. The source of this information reportedly was debriefed by the FBI; however, this debriefing report was not in DPMO's report to Congress, and no evidence has surfaced that there was any other follow up.(14)
According to a February 1971 State Department cable, a former aide to Fidel Castro offered "...to ransom POWs in NVN [North Viet Nam] through the Castro Government." The cable concluded, "Propose doing nothing further unless advised."(15) Evidently no advice was forthcoming, and there is no evidence of any other agency investigating this matter.
One intelligence source reportedly interviewed "Fidel", "Chico" and "Pancho" after they returned from Hanoi to Cuba and said they claimed that their real job was to act as gate-keepers to select American POWs who could aid international communism.(16)
...
Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail
The Cubans were heavily involved in the Vietnam war. Cuba had a very large contingent of combat engineers, the Giron Brigade, that was responsible for maintaining a large section of the "Ho Chi Minh Trail;" the supply line running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. The contingent was so large that Cuba had to establish a consulate in the jungle.(22)
A large number of American personnel serving in both Vietnam and Laos were either captured or killed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and in all likelihood, many by the Cubans.
One National Security Agency SigNet report states that 18 American POWs "are being detained at the Phom Thong Camp..." in Laos, and "...are being closely guarded by Soviet and Cuban personnel with Vietnamese soldiers outside the camp."(23)
...
One POW camp holding a large number of Americans was located about 100 km from the Chinese border between Monkai and Laokai, (an area where Cuban engineers were constructing military installations after 1975). According to an intelligence source, "one day the camp just disappeared, guards and all".(25) [also see End Notes] The disappearance of American POWs near the Cuban facilities at Monkai and Laokai wasn't an isolated incident.
American POWs also disappeared in the vicinity of two other Cuban installations. One American POW camp, located at "Work Site 5" (Cong Truong 5) just north of the DMZ, was adjacent to a Cuban field hospital that Fidel Castro visited in 1972. None of the POWs held in that camp were ever released, including black American aviator Lt. Clemmie McKinney. McKinney was shot down in April 1972, approximately the same time as Castro's visit. McKinney's remains were returned on August 14, 1985. The Vietnamese claim that McKinney died in November 1972; however, "A CILHI (U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii) forensic anthropologist states his opinion as to time of death as not earlier than 1975 and probably several years later."(26) Had McKinney been a guest of the real "Fidel" to be exploited by Castro's G-2 at Las Maristas and later returned to Vietnam?
...
Cuba's End Game in Vietnam According to a DIA "asset", after the signing of the cease-fire on January 21, 1973, 4,000 Cuban army engineers arrived in Hanoi. They helped rebuild the Phuc Yen/Da Phuc Airfield North of Hanoi where, according to intelligence reports, American POWs were used as technicians after the war. Later, the Cubans disappeared into the mountains of the north and constructed and equipped secret bases about 100 km from the Chinese border between Monkai and Laokai. Here, the Soviets equipped the bases with mobile launch ramps, medium-range strategic missiles, possibly with tactical nuclear warheads, capable of hitting population centers in the southern part of China.(17) This is the same area where the above mentioned POW camp containing American prisoners "disappeared, guards and all."(25)
Units of this same Cuban engineering contingent were building the airfield in Grenada when Americans overran the island. U.S. military intelligence captured reams of documents and photographs relating to this unit's operations in Vietnam. However, no evidence has surfaced that these documents were ever analyzed for information on POWs by DPMO or any intelligence agency.
In the spirit of communist solidarity,
Hanoi reciprocated for Cuba's assistance during the Vietnam war by sending U.S. arms and ammunition, captured in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to South America to fuel the lution" directed by the Cubans there.
As agents of the Soviets, and continuing their belief in the communist internationale, the Cuban government expanded its role in the communist internationale.
The Cubans sent troops to Angola. In 1975, Vivo again surfaces in Angola posing as a journalist. Vivo "interviewed" western mercenaries who were put on trail in a "kangaroo court" in yet another slanted propaganda coup against the U.S. One of the mercenaries was an American who's body has yet to be recovered.(13)
Evidently, Cuba's partnership with Vietnam in subversive activities against the U.S. has continued. In 1996, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that
"Vietnam has been training Cuban Special Forces troops to undertake limited attacks in the USA... .... Havana's strategy in pursuing such training is to attack the staging and supply areas for U.S. forces preparing to invade Cuba. .... The training program is focused on seaborne and underwater operations, roughly comparable to those assigned to U.S. Navy Seals. .... The political objective would be to bring the reality of warfare to the American public and so exert domestic pressure on Washington."(37)
Vietnam and Cuba are closely linked by their belief in exporting international communism. Hanoi praised Cuba for its shootdown of two American planes and denounced the Helms-Burton Bill as "Insolent!" Hanoi recently reaffirmed the unswerving solidarity of the communist party, the government and people of Vietnam with the Cuban revolution.(38)
Conclusion
The behavior of "Fidel", "Chico" and "Pancho" in the torture and murder of Americans is beyond the pale and is clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War, which North Vietnam signed. Allowing these Cubans to go unpunished sets an ugly precedent, and adds to America's growing "paper tiger" image.
Although the Cubans' crimes are smaller in number, they are no less than some of the war criminals that are being tried in Bosnia.
If the communist regime in Hanoi was fully cooperating in resolving the POW/MIA issue as President Clinton, Senator John McCain, and Ambassador Pete Peterson profess, the Vietnamese communists would have turned over to the U.S. the names of the Cubans who tortured and killed American POWs in the "Cuban Program." Full cooperation by the communist government in Hanoi includes the full disclosure of the true identities and roles of these Cuban "diplomats", who were "advisors" to the Hanoi prison system, and were directly responsible for the murder, torture, and severe disablement of American POWs.
Although the "Cuban Program" was reviewed by the Department of Defense's Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Office (DPMO), its analysis was incomplete. DPMO's chief analyst Robert Destatte's claims that the "Vietnamese's story is plausible and fully consistent with what DPMO knows about the conduct of the Cubans in question" are ludicrous and grossly incompetent.
DPMO's analysis of the "Cuban Program" is glaringly incomplete, indicating either incompetence, negligence, or an attempt at political correctness in keeping with our present policy toward Cuba.
| - - - - -
http://www.wnd.com/2003/02/17288/Cuban torturers hiding in Florida?
Officials searching for men who brutalized Americans in VietnamPublished: 02/16/2003 at 1:00 AM
A special criminal investigations unit in the U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing reports that two notorious Cuban nationals suspected of participating in a brutal torture program conducted against American POWs in Vietnam are hiding somewhere in southern Florida, WorldNetDaily has learned.
...
Commonly referred to as the “Cuban Program” by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, which is also said to be involved in the manhunt, the Vietnam torture program was carried out from late summer 1967 to the last quarter of 1968 at the Cu Loc prison complex located 2 miles southwest of Hoa Lo. A village on the outskirts of Hanoi, Hoa Lo, was the site of the infamous POW prison known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Cu Loc, commonly called the “Zoo” by American POWs, was opened by the North Vietnamese in August 1965. Earlier, the converted complex had served as a French film studio and arts colony.
Declassified Pentagon reports reveal that in July or August of 1967 a group of about five Cubans appeared at the Cu Loc where they soon began brutalizing American POWs held there. Officials in the Pentagon’s Office of Missing Personnel report that the Cubans were responsible for the murder-by-torture of at least one American serviceman. Over a period of weeks, captured Navy pilot Capt. Earl Cobeil was mercilessly beaten and tortured to death.
Former American POWs who were held at the Cu Loc complex report that the Cubans also may have been responsible for the deaths of other POWs who remain unaccounted for.
...
Florida’s criminal element
Cases of foreign human-rights violators and war criminals, not to mention terrorists, living in the U.S. – especially in Florida – are not new or unusual. Over the past four decades,
numerous Nazi war criminals have been found living in Florida. In recent years, cases involving fugitives from South and Latin America also have become commonplace.
Last year
a man accused of torturing dozens of political prisoners in Cuba using electrical devices was arrested in Miami. Eriberto Mederos, a Cuban who became a U.S. citizen in 1993, was arrested by INS agents after a federal grand jury indicted him on a felony charge of illegally obtaining citizenship by lying on his application. Mederos
wrote “no” to questions asking if he ever was a “member of the Communist Party” and if he had “ever persecuted anyone,” said Aloyma Sanchez of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.
At the November 1999 congressional hearings on the Cuban Program, Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., said that he “didn’t become aware of this
problem of war criminals entering the United States” until he was informed about
a former member of Haiti’s brutal dictatorship who ended up living in his congressional district. Carl Dorelien, a former colonel in the Haitian army that seized power from Haiti’s President Aristide in 1991, killing 4,000 civilians in the process, came to Foley’s attention after he won $3.2 million in the Florida lottery.
Dorelien claimed the U.S. military gave him a five-year visa after his army was forced from power. He told reporters in 1999 that he came to Florida along with about 15 other Haitian military officers.
...
